This Monday marked the 80th anniversary of Benito Mussolini’s last journey: from a village on the shores of Lake Como, where he had been held since his capture the day before, to a farmhouse a little ways to the north, where partisans positioned him in front of a wall and executed him by gunfire. When Adolf Hitler took his own life in a Berlin bunker two days later, it became clear that the first fascist era had come to a sudden, bloody, and well-deserved end.
I was raised to take over the world for God. My teachers have been sorely disappointed on that front. It is not something I spend much time talking about because it’s not something I spend much time thinking about. It was the milieu of my childhood, and I had no say in the matter. As a pastor’s kid from Nashville, Tennessee, I was steeped in religious conservatism from birth. The impetus towards a highly political, far-right version of Christianity which seeks to conquer the world for Christ, though, didn’t come from my family so much as it came from my classical Christian school. We were taught that we were special, that the world was fallen and we could redeem it. We were taught that America was a Christian nation which had drifted off course, but that a faithful generation could restore it.
Dozens of people rallied at the Byron White Federal Courthouse in Denver Thursday to speak out against President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch.
