Soon after the 2016 election, I predicted that Donald Trump’s egregious behavior and bad values would work to the disadvantage of his delerious Evangelical Right supporters.
Third, 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump, and that will eventually sink into public consciousness, as in, Wait a minute! What are you saying? The church people gave us that piece of sh*t p***y-grabber?! Yep, they did — and that will be the tale of how the Evangelical Right and ‘movement so-called conservatism’ committed political suicide. They might make some noise, occasionally score a small victory … but they are done. The Trump administration, with its inevitable serial indecencies and corruptions, is their achievement, and they will never live it down.
There has been plenty of frankly contemptuous commentary here and there (right here at Civil Commotion, for instance), but now Raw Story, an important media outlet, has published a piece that unambiguously argues that Christianity is being cynically used as a cover for selfish policy-making.
In reality, the relationship between Christian piety and support for selfish policies is fairly straightforward. It’s not that being Christian makes you conservative. It’s that being conservative makes being a loud and pious Christian extremely attractive.
Without Christianity, the underlying mean-spiritedness of conservative policies is simply easier to spot.
The tide is going out on the Evangelical Right, just as it is on Trump, and nothing can change that because the bone-deep malice and painful stupidity can’t be hidden any longer. Reality always has the last word.