It appears likely at this point that President Trump is going to name Judge Amy Coney Barrett as his Supreme Court nominee. If so, get ready for the floodgates of liberal smears against the judge, who is a faithful Catholic and a member of the People of Praise community, which emerged from the charismatic renewal of the 1970s. Reuters doesn’t even bother with a windup; its reporter Dan Trotta goes straight to the slander:

Some have likened People of Praise, a self-described charismatic Christian community, to the totalitarian, male-dominated society of Margaret Atwood’s novel “The Handmaid’s Tale.”

That’s the lede! But what do others say? Surely somebody has something good to say about them, right?

Others call it an ultraconservative group with an unusual mix of Roman Catholic and Pentecostal traditions.

There’s Reuters’s balance for you. They quote a former member who says it was a “cult,” and a professor who said it’s not a cult, it’s just conservative.

“Unusual mix” is wrong too, unless you consider the Catholic charismatic movement to be “unusual”. I’ve known Catholic charismatics for most of my life, and while charismatic spirituality is not my thing, I’ve had great admiration for their faithfulness and generosity of spirit.

The problem is that media people are so unaccustomed to Catholics in public life who actually believe what the Catholic Church teaches that when they find one, they freak out. Remember when Justice Antonin Scalia gave New York magazine an interview in 2013, and said that he believed in the Devil? Here is that part of the interview with writer Jennifer Senior:

But you don’t have to be a Catholic to get into heaven? Or believe in it?
Of course not!

Oh. So you don’t know where I’m going. Thank God.
I don’t know where you’re going. I don’t even know whether Judas Iscariot is in hell. I mean, that’s what the pope meant when he said, “Who am I to judge?” He may have recanted and had severe penance just before he died. Who knows?

Can we talk about your drafting process—
[Leans in, stage-whispers.] I even believe in the Devil.

You do?
Of course! Yeah, he’s a real person. Hey, c’mon, that’s standard Catholic doctrine! Every Catholic believes that.

Every Catholic believes this? There’s a wide variety of Catholics out there …
If you are faithful to Catholic dogma, that is certainly a large part of it.

Have you seen evidence of the Devil lately?
You know, it is curious. In the Gospels, the Devil is doing all sorts of things. He’s making pigs run off cliffs, he’s possessing people and whatnot. And that doesn’t happen very much anymore.

No.
It’s because he’s smart.

So what’s he doing now?
What he’s doing now is getting people not to believe in him or in God. He’s much more successful that way.

That has really painful implications for atheists. Are you sure that’s the ­Devil’s work?
I didn’t say atheists are the Devil’s work.

Well, you’re saying the Devil is ­persuading people to not believe in God. Couldn’t there be other reasons to not believe?
Well, there certainly can be other reasons. But it certainly favors the Devil’s desires. I mean, c’mon, that’s the explanation for why there’s not demonic possession all over the place. That always puzzled me. What happened to the Devil, you know? He used to be all over the place. He used to be all over the New Testament.

Right.
What happened to him?

He just got wilier.
He got wilier.

Isn’t it terribly frightening to believe in the Devil?
You’re looking at me as though I’m weird. My God! Are you so out of touch with most of America, most of which believes in the Devil? I mean, Jesus Christ believed in the Devil! It’s in the Gospels! You travel in circles that are so, so removed from mainstream America that you are appalled that anybody would believe in the Devil! Most of mankind has believed in the Devil, for all of history. Many more intelligent people than you or me have believed in the Devil.

According to a 2013 survey, 57 percent of Americans believe in the existence of the Devil. Women, blacks, and Hispanics are more likely to believe in the Devil than whites or men. If ACB is Trump’s nominee, I hope black and Hispanic voters are paying attention when the Democrats and the liberal media try to burn her reputation at the stake for believing in many of the things that those voters also believe in.

