“Pray for brains.” — Dorothy Zbornak, on The Golden Girls
Election Day has come and gone, and the people have spoken. The democracy that a mob of MAGA “patriots” tried to overthrow on January 6, 2021 has done its job. And sadly, religious conservatives have once again shown us who they are at the ballot box. I believe them.
So let’s take a look their new president-elect — the one so-called Christians worship and have pretty much ordained as the second coming since 2015, when he announced his first candidacy. Where do I begin?
Well, let’s begin near the end — on the eve of Election Day, when he called one of his female political opponents a bitch. (He actually mouthed the words, but the crude sentiment was loud and clear.)
He’d already been caught on tape bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy.” He’d already been accused of sexual assault and rape by multiple women and convicted of 34 felonies.
He simulated fellatio with a microphone on one stage and extolled the virtues of a dead golfer’s big dick on another. If God does indeed have a sick sense of humor (as Depeche Mode suggested in “Blasphemous Rumours”), he must have gotten a nice chuckle out of that one.
The religious right’s other god has been saying dumb shit for decades. He once called for the execution of five innocent Black boys who were falsely accused of raping a White woman. He’s been divorced twice, and he’s spent his life pursuing money, fame, power, and, by his own admission, pussy.
Suddenly, he’s a man of God, a good, righteous Christian.
His rallies are filled not with the Holy Spirit, but with venom and vitriol, as well as racist “humor.” His inner circle includes people he’s molded in his own image, including his vice president, who claims to be a man of faith with God on his side yet refers to a political opponent as “trash.” Does anyone seriously think that J.D. Vance has ever gotten down on his knees and prayed for anyone other than himself?
Christian conservatives voted for a man who held a rally with a featured comedian who called an entire island of Americans “garbage.”
Did Jesus talk like that? Are these really the type of men that Christians want their children to emulate?
But then, their concern for their children is clearly selective. They believe the guns they worship and give to their grandkids before they turn 2 pose less of a threat to them than drag queens in public spaces and trans girls in the bathroom and on high school sports teams?
Was January 6, 2021 the equivalent of a holy crusade? Were the Confederate flags emblems of godliness? Was the bloodshed in the name of Jesus, amen?
Are fetuses more worthy of love and life than those who don’t look or live like them? Or their daughters and wives who could very well die because of anti-abortion laws that prevent doctors from saving their lives.
Are fetuses more worthy of love and life than the Brown children of illegal immigrants. Are they more worthy of love and life than the precious children who risk their lives every day just by going to school?
If Jesus were alive today, would he walk on water with a gun in the pocket of his robe? Would he vote for a man whose language is hate? Would he hold up someone like Marjorie Taylor Greene, who snarls and barks and calls herself a Christian yet has never done anything that didn’t benefit her, as a woman of supreme virtue?
Would he act anything like the religious conservatives who hail Trump?
They claim to love, but I fail to see the love in their words or in their actions or in the man they’ve chosen as their modern-day savior? Doesn’t their old-time religion preach that we’re all God’s children? If God is love, why do they seem to be so full of hate.
They can vote for their real god — pray to him, bow down to him, throw money at him, lick his shoes, and enshrine him in gold if they want to. That’s what they’ve done. But they can’t tell me that a man who constantly spews the kind of hate that he spews about immigrants, about women, about disabled people, about anyone who doesn’t buy the garbage he’s been selling for decades, is a man of God or that he represents real Christian values.
Opposing abortion but not giving a fuck what happens to babies after they’re born will not get you a ticket into Heaven on judgment day.
I grew up in a devoutly Christian (and Democratic) household, and I was always told that accepting Jesus as your savior was supposed to make you a better person. It was supposed to fill you with grace, compassion, and empathy for your fellow man. It was supposed to bring you peace.
But pastors preach what they don’t practice themselves. My late uncle spent his entire life at the pulpit. Yet he was one of the most hateful, judgmental men I’ve ever known. He claimed to be full of love, but I don’t think I ever saw him smile. I certainly never heard a kind word from him, not even on the day he picked me up from school when I was in 4th grade after I broke my thumb playing kickball.
The last time I saw him was at my brother’s wedding 20 years ago when I said hello to him in the restroom. He gave my then-boyfriend an ugly look and ignored me.
“There goes a man of God,” I thought.
I’m certain that he, like so many of the supposed Christians in my extended family, was a Trumper. They think he brings them closer to Whiteness — and to God.
For most of my life, and especially in the past decade, when I hear Christian conservatives talk, they come across as angry, vulgar, vengeful, greedy, and, most disturbingly, cruel. I hear no kindness. I see no peace.
They love to quote the Bible and twist its words to suit their agendas. They’ve clearly never read it cover to cover. Or maybe they missed Matthew 7:1–3:
Judge not, that ye be not judged.
For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.
And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?
But all they do is judge… and hurl insults… and treat anyone who doesn’t fall in line with them with the utmost contempt. But worst of all, they’ve allowed themselves to be taken in by a con man who, if he had lived during the times of Jesus, probably would have led the mob to crucify him.
If it were 1861 instead of 2024, we know they’d all be on the side of the Confederate States of America, fighting to the death to preserve the institution of slavery. If it were the 1940s or ’50s, they’d be pro-Jim Crow, anti-integration, and probably fighting like hell to keep Black people out of their schools, out of their bathrooms, and out of their sports — sort of like how they’re fighting to remove trans people from society today.
It’s funny how the folks on the wrong side of history always hide behind God. In the days of slavery, Southerners used Him to justify that “peculiar institution,” claiming their religion benefitted enslaved people (who were basically undocumented immigrants forced to live in this country and literally build it up into what it became) because it exposed them to God.
During an appearance in September, Vance came up with a new “Christian idea” on the spot. He said God wants his boss to round up all undocumented immigrants and toss them out of the country because “you owe the strongest duty to your family” and because “your first duty as an American leader is to the people of your own country.”
They’re still using God against gay people, too. He loves us, but He hates our “lifestyle,” they say about the LGBTQ community. Or, “God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.” Most of them (unlike this guy) are probably too cowardly to say it out loud, but they think God created America for straight White men.
The first White immigrants from Great Britain came to America seeking religious freedom, but they don’t want to bestow that same religious freedom to all Americans today. It’s more convenient to force their religious beliefs on everyone.
They say God is in the details. Maybe he is, but I know one place where he isn’t: He isn’t in the hearts of the Christian conservatives who’ve made the president-elect their new god. They’re lying to us, and they’re lying to themselves.
And we all know what the Bible says about lying.