Catholic League Blasts ‘Meathead’ Rob Reiner for ‘Religiophobia’

LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA - JANUARY 15: Rob Reiner speaks onstage during the 75th Primetime
Monica Schipper/WireImage
Thomas D. Williams, Ph.D.

Catholic League president Bill Donohue has slammed Hollywood director/actor Rob Reiner for his bigoted attack on U.S. Christians.

Last month, Reiner released a film titled God and Country about an “alleged threat to American democracy posed by so-called Christian nationalists,” Dr. Donohue notes.

“The Meathead [Reiner’s nickname on the 1970s TV series All in the Family] would have the audience believe that we are on the verge of a theocratic takeover,” Donohue writes, “though few outside of Hollywood and other secular subcultures pay any attention to this fable.”

The film is based on the work of Katherine Stewart, who “harbors a deep phobia about Christianity,” Donohue adds, but more than anything it “demonstrates the pervasiveness of religiophobia in Hollywood.”

The move drew rave reviews from the likes of the Hollywood Reporter, which warned that Christian nationalism “bears an unfortunate similarity to the rise of Nazi Germany.”

Reiner’s film “delivers a bracing primer on the rise of this political movement that should thoroughly scare the large majority of American adults who don’t embrace it,” the newspaper declared.

According to Reiner, Christian nationalism “is out to make us a Christian nation,” Donohue writes, adding that the Founders rejected the establishment of a Christian nation, but recognized the founding of a “Christian-inspired nation” — which is a big difference.

Fortunately, God and Country has bombed at the box office, Donohue observes, and took in a mere $38,415 in its first 4-day weekend, playing in 85 theaters.

As Breitbart News has reported, scaremongering over a fabricated Christian nationalist uprising has not been limited to Hollywood bigots with an anti-Christian chip on their shoulder.

Politico’s national investigative correspondent, Heidi Przybyla, recently warned that Christian nationalists are dangerous because they think human rights come from God rather than government.

In an appearance on MSNBC’s All In, Przybyla said that Christian nationalists “have a lot of power in Trump’s circle.”

The one thing that unites all Christian nationalists, she continued, is the belief “that our rights as Americans, as all human beings, don’t come from any earthly authority. They don’t come from Congress. They don’t come to the Supreme Court. They come from God.”

In response, Catholic Bishop Robert Barron of the Diocese of Winona–Rochester noted that it was Thomas Jefferson — and not Christian nationalist “weirdos” — who famously wrote that human beings are “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”

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