The study of theology, as it stands in Christian churches, is the study of nothing; it is founded on nothing; it rests on no principles; it proceeds by no authorities; it has no data; it can demonstrate nothing; and it admits of no conclusion. Not anything can be studied as a science, without our being in possession of the principles upon which it is founded; and as this is the case with Christian theology, it is therefore the study of nothing.
Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason
A Who’s-Who of conservative evangelical leadership have signed a statement upholding the claim that Trump won the recent presidential election.
The evidence overwhelmingly shows officials in key battleground states—as the result of a coordinated pressure campaign by Democrats and allied groups—violated the Constitution, state and federal law in changing mail-in voting rules that resulted in unlawful and invalid certifications of Biden victories.
There is no doubt President Donald J. Trump is the lawful winner of the presidential election. Joe Biden is not president-elect.
Coincidentally — or perhaps not — the current draft of the statement was issued yesterday, the day that the Electoral College met to vote.
Undoubtedly a lot of evangelicals — oblivious to the cynical manipulations of their leaders — will read this statement and conclude that, Yep, there really is something hinky about Biden’s victory.
It’s possible, I suppose, that some of the signers of that letter actually believe it — but I doubt that. I can much more easily believe they’re cynically exploiting disappointed Trump supporters, and that the “stolen election” is going to become a long-running fundraising device.
Much has been made of Proud Boys violence in Washington, D.C., this weekend — but evangelicals were in D.C., too.
Except he [Trump] didn’t lose the election, according to them [evangelicals]. It was taken from him. This is an article of faith, not to be doubted. If you doubt, you are a traitor, a coward, in league with the Devil. I’m not exaggerating at all. I saw an interview that the influential Evangelical broadcaster Eric Metaxas gave to the populist activist Charlie Kirk this week, in which he boldly claimed that patriots must fight “to the last drop of blood” to preserve Trump’s presidency, and that those who disagree are the same as Germans who stood by and did nothing to stop Hitler (Metaxas is best known as a biographer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer). In the same interview — I wrote about it here, in “Eric Metaxas’s American Apocalypse” — Metaxas said it doesn’t matter what can or can’t be proven in court, he knows, and we know, that the election was stolen. When Kirk, who is very sympathetic to Metaxas, asked him what he thought of where the cases stood, Metaxas blithely claimed that he is “thrilled” to know nothing about them.
Read the entire thing — and be very frightened.
What appears to have happened here is that the cult-susceptibilities that drive fanatical religion have been displaced by Trump; that is, Trump has displaced Jesus as the locus of fanaticism. I imagine psychologists have a name for that sort of transference, though I don’t know what it is. I suspect this behavior will probably harden, too, because the evangelical loyalty to Trump has been so costly to them; cultists aren’t the kind of people who can stand back and say, Hoo-Boy! We screwed-up!
They will double-down and triple-down on their grievances and their claims of persecution.
Evangelicals are not part of the mainstream, and Trump’s defeat is going to increase their estrangement from society.
Meantime, it turns out — What do you know? — that Jerry Falwell, Jr., was misusing tax-privileged Liberty University money to promote Trump’s presidential campaign.
After shocking many in the evangelical movement by endorsing Donald Trump over other Republicans for the 2016 presidential nomination, Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. pumped millions of the nonprofit religious institution’s funds into Republican causes and efforts to promote the Trump administration, blurring the lines between education and politics.
The culmination of his efforts was the creation of a university-funded campus “think tank” — which has produced no peer-reviewed academic work and bears little relation to study centers at other universities — that ran pro-Trump ads, hired Trump allies including former adviser Sebastian Gorka and current Trump attorney Jenna Ellis to serve as fellows and, in recent weeks, has aggressively promoted Trump’s baseless claims of election fraud.
Jenna Ellis, y’all will recall, is the loony who claimed that Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez, who died 7-years ago, was behind much of the current election turmoil.
What makes this especially galling is that the tax-privileged status of religious donations means that you and I are indirectly subsidizing this. Falwell’s misuse of donations is the very reason for the Johnson Amendment, and enforcing it should be made, once again, an I.R.S. priority.
Nothing is normal under Trump. He refuses to admit defeat. Instead, he speaks of massive electoral fraud, although there is no evidence for it. The whole thing is not surprising. Trump’s presidency ends as it began. Without decency and without dignity.
No differently than many people, I’m sure, I’ve occasionally wondered over the past 4-years, How will the Trump presidency look from a distance? One-hundred years from now, say? And I invariably reach the same conclusion: There is no long-view that redeems Trump, no long-perspective that enables us to regard him as anything but a corrupt madman.
Nobody is ever going to look at the Trump presidency and say … America got lucky. Nobody is going to someday look at the Trump presidency and marvel at the subterranean genius of the Constitutional system that installed him. No. For the next 100-years, perhaps the next 1000-years, men will view this squalid episode in our nation’s history and wonder, What the hell happened to Americans? How did such a blatant pile of sewage win the presidency?
My hometown of Youngsville, believe it or not, held a Christmas Parade this morning.
Lots of “God-fearing patriots” without masks in that crowd.
I am convinced Nietzsche got it right: Natural selection is going to pay morons a visit, and it’s wasted effort to try to protect them from themselves. The best you can do is put morons out of your life and protect yourself from them.
