The most devoutly religious guy I know is also a big-time Trump supporter.
A friend of a friend, he’s not actually an evangelical (you might say he’s even more Catholic than the quasi-lefty pope they’ve got in there now), but he adheres to many of the same core “family values” that galvanize evangelicals.
And he’s not just a Trump supporter — he’s a stalwart supporter who’s backed Trump since the gates of Sheol opened up and disgorged the animatronic circus peanut onto the GOP debate dais.
It’s easy to dismiss evangelical support for Trump as a devil’s bargain wherein Christians hold their noses so they can seat another reactionary Supreme Court justice.
But there are several problems with that theory:
- Evangelicals basically see Mike Pence as an albino Jesus, and they’re not clamoring to remove Trump so they can install Pence.
- White evangelicals actually voted for Trump by greater margins than they did for George W. Bush, who rode into the presidency on Jesus’ back like Jesus rode into heaven on his gay, fruit-striped unicorn. (Okay, so I missed a few CCD classes.)
- If evangelicals had wanted a Christian who acts Christian and supports lots of supposedly Christian things, they had any number of candidates to choose from during the primaries, including Ted “Get in My Windowless White Van Now!” Cruz. Many still supported Trump.
- If they simply wanted another right-wing Supreme Court justice so they could implement their anti-choice agenda, you’d expect their distaste for Bizarro Jesus to show up at least a little in public opinion polls. But a Pew Research poll from as recently as March showed that white evangelicals still support Trump by a gaudy 78-18 percent margin.
In short, they fugging love the guy. It simply doesn’t matter how many porn stars he bangs.
Hillary Clinton could have descended from parted skies bathed in blinding beatific white light while stigmata opened up like a chem lab sprinkler system in her hands and feet, and it wouldn’t have earned her a single evangelical vote. (They would have called her a showoff, and you know it.)
No, Trump’s standing with evangelicals has nothing whatever to do with his piety (or lack thereof), and it never will. Trump won evangelicals over because he’s a bully. Full stop.
This occurred to me again while watching the just-released Netflix remake of Lost in Space. Will Robinson discovers [spoiler alert] that his new robot friend and protector had not so long ago run amok on the colonists’ ship and flat murdered a bunch of people. But because the robot was his robot — and had staunchly defended him — Will backed him 100 percent.
Or take a real-life example. Constantine I was a vicious warmonger who left his first wife to marry a second (in order to cement his standing with the previous emperor) and then eventually killed his second wife after executing his own son. But he elevated Christianity to a privileged position in the Roman Empire (because he supposedly saw a sign from God that helped him win a bloody battle), and so he gets to be Constantine the Great from now until Trump fries us all to death in hellfire and KFC spittle.
Tim Kaine, a true Christian, trotted out lots of flowery-sounding Bible verses during his debate with Mike Pence, but Christians by and large didn’t want to hear crap from the Bible. They wanted to hear Donald Trump vigorously defend their faith by claiming everyone will be saying “Merry Christmas” from now on, whether they want to or not.
For whatever reason, some Christians feel picked on, and by backing Donald Trump they’re basically bringing a crazed, syphilitic gorilla to school. He may rip a few faces off and shotput poo all over the playground, but it will be other people’s faces and, perhaps more importantly, someone else’s poo.
They can stay “Christian” while their 21st century Constantine destroys everything under the sun besides their God-given right not to bake cakes for gay people.
What does this say about evangelical Christians? It means their Christianity isn’t a spiritual practice so much as an identity and a culture. For them, it’s about winning, not winning hearts. And they can all fuck off now.
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