Trump vs Jesus

In writing about Trump's meeting with evangelical ministers and assorted religionist hucksters and grifters at the White House Monday evening, they reported that in his public remarks he "spoke in high-minded tones about religious liberty, abortion and youth unemployment. He noted a John Adams quote carved into the room’s fireplace: 'I pray heaven to bestow the best of blessings on this house.' But once reporters and camera crews were escorted out of the room, he reverted to the scumbag most Americans have come to detest and started talking about "how evangelical leaders can use their pulpits to help Republicans win in the midterm elections." Someone trying to save America from Satan secretly taped it and gave the tape to the Times. He urged the religious leaders to use their "newfound freedom" to campaign from the pulpit on behalf of Republicans. "You have people that preach to almost 200 million people-- 150 to, close, depending on which Sunday we are talking about, and beyond Sunday, 100, 150 million people."

“I just ask you to go out and make sure all of your people vote,” Mr. Trump told the group of about 100 evangelical ministers. “Because if they don’t-- it’s Nov. 6-- if they don’t vote we’re going to have a miserable two years and we’re going to have, frankly, a very hard period of time because then it just gets to be one election-- you’re one election away from losing everything you’ve got.”

Yes, the man is crazy and narcissistic and manipulative. But he's also a bold-faced liar. I know that isn't news to DWT readers but he claimed that he had "gotten rid of" a law forbidding churches and charitable organizations that don't pay taxes from endorsing political candidates. NBC caught him in the lie, in fact, they caught him in several lies. "The law," (the so-called Johnson Amendment inserted into a 1954 bill by then Senator Lyndon Johnson) they wrote, "remains on the books, after efforts to kill it in Congress last year failed... The law says churches and charities "are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office."

But Trump cited this alleged accomplishment as one in a series of gains he has made for his conservative Christian supporters, as he warned, "You're one election away from losing everything that you've got," and said their opponents were "violent people" who would overturn these gains "violently."

At stake in the November midterms, Trump told the audience, are all the gains he has made for conservative Christians.

"The level of hatred, the level of anger is unbelievable," he said. "Part of it is because of some of the things I've done for you and for me and for my family, but I've done them. … This Nov. 6 election is very much a referendum on not only me, it's a referendum on your religion, it's a referendum on free speech and the First Amendment."

If the GOP loses, he said, "they will overturn everything that we've done and they'll do it quickly and violently, and violently. There's violence. When you look at Antifa and you look at some of these groups-- these are violent people."

See what he's doing? He's enthusiastically embracing Satan's mission: fear and division-- and entirely eschewing Jesus.  Did anyone call him out on it, even if just to lovingly help him understand the difference? As pastors isn't that their job? Did you miss Frank Schaeffer and Samir Selmanović this morning? These pastors, explained Samir, "would take Trump over Jesus, any time. Jesus is about possibility in the world and love for the other, Trump is about power in the world and fear of the other. Nothing can now stop them from operating from fear since they have now created circumstances that should make them afraid (everyone hates them) and have destroyed their own resources (demolished their own theology and ethics), and they swiftly remove their own people at any whiff of disloyalty, like Jeff Sessions They project it a virtue to their own: 'Great leadership requires hard decisions, often sacrifice and suffering!' (always sacrifice and suffering by the disloyal and never by the leaders who stay)."

John Pavlovitz addressed by putting together a must-read post at his own blog, The Moral Confusion of Trump Christians. "Christians supporting this President are the most morally confused people I’ve ever met. They are profoundly spiritually disoriented," he wrote... "Their spirituality was compromised. Once you make a deal with that kind of devil, there is no moral path forward that makes sense any more."

The day they hitched their convictions to Donald Trump, they doomed themselves to moral confusion, but what’s worse--they’ve confirmed the greatest fears that people outside of Christian have about Christians. 
They’ve become a walking example of the hypocrites people fear, and the kind ironically, that Jesus warns about. 
They are giving millions of people sound reason to reject it all. I don’t blame them one bit-- though I hope they realize there are others.

I am a Christian and I am not morally confused.

Many Christians I know aren’t.

We see with perfect clarity, that you can either align yourself with this President or with Jesus of Nazareth-- but that emulating both is a moral impossibility.

I’m sad for the Christians who left the narrow road of Jesus to jump aboard the  Trump Train, and who now can’t find their way back-- but I’m sadder still for a watching world who sees them and realizes how far they’re drifted from their namesake, even when they cannot.

Thankfully, many of the faith and faithless alike-- are not confused about them.