That’s why all of us who are Christians certainly see this is not a political skirmish. This is a battle between good and evil.
Robert Jeffress, on impeachment
Granted, Jeffress is a Southern Baptist and can’t reasonably be expected to say things that aren’t painfully stupid, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t typical of evangelicals; he is. The modern world — automation, artificial intelligence, humanism — has left them behind. Though we are mindful of looming problems arising from those technologies and philosophical shifts — in employment, for instance, and the corresponding distribution of resources — people like me tend to welcome the changes; they signal a safer workplace and less violence in the world. But it is also a world incomprehensible to people baffled by the steady decline of the Abrahamic faiths; modernity is, to them, an existential threat. Thus … Trump.
I was looking-up a quote from Nietzsche’s The Antichrist a few days ago, and noted a striking fact: In a lot of places, some variation of ‘Trumpism’ or similar can be painlessly substituted for ‘Christianity’ and its variants.
It is indecent nowadays to be a Christian [Trump supporter].
Christianity [Trumpism] is the revolt of all things that crawl on their bellies against everything that is lofty; the gospel of the ‘lowly’ lowers …
And so on.
And the implication of that observation holds: 1st-century Christianity was a cult and often corrupt and self-serving, and recall how casually the Christians turned-on their former co-religionists following the failure of the Jewish Rebellion. Trumpism is not a new religion — at least, not exactly — but it is a social movement that appeals to the same frustrations and subterranean malice that fueled Christianity’s birth and spread.