It finally happened. Failing as a politician, Donald Trump has gone to preaching.
While James Comey was spilling the beans on Trump’s efforts to stop the investigation into Michael Flynn, he was across town giving a “sermon” to the evangelicals attending the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference.
His text was Isaiah 1:17: “Learn to do right, seek justice, defend the oppressed. Take up the fatherless, plead the case of the widow.”
Then he launched into his exposition of the text: “The entrenched interests and failed bitter voices in Washington will do everything in their power to try and stop us from this righteous cause, to try to stop all of you. They will lie, they will obstruct, they will spread their hatred and their prejudice, but we will not back down from doing what is right.
“Because, as the Bible tells us, we know the truth will prevail. Nothing worth doing ever came easy. . . . We know how to fight better than anybody, and we never give up. We are winners, and we are going to fight.”
This is what Trump’s presidency has come down to, using the Bible to justify his own words and actions, identifying God with his cause which he defines as “doing right, seeking justice, and defending the oppressed.”
Only he wasn’t talking about the poor and people truly oppressed. He was talking about evangelicals who imagine themselves under siege and his being their champion determined to protect their religious freedom that the rest of us are apparently trying to take from them.
It’s a wonder he wasn’t struck by lightning.
Both Trump and his evangelical followers have reached the point of no return. Neither has any credibility left to draw on.
The only people who respect Trump are primarily evangelicals and virtually no one respects them. In fact, most Americans see right through Trump and his evangelical base.
In my new book, Evangelicals and the Decline of American Politics, coming out late summer, I document the fact that evangelicals are in a decided minority when it comes to their stand on most moral issues.
And Nate Silver, the genius numbers guy, says that the percentage of people who “strongly support” Trump has gone from a high of 30% in February to 21% today. Overall, almost 56% of the country disapprove of his presidency.
Trump rejects these kinds of facts because, as we all know, he suffers from extreme narcissism.
But I think the same holds true for evangelicals who have a collective narcissism that leads them to believe that their self-righteousness is seen by others as a virtue rather than a vice.
Both Trump and evangelicals are so wrapped up in themselves that they cannot see anything except a world of their own creation.
That was confirmed when Trump started quoting scripture and evangelicals wildly cheered him on, much to the disbelief of the rest of the country.
You really can’t make this stuff up, but the consequences are too serious to dismiss that easily.
Whenever an American leader resorts to using religion to stave off declining political support, our nation is headed for serious trouble.
At the sane time, we may be seeing the signs of the impending end of the short lived Trump era, and evangelicalism’s effort to become the dominant expression of Christianity as well.
Neither can come too soon.
linnposts.com 