Flame Warriors - Special Section
Democrats and Republicans

Crossover Index - scale of 1 to 10. 1 being LEAST likely to vote the opposite party.

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Warrior Index

    Reverend Crossover Index  4

         Pastor     Crossover Index 4


Both Reverend and Pastor leverage their official religious affilliations to enhance the legitimacy of their political positions. There are plenty of slick hustlers out there who cynically use religion to advance their interests, but typical Reverends and Pastors are excruciatingly sincere. It was once fairly easy to identify Pastor by his strong southern accent, but this distinguishing feature is no longer as reliable as it once was. Nonetheless, there are striking differences. One of the most important of which is that unless he is invoking God to shore up his arguments Reverend seldom mentions religion, while Pastor blathers loudly about his faith at every opportunity. More generally, the chief difference between the two is that Reverend uses religion to advance his politics; Pastor uses politics to advance his religion.

Besotted by their own pieties and laboring under astonishingly simple-minded conceits about social, economic and geopolitical realities, Reverend and Pastor feel an overwhelming imperative to share their revelations. Reverend believes that his spirituality endows him with a special sensitivity to human suffering and injustice, so he self-righteously badgers government and plumps for progressive causes under the rubric of working for social justice. Pastor, on the other hand, claims to have a personal relationship with God, Who has apparently commanded him to constantly hector everyone about moral rectitude, cultural decadence and the need for religion to inform public policy.

Democrats embrace Reverend because he shares their affectation of possessing a superior sense of social conscience, as well as their fetish for being compassionately non-judgmental (except, of course, when denouncing Republicans and the United States). Republicans cleave to Pastor because of his obsessive attachment to a sentimental view of individual responsibility, his dogmatic moral rigidity and his jingoistic patriotism.

In either case, Reverend and Pastor’s overwhelming sense or moral superiority emboldens them to take absurdly absolutist positions. For example, Reverend is so convinced of pacifism’s moral correctitude that he would violently protest the National Guard’s use of bazookas if waves of bloodthirsty Canadian tank battalions stormed into Minnesota and began shelling Duluth.
On the other hand, Pastor, ever vigilant against the encroachments of evil, routinely demands that schools ban Harry Potter books and Halloween celebrations because they glorify the Devil and witchcraft (no, I’m not kidding).

Reverend and Pastor are unshakeable in their beliefs and are therefore almost impossible to defeat in battle, but they are not powerful Warriors because they rely on faith or a vague spirituality instead of well-developed arguments . They are, however, accomplished at wielding guilt in battle, but many Warriors are not particularly vulnerable to this weapon. When confronted by a skeptical and aggressive opponent both Reverend and Pastor usually curl up into the defensive posture of; “Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do”.