linnposts.com

On his MSNBC show last week Lawrence O’Donnell gave a scathing criticism of Christians attending a Trump rally cheering when he called immigrants “animals.”

I think he was right to do so. The moral blindness of people who claim to be Christians is shocking, to say the least, but the issue is too important to let it go at that.

Many of us have Christian family members and/or friends who also support Donald Trump. They may not cheer him when he makes outrageous statements like this, but it doesn’t stop them from supporting him either.

How can they do that? What possible justification could they make for supporting an awful man like Trump and at the same time claim to be a Christian?

That is a question worth thinking about, not for their sake because they are not likely to change, but for ours so we might at least know what’s going on with them.

Let’s begin with what we know, which is that Christians supporting and cheering Donald Trump are almost always evangelical, meaning they are conservative in their beliefs. Let’s call them MAGA Christians.

At the same time, while it is fair to say that most MAGA Christians are evangelicals, it is equally important to understand that not all evangelicals are MAGA Christians. Surveys make this clear.

The second thing to say is that MAGA Christians justify their support of Trump because of two primary issues. The first is abortion, the second is homosexuality.

Ask any of them to tell you why they will vote for Trump in November and if they are honest these two reasons will be at the top of the list.

This is where the fact that they are evangelical becomes important. Their views on abortion and homosexuality are rooted in how they read the Bible, or more accurately, what their ministers have told them about how to read the Bible.

Evangelical Christians – not just MAGAs, but all of them – have been fed a steady diet of biblical literalism. It is a false, and I would add foolish, theory about how the Bible came to be that has no basis in either facts or logic.

Biblical literalism insists the Bible is the inspired word of God, meaning it is inerrant and infallible and must be accepted as it was written as divine truth.

None of that is true, of course. The Bible cannot be read literally for two reasons. One is that no original texts exist and all we have are copies of copies, making it absurd to claim that today’s translations are inerrant and infallible. The second is that every person reading the Bible, whatever version, is both fallible and flawed, prone to misunderstandings, misperceptions, and false assumptions.

The most dangerous thing about biblical literalism is that it represents an attack on truth that convinces people that facts are not facts and evidence is not evidence, that truth is only what you believe is true.

You can see that evangelicalism creates a circle of falsehoods you cannot penetrate because everything they say are beliefs they equate with facts and, thus, truth.

Evangelicals ignore the truth that beliefs are not facts because they cannot be. Once they become facts they are no longer beliefs, but facts have to have evidence to support them. Beliefs don’t. That’s why they are not facts.

Evangelicals being conditioned to reject facts that are true while arguing that truth is what they believe is true is why they refuse to listen to facts about abortion or homosexuality. They choose, instead, to believe both are sins because that is what they believe the Bible says.

This means, for example, that they completely reject advances in modern medicine that have discovered that sexual orientation (heterosexuality and homosexuality) is genetically determined and is not a choice someone makes (see the book, The Language of God by Dr. Francis Flowers who headed the Human Genome Project).

That’s not what the Bible says, evangelicals argue, so what science says doesn’t matter. What does is that according to the Bible God condemns homosexuality and so do they.

They take a similar view of abortion. Even though the Bible doesn’t say anything directly about abortion, it does forbid murder and because they believe life begins at inception, abortion is murder.

Here, again, because they are conditioned to reject facts supported by evidence, they insist that life begins at inception when there is no conclusive evidence that it does. According to Dr. Scott Gibert, Howard A. Schneiderman Professor of Biology at Swarthmore College, they are wrong. When asked when does personhood begin, he answered:

“I really can’t tell you when personhood begins, but I can say with absolute certainty that there’s no consensus among scientists.” He then proceeds to name the numerous views scientists hold about when personhood begins, making the point that no one can say with certainty one position is right and all the others are wrong.

At the very beginning of Roe v. Wade, the justices acknowledged precisely what Dr. Gilbert said. Didn’t matter to evangelicals who fought to have it overturned because they are not trained to entertain uncertainty. They want absolute answers, even if they are fantasy rather than fact.

That is why they cannot admit that what they believe the Bible says might be wrong, and God forbid that what the Bible itself says might be wrong, too. Their world would fall apart if they did.

This is the kind of Christianity to which all evangelicals are committed. They have been taught to fear facts and evidence that contradict what they believe. Truth threatens the sense of certainty on which they have based their lives.

MAGA evangelicals go one step further. Their need for religious certainty extends to their need for political certainty. A woman’s right to choose and equal rights under the Constitution for gays and lesbians challenges that need for political certainty just as modern biblical scholarship challenges their need for religious certainty.

They support Donald Trump because he is willing to tell them whatever they want to hear so they will believe as president he will stand with them on all issues that pose a threat to their need for certainty.

Thus, nothing about facts, evidence, reason, or logic has any effect on what they believe. So MAGA evangelicals attend Trump rallies and cheer when he says things that would make Jesus weep.

Their need for certainty even supersedes Jesus’ own words that truth sets a person free from any fear of truth (John 8:31).

The upshot of what we see happening within American evangelicalism is that what evangelicals have been taught to believe about the Bible is why so many of them have become MAGA Christians attracted to a man whose entire life has been lived in contradiction to everything they say they believe and believe in.

They need certainty more than truth, and the saddest part is that there is not one thing any of the rest of us can do about it.