Do You Think ANYONE Took Trump Seriously When He Said Biden Wants To Hurt God?

Actually, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Congress' most knowledgeable Constitutional scholar is taking it very seriously. He e-mailed his followers and warned them, telling them that "Trump said that Joe Biden as President would 'hurt God and the Bible.' This comical bit of pandering to the religious Right came from the guy who has more than a dozen outstanding sexual assault and harassment claims against him and waved an upside-down Bible over his head after unleashing a tear gas and pepper spray riot by his secret police force against 2,000 civil rights protesters. For anyone who has read or watched The Handmaid’s Tale, Donald Trump’s America offers disturbingly familiar dystopian glimpses of misogynistic, anti-scientific, homophobic, and authoritarian religion driving the affairs of state. In Congress we face a constant drive to stifle science and promote discriminatory religious dogma in government."

No one knows more about the evangelical hive mind than Frank Schaeffer. This morning he told me that "Trump got the emotions right. He won in 2016 because he understood that white evangelical and conservative Roman Catholic Republican voters were no longer motivated by any sense of hope; they were motivated by a menace, resentment and fear. Since we think of God as a bigger version of ourselves thus Trump is correct: Biden hurts God-- if, that is, God is a reflection of Trump’s white evangelicals’ denial of the teachings of Jesus. In that universe Biden’s simple humanity is an affront to a God who endorses separating children from parents and locking them in cages, approves flying confederate flags to remind American Blacks that slavery was God’s plan all along, is titillated and pleased by clubbing and gassing protesters who dare to get in the way of a photo-op in order to wave a Bible in front of a church a few yards from where you signed a check to pay off a porn star. All this hurts God- once you’ve redefined the Creator as Satan and erected a new temple too him in the person of Donald Trump."

 Jack Holmes, writing for Esquire noted that there's something to learn from Trump's unhinged rant about Biden wanting to hurt God. "Just as Vice President Mike Pence provided a clarifying look this week at how conservatives see the Supreme Court, his boss has been a clarifying force when it comes to American political religion. In short, the kind of Political Christianity that now dominates on the American right has very little to do with the teachings of Jesus Christ, or even the Old Testament. That's how Donald J. Trump became the standard-bearer for Evangelicals despite personifying all of the Seven Deadly Sins at once, and despite his palpable disdain for believers even when addressing them directly. 'Two Corinthians 3:17, that's the whole ballgame,' he said at Liberty University way back in 2016. 'Is that the one you like?' It didn't matter that the president was essentially saying, I'm pandering to you because I think you're an easy mark, or that he clearly has no familiarity with even basic tenets of the Bible, or that he rarely, if ever, goes to church, or that he's cheated relentlessly on all three of his wives, paying hush money to multiple mistresses. It won't matter that he's demonstrated callous indifference to the deaths of 158,000 Americans, or that, as more than 1,000 of his constituents die each day and the current economic suffering is set to explode with the lapse in boosted unemployment benefits, he really packed his schedule Friday as he heads to one of his golf courses."

On Thursday, the last day that he and Congress saw fit to work this week, he gave a speech in Ohio in which he once again demonstrated that his strategy for courting Evangelical votes is just throwing things at the wall.

The idea that a presidential candidate could "hurt God," a Supreme Being who exists beyond space and time, is not really the kind of talk you'd expect from someone who believes in or understands the concept. But this is a fairly revelatory look at the state of the conservative movement. As Trump has proven, this sort of Godliness and religiosity is less tied to any principles to live by than they are one facet-- along with gun ownership and, apparently, burning fossil fuels-- of a conservative identity around which the movement's base is organized. He doesn't mention opposition to nonwhite immigration here, or the larger concept that this is a country built for and by white people and everyone else should just be happy to be here, but those are the really animating features that drew movement conservatives to his candidacy in the first place.

It's probably worth mentioning that insufficient religiosity is not among Joe Biden's issues, of which there are many, though many fewer than the incumbent president has. By all indications, the Democratic nominee is a man of faith, and it would take approximately two church visits a year for Biden to prove himself more devout and committed than Trump. (The president did visit a church recently, albeit after he had federal forces violently clear peaceful protesters so that he could stage a photo op holding a Bible upside down.) There is zero reason to believe Biden would somehow crack down on religious believers-- not even make them provide employees with health insurance that covers contraception, which is considered oppression in this country. None of this is to suggest Trump really believes any of what he says about this, or cares. Meanwhile, the actual problems that exist in reality have not gone away, and will not disappear beneath another culture-war food fight.

Biden was America's first Catholic vice president. He has always seemed like a guy who takes Christianity and faith far more seriously than Trump does. But, as Stephen Crockett put it for readers of The Root, Señor Trumpanzee "believes that if Joe Biden is elected president, his first days in office would include Biden placing the Bible on the floor of the White House bedroom and the 77-year-old diving off the bed to deliver a big elbow to the helpless Bible. The president of people who’ve thrown out all their watches because he’s banned Tik Tok also believes that Biden is going to get into an argument with God that includes Obama’s former No. 2 sucker-punching God in the face. Or at least that’s how Trump’s been trying to spin it. The president of people who love the Bible yet openly and actively hate people who don’t look like them or love like them told a crowd that Biden wants to 'Take away your guns, take away your Second Amendment. No religion, no anything. Hurt the Bible. Hurt God. He’s against God. He’s against guns. He’s against energy, our kind of energy.' And what energy would that be? Orange-painted-skin energy? Also known as Oompa Loompa energy?"

I was a little surprised that hundreds of so-called evangelicals showed up for a live Trump campaign rally-- headlined by crackpot Paula White-- yesterday. The hotels was fined for breaking the social gathering restrictions, although not enough for anyone to think twice about it. And speaking if crackpots, Ralph Reed was very excited about the whole thing. But what I wasn't surprised about was Rev John Pavlovitz's eloquent rebuttal letter to Trump: This is What Hurts God, Donald. "I know that actual spirituality is something foreign to your heart," wrote Pavlovitz, "that authentic faith is antithetical to who you are and how you view the world. I know that God is simply a prop you wield, a costume you put on, a resource you rent in order to manipulate religious people. If you knew anything about Jesus, if you’d ever read the Gospels, if you even once opened the Bible and saw what the Good News Jesus preached actually was-- you’d know the kinds of things that hurt God:

• 160,000 Americans dying without a shred of compassion for them.
• Children taken from the arms of their parents and put into dog kennels.
• Families pepper-sprayed for a sociopath’s Bible-wielding photo op.
• Terrified refugees denied sanctuary from their suffering.

• A leader who celebrates a rising NASDAQ and ignores a rising death toll.
• Dehumanizing women by talking about their genitalia.

• Black men murdered in the streets and a leader who will not condemn the executioners.
• Rubber bullets fired into the bodies of young mothers standing silently in solidarity with those black men.
• Someone trying to take away healthcare from millions of people in a pandemic.

The Jesus who implored his followers to love the least, to care for the poor, to feed the hungry, to visit the prisoner, to welcome the stranger-- this Jesus surely is being hurt in these moments."

Pavlovitz was just getting started I suggest you redathe whole open letter on his website