Hypocrisy or expediency?
If you’re a conservative evangelical or Catholic who voted for Trump in 2016, have you atoned for the sins you committed in setting the US back during the mad and divisive four years of his presidency? If not, you should!
I don’t know what to call those sins. At the very least, they were hypocrisy. At the worst, they were Machiavellian, evil, and political expediency. In any case, people like them made a Faustian deal with the Devil incarnate Trump to further their own agendas.
You may call Michael Cohen a sleazebag or something worse, but he’s atoned for his sins and shown who Trump and his family really are in his tell-all book (probably the most interesting of all the anti-Trump books I’ve read in detail). One scene in that book sticks in my mind. It takes place in Trump Tower where Narcissus le Grand meets with several famous (infamous?) evangelical leaders. They practice the “laying on hands” ceremony and depart convinced that Il Duce has the spirit within him. What a laugh I had! Trump just conned them. He hates and hated people touching him, even before Covid, but Cohen had convinced him to just close his eyes and go along with that cultish ceremony. The ultimate con man and his acolyte, Cohen, conned the evangelical leaders, con men themselves, who were stupid enough to believe the charade.
As long as these people got what they wanted—the worst probably being a Supreme Court now dominated by extreme right-wing conservatives, including Catholic cult member Judge Amy; wasn’t Creepy Clarence, the sexual pervert, enough?—conservative evangelicals and Catholics happily held their noses and looked the other way, especially their leaders who pandered to their base. Families ripped asunder at the border, attacks on our God-given planet Earth, faux displays of religious fervor (violently clearing peaceful demonstrators away to get his photo-op in front of that church, holding up a Bible) are only a few things these Christian conservatives should count as evil deeds their lord and savior Mr. Trump committed. They are complicit in that.
Of course, there’s nothing new about religion playing a nefarious political role. In the first centuries after the Crucifixion, powerful men in the Catholic Church (the only one at the time in a world at the time that treated women as property) kept women out of the hierarchy and shortened and distorted the New Testament of the Bible to four gospels (out of more than twenty!) to establish their hegemony. The Magdalene, a dear friend of Christ at the very least, was portrayed as a whore, and Judas as the ultimate evil person—their gospels paint a different story. Consequently, the “official version” of the Bible is highly questionable, revisionist history.
I’ve observed how religion interacts politically for a long time. I’m an unbiased observer in that regard. I respected my Latin American History prof at UC Santa Barbara and many other Jesuits during my stay in Colombia, but the story of Padre Luna (the priest who spent his life helping the street children there) certainly showed that he was more a man of God than those in the Colombian Church hierarchy. From Colombia to the Vatican, that hierarchy has proven the adage that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. (Four members of the powerful Medici family were popes!)
Many of my novels deal with the age-old war between good and evil. A lot of storytelling does. Sometimes I paint religious women and men as good, other times evil. A Jesuit, more Bastiann van Coevorden’s old prof and a minor character in Son of Thunder (the son of Lorenzo de’ Medici was the first Medici to become a pope; Botticelli the artist begins the book, feuding with the father) was modeled after my UCSB professor and is an enlightened priest. (I sent the manuscript to another priest so he could check for historical inaccuracies. I’m still waiting for his reply!) Another good priest in Soldiers of God fights the religious fanaticism of the future that’s tearing the US apart (while prescient, the temporal setting was a bit late when you think about the religious right’s support of Trump!). Mary Jo Melendez spends time with nuns in Muddlin’ Through. And so forth. There are good and evil Christians, so authors should consider both in their fiction to make it appear more real!
Conservative Christians who supported Trump are in the evil category, or at least trending that way. They seem to have no shame. They turned Christ’s love into a lot of political hatred, buying into that new us-versus-them religion dominating the Trump administration. If they continue to ruin this country, God might forgive their sins, but I sure won’t!
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Comments are welcome.
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Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!
