The misapprehensions of Kurt Eichenwald’s open letter to Paul Ryan and James Dobson, in the current edition of Newsweek, offers a good example of the way that self-aggrandizing marketing lies (mis)shape perceptions.
Mr. Dobson, if Donald Trump represents Christian values, those values mean nothing. By endorsing him, evangelists are creating the image that what matters to them is political influence, not the word of God.
Weigh those words against the words of Trump, uttered as he was going through his first divorce: “You know, it doesn’t really matter what [the media] write as long as you’ve got a young and beautiful piece of ass.” This, Mr. Dobson, is your man of the Bible?
More:
How can a man who claims to be devout know so little about Christianity? There is a term for this, one usually used to describe situations in which the religious are taken financially by someone professing the same faith: affinity fraud. By pretending to be a religious Christian, Trump has fooled those who want to believe he is like them. They are being conned, into giving up not their money but their vote. A man—one who has repeatedly lied after swearing to God to tell the truth, who regularly walks away from financial and personal obligations, who knows nothing about Christianity—has tricked them.
This would not be a bad time to rehearse a few facts about the 1st-century church. Then, as throughout most of the Middle East today, there was no idea of separation of church and state; we speak today, in America, as though politics is one thing and religion another, but a man of Jesus’ time would have been baffled by the idea.
“Christianity is a revolt of all creatures that creep on the ground against everything that is lofty: the gospel of the “lowly” lowers …”
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Jesus Movement was a political movement no less than a spiritual movement, and it was a political movement of the have-nots against the haves. They made turning the other cheek a virtue because the underclass had no choice but to submit to being mistreated. They made being poor a virtue because they had no realistic hope of wealth.
The Christian Movement turned their necessary obsequiousness and unavoidable failure into tokens of virtue.
Now, along comes Donald Trump to insult and dismiss all of the accomplished people they can never be, to say that everything is simple, to tell them the lie they want to hear — that their frustrations are the undeserved consequence of their goodness, not their failures of intelligence and character.
Trump is working the same demagoguery that Jesus worked; he understands Christianity just fine. It is Eichenwald, an accomplished business reporter who seems to have fallen for the marketing lies, who has misapprehended what is going on.