Their Slavish and Shameful Devotion to the Felon in the White House

Is there anything that calls out Fundamentalist and Evangelical Christians in America for their phony piety and maligned morality more than their support for the four time indicted, thirty four time convicted felon, adjudicated sex offender, six-time bankrupted, draft dodging, racist, multi-marital-cheating, porn-star-assaulting, lawsuit loser, and most mendacious con man, Donald Trump?  Do they really believe that a “god” – any god, pick one – would have anything to do with the likes of such a poor example of his creation?  If you’d like to see an example of the piety crowd at their most delusional, then look no further than their slavish devotion to Trump and their obvious excitement of him occupying the office again.  If they have achieved anything with this misplaced support, it is to further reinforce the explicit proof that their religion and their motivations are nothing more than a politically motivated pretense to move the country further towards their goal of a conservative Christian nation so they can continue their bilking of the America public unabated.

The “demonic forces” they would claim lay behind the Democratic Party are simply false representations of anything that violates their “Christian” sensitivities, whatever that may be. Yes, according to these purveyors of religious delirium only Donald Trump can save our country from the depravity and debauchery into which it has been led by the “godless” Democratic party!  Christian political activists are putting millions of dollars DIRECTLY into  the pockets of the very man convicted of 34 felony crimes (and counting), multi-million-dollar business tax fraud in New York State, and an adjudicated sexual assault predator!  This is the man that the phony piety crowd is putting their money on to save the country and bring us back to the god-fearing nation we once were, even though we have never been a Christian nation.  The very same man that can no longer participate in a charity in the state of New York due to his fraudulent mishandling of funds AND who sold phony university degrees to armed services veterans not worth the paper upon which they were written has been sent by “god” to save the United States.  This is their claim.

Only the most seriously deluded and cognitively dissonant can rationalize such nonsense and, as it happens, that’s the very target audience upon which Christian organizations have focused their efforts.  The very same people that believe in the invisible man in the sky, a 6,000-year-old planet Earth, (an Earth where dinosaurs and humans cohabitated), humans that literally “popped” into existence in our current, “unevolved” state, a worldwide flood that wiped-out humanity save a single family, talking serpents and asses, (although as “talking asses” go, I believe Trump has proven this conclusively) and dead people rising from their graves and parading around the city of Jerusalem!  The most immoral snake-oil salesmen in the country are focusing their considerable caches on obfuscating the completely fallacious nature of his every word, promise and claim, even while their favorite “Christian”  demonstrates the very opposite of virtually everything and anything that Jesus ever said and taught.

We now know about the vast and various Christian power bases behind this most despicable candidate and the dystopic society they would have us living in given their ability to do so. Consider the so-called Ziklag, a so-called Christian organization supported by wealthy Christians such as the owners of Hobby Lobby and described by investigative journalists ProPublica during the 2024 election as: “A network of ultrawealthy Christian donors is spending nearly $12 million to mobilize Republican-leaning voters and purge more than a million people from the rolls in key swing states, aiming to tilt the 2024 election in favor of former President Donald Trump.”  Christians collaborating to steal an election as I assume they would have us believe Jesus would as well.

Another “Christian” organization that focused their considerable resources to the election of Trump is the Alliance Defending Freedom, (don’t you just love the titles?!) an Arizona-based Christian conservative legal “nonprofit”.  According to the Washington Post: “The organization has had nine successful cases before the court in the past seven years, including Burwell v. Hobby Lobby, which allowed corporations to opt out of covering contraceptives based on religious beliefs, AND created model legislation for “bathroom bills,” which bar students from using restrooms that don’t correlate to their sex at birth.”

Unfortunately there are many, many more.  Christian organizations across the country are working diligently to re-craft our society into the white-washed and white dominated country they contend their imaginary savior endorses. This represents a real and present danger to the democratic life that our relatives and ancestors fought and died for (not Trump’s, of course, they dodged the draft), and which the rest of the world looks upon with envy.  These groups are not community volunteers nor are they motivated by altruism.  These are people of power for whom money and power are virtually everything and they want control; complete and boundless control of the government and the rules of our society, and they see Donald Trump as the vehicle to their ends.

As it has become painfully obvious, the self-designated “Freedom Party” and “Freedom Caucus” in Congress, AKA the GOP, has been the party that takes our freedoms away, all while misrepresenting that it is in our best interests or those of society at large. Yes, it is in our collective best interests not to be able to decide what we or our children can read which is why the repugnant red states are purging their libraries of such radical tomes as “Animal Farm” and “Anne Frank’s Diary”.  Americans are just not responsible enough to choose reading material on our own, it must be done for us and by those that claim to know better.  Similarly, women cannot be trusted to make their own decisions about their healthcare, particularly their maternal healthcare.  We need the government to intercede on behalf of woman, even as some women cling to life for lack of medical care while the government dawdles in the courts.  (Hopefully, they’ll still be alive when the government finally arrives at its’ decisions!).  The party that for decades has been extolling the virtues of getting government off our proverbial backs would now like for the government to share in the most intimate decisions of our lives and have the last word over these matters as well.

And these kinds of behaviors go on and on and into all areas of life.  Consider the solutions to “voter fraud” legislated by red states that always seem to include making it more difficult to vote, especially in areas of black or brown people.  Texas has closed over 700 polling places since 2022 exclusively in minority voting districts while positioning the changes as a solution to some colossal threat to democracy from “illegal aliens” and undocumented workers, code for “non-white voters.  

There is much more to reveal about this, we haven’t even begun to discuss the introduction of the Bible into our public schools complete with morning prayer and Creationism being taught as a legitimate alternative to evolution, as if there is any legitimacy at all to the Judeo-Christian mythology that warrants such special placement over both the Constitution or of other religions.  They don’t seem to have any hesitation about the obvious upcoming battle over which of the 12,000 variations of Christianity in the U.S. will be “the one”.

When Trump gets to the end of his presidency, assuming we survive his presidency, perhaps the Democrats retake the House and Senate.  They will need to pass new legislation aimed at securing the secular nature of the government complete with a new and vigorous reinforcing of the Johnson Amendment.  The Johnson Amendment is a provision in the U.S. tax code, that prohibits all 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations from endorsing or opposing political candidates in exchange for their tax-free status. Section 501(c)(3) organizations are the most common type of nonprofit organization in the United States, ranging from charitable foundations to universities and churches. The amendment is named for then-Senator Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas, (Oh! The irony!) who introduced it in a preliminary draft of the law in July 1954.  With a new emphasis placed on the Johnson Amendment and a reform of the Supreme Court including term limits and an ethics code with teeth for enforcement, maybe we can make tremendous progress towards a more compassionate and representative government for all Americans regardless of race, sexual identity, or any other discriminating factor.

But that will remain to be determined……