We can expect the media to make Amy Coney Barrett out to be a complete religious freak. Bank on it. We conservative Christians are going to have it made very, very clear what they think of people like us, and how we don’t belong in positions of authority. It’s going to be Jacobin time. And this is going to be something to be grateful for, in a way, because it will reveal the truth of things.

I have been away from the keyboard most of today, up in St. Francisville taking care of business and visiting my mom. On the drive up, I listened to NPR until I couldn’t bear it anymore, then switched over to Spotify to listen to Joe Rogan’s recent podcast interview with Douglas Murray. It was like broadcasts from two different countries. Rogan’s politics are messy; he endorsed Bernie Sanders for president, and is a big supporter of gay marriage and drug legalization, but he also holds some conservative views, and recently left California to move to Texas because he could not stand the Golden State’s loony left government. On the podcast, Rogan told Murray that the far left has botched everything, silencing the sensible liberals (who, in Rogan’s view, favor free speech) and being so extreme and hateful that they push people who don’t even like Donald Trump to vote for someone as crazy as he is, because they see him as the only thing keeping the far left from gaining power.

That describes almost all of the Trump-voting people I know within my bubble. Nobody thinks Trump is much good, but they know without a shadow of a doubt that wokeness in power would be worse. Rogan and Murray (who is gay) agreed that the left’s attempt to silence, shame, and harass as “bigots” anybody who gets the slightest bit outside the progressive party line is making it impossible for us to have a proper democracy.

If Amy Coney Barrett is the Trump nominee, we will see how merciless these people are on a Midwestern Catholic mom of seven children, including adopted kids from Haiti (and has a child with special needs), whose great crime in their eyes is believing what her church teaches. Look at this:

Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s top pick, believes a “legal career is but a means to an end…and that end is building the Kingdom of God.”

I’m a Christian but this is terrifying

RT if you care about the separation of church and state ?https://t.co/eZ7fnUF7kb

— Lindy Li (@lindyli) September 20, 2020

Lindy Li might be a Christian, but she’s a theologically illiterate one. In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus tells his followers to pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name; thy Kingdom come…”. If you say the Lord’s Prayer, you are praying for God’s Kingdom of perfect justice and perfect mercy to be established. Jews believe that when they work for social justice, they are working to bring about the Kingdom of God. Same with Christians, who took the idea from the Jews. There’s nothing nefarious about this at all. If you are a serious Christian, then whatever your career — judge or ditch-digger — your work ought to be for the glory of God, and the building of His Kingdom.

We Christians certainly can’t expect liberals and secularists to embrace Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination. She’s a conservative, after all. It’s not anti-Christian bigotry to oppose her, if she gets Trump’s nod, any more than it would have been anti-Semitic to oppose Justice Ginsburg’s nomination. But there really are anti-Christian ways of opposing her, and I am confident that the full panoply of secular prejudice will be on gaudy display should Trump nominate her. Pay close attention to it, because the manner in which the left attacks Judge Barrett will tell us ordinary Christians a lot about what to expect going forward.

When I finished the manuscript of Live Not By Lies in early spring, I thought that it would be challenging to convince conservative Christians that we were well on our way to a soft totalitarian situation here in the United States, especially when it comes to social and religious conservatives. I lay out a case for it in the book, but people just don’t want to believe it. On the Joe Rogan podcast, Douglas Murray says he figured that the pandemic would send the woke to the margins, as folks came to realize that we have more important things to worry about. Exactly the opposite happened, he said. It’s true. Real-world events have made it a lot easier for me to convince people of the case in my book — and the Category 5 hurricane of hatred about to come against Amy Coney Barrett will make denial even harder to maintain.

UPDATE: A reader who is a Catholic priest writes:

I would keep my eyes peeled for the reaction of the Catholic Left if ACB is nominated. I think some of the most vicious attacks will come from that quarter. There is no one more threatening and disturbing to a Liberal Catholic than one who takes Church teaching seriously and tries to live it. I have often said that Catholic Leftists tend to take their leftism far more seriously than their Catholicism. I think many of them are about to illustrate that in vivid detail.