Huge beach party in Virginia Beach thrown by Pat Robertson and his buddies last week. Reclaiming America for Christ was an alternate celebration of the 400th anniversary of Capt. John Smith’s landing at Jamestown.

An anonymous attendee with a clear eyed ability to observe talks us through the spectacle, the players of power pandering to false Gods and the attendees soaking up some sun and sand as they bask in their ambitions. 
Pictures too.
Is it just me, or is this a middle age white exburb party?

It was largely a Word of Faith crowd, and so the preachers Word-Faithed by boldly demanding that attendees to fork over big money in sacrifice to the Lord.

One of Martin Luther’s most seriously gripes, that helped lead to the schism of Christianity and the subsequent religious wars, that wracked Europe for centuries, between Catholics and Protestants, with both sides contriving cute ad-hoc tortures such as slowly extracting the intestines of wounded enemy combatants, was the Catholic Church’s practice of selling “indulgences”: tickets to grace, redemption, and Heaven for those who could afford to pop enough pieces of Gold into the God-slot at the Vatican. It’s odd to see Protestant Christianity returning to where Christian practice was at about five hundred years ago, but maybe that’s in line with the rejection of Evolution and growing outbreaks of people who say Galileo and Copernicus were wrong and that the Sun revolves around the Earth.

…

Despite periodic proclamations of love , hatred pulsed sporadically throughout the week-end, directed intermittently toward Muslims, homosexuals (where’s Ted Haggard when you need him?), the U.N. and the E.U. Most often, though, venom was hurled toward the God hating liberals. Neither was the traditional church cut any slack, being described as the prime cause of moral decay, thanks to “weakness, apathy and laziness.  True believers are calling for a severe church, for biblical law, for personal prosperity at any cost, for no sin being so heinous it can’t be forgiven: except for liberals who should all be destroyed by the wrath of God. Forgive? Heck, if you buy in, maybe you too can drink, steal, lie, and God knows what else before you turn it all in for redemption.

But it wasn’t all hate. After sharing the good news, “the Bible is the world’s greatest sex manual ever written. Read the Song of Solomon to your wife.  It’ll turn your motor on!”, the corpulent, perhaps lascivious, probably gluttonous John Hagee treated the crowd to a lusty, expert sex ululation that seemed more pornographic than pictures or movies ever could be, and oddly  misplaced coming from a man who looked much more in love with all-you-can-eat buffets than with conjugal erotic arts. Laced in with his standard rhetoric of undying love for Israel, Hagee mentioned that “There is no other name by which we can be saved than Jesus Christ.” Could that bubble over his head really be reading, “Jews. Left behind?”

Frederick Clarkson looks at how Christian nationalists chose to re-write this history.