"As an atheist, I'm finding Easter on April Fool's Day to be a fucking hoot...-Doug in Oakland"
I couldn't resist that comment which accompanied my last post from a regular in the fields.
Anyway, today is the holiest of days for white evangelical Christians in America, and on this day, their leader, rather than tweet an inspirational message of peace, or of God's grace, chose to tweet a hateful and divisive screed about illegal immigration.
He even went to church with his wife. You know, the one he cheated on--- soon after she gave birth to his youngest child-- with a playboy bunny and a porn star.
Polls show that most white American evangelicals support this president. The fact that he is a bigot, a thief, an alleged rapist, and a conman, means nothing. Throw in the fact that he makes fun of the disabled and of poor people in Third World countries, and you have to wonder if these people who support him understand irony, or if they even consider doing a little self-reflection every now and then.
White American evangelicals claim that they support this current president because they felt that their religion was under siege under former president Obama. Now, with trump, they believe that they have a friend in Washington, and that he will protect their religion and American way of life by stacking the courts with like minded people, and pushing for laws that will do harm to those other people; not them. So even if they know that he raped someone, as Jerry Falwell, Jr. recently suggested, they are still not sure if they would pull their support for him.
Michael Gerson nailed the dilemma facing white evangelical trump supporters in his excellent essay for the Atlantic magazine:
"Trump supporters tend to dismiss moral scruples about his behavior as squeamishness over the president’s “style.” But the problem is the distinctly non-Christian substance of his values. Trump’s unapologetic materialism—his equation of financial and social success with human achievement and worth—is a negation of Christian teaching. His tribalism and hatred for “the other” stand in direct opposition to Jesus’s radical ethic of neighbor love. Trump’s strength-worship and contempt for “losers” smack more of Nietzsche than of Christ."
Today is the day Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead. I dare say that if he were to wake up today he would wonder why he even bothered.
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