Now that the malice and ignorance of evangelicals has driven the execrable Donald Trump to the front of the Republican pack, Russell Moore and Albert the Pious think it might be time to rebrand.
First Mohler, who complains that Trump supporters aren’t r-e-e-e-a-l evangelicals, but concedes that maybe ‘evangelicals’ aren’t the big bad voting bloc he thought.
GJELTEN: It may be that evangelical has become more a cultural label than a religious label. Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Seminary says that would mean the true evangelical bloc is smaller than he and others realized until now.
MOHLER: We have taken comfort in the fact that there have been millions and millions of us in America. And a part of that evidence has been the last several election cycles, with the evangelical vote being in the millions. And now we’re having to face the fact that, evidently, theologically-defined – defined by commitment to core evangelical values – there aren’t so many millions of us as we thought.
GJELTEN: So what is motivating the evangelical voters who are supporting Trump if it’s not their faith?
Moore ducks the question, taking refuge in the lie that Christians drove the civil rights movement.
MOORE: As a matter of fact, the Scripture tells us that we are to engage with people who disagree with us with kindness. That ought to be the message that drowns out any hint of bigotry or hatred in our lives. And as we’ve seen, over the centuries, Christianity has been a vibrant force against racism, for instance.
The grim truth is that it was the Southern Baptists, Moore’s and Mohler’s denomination, that provided the theological justification for slavery — and they condemned those who opposed it as not r-e-e-e-a-l Christians.
And hung in effigy that handful of brave southern pastors who supported the civil rights movement.
But, now, anybody with two eyeballs can see who evangelicals are — the malicious ignoramuses who think Donald Trump’s empty trash-talk is just what the Good Ol’ U.S. of A. (A Christian Nation, don’t you know?) needs. Sorry Albert, Russell … y’all damn sure are evangelicals, and the disaster of Donald Trump is on your heads.
This would not be a bad time to remember this passage from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged:
Are you now crying: No, this was not what you wanted? A mindless world of ruins was not your goal? You did not want us to leave you? You moral cannibals, I know that you’ve always known what it was that you wanted. But your game is up, because now we know it too.
We do, indeed, know it now. And shame on all of us if Trump’s success is not the end once for all of creatures like Mohler and Moore.