We’re hearing a lot about God in politics lately. Maybe not your god, especially if you’re Muslim or Buddhist or Jewish or, I don’t know, Episcopalian. No, the god that’s being shoved into our faces by the United MAGA Church is the American fundamentalist Christian god, the one who doesn’t approve of unmarried sex, homosexuals, abortion, interracial marriage, or even contraception. This god is a real hard-ass, and the MAGAs have attached themselves to him like a barnacle on a tugboat. (We’ll assume His pronoun is Him.)
This god was invented in backwoods American churches, where fast-talking evangelists did their best to guilt their flocks into obeisance and into donating money to “the church” before seducing the prettiest 15-year-old in the congregation and running off to dupe the next group of suckers.
As is often the case with successful small businesses in America, that model got leveraged and eventually morphed into the big mega-churches whose preachers fly private jets, live on palatial estates, and have television shows. The payoff is bigger but the game is the same — guilt and grift: “You poor schmucks are going to fry in eternal hellfire FOREVER if you don’t stop sinning. Here’s a list of stuff that’s bad. Don’t do any of it, even if most of it feels good. Like sex. Sex is really bad unless you’re heterosexually married and only doing it to have babies. Did I mention you need to send me money so we can stop all these other schmucks from sinning? In the name of JAYSUS, amen!” Millions of idiots buy into this.
All of this hustle is theoretically based on Christianity, which, applied properly, is a respectable religion, based on the life and example of one Jesus Christ of Nazareth, a poor man who lived in the Middle East a couple thousand years ago, and who, as far as I’m aware, never asked for money or said a word about abortion, guns, contraception, interracial marriage, or white supremacy (which is a good thing, since Jesus wasn’t white).
Mainly, as I recall from my Methodist raising, Jesus was against materialism (money-changers), for forgiveness — and for treating our fellow humans as we ourselves would like to be treated. If we did this, I was taught, we’d go to Heaven, where we’d see all the people in our lives again and hang out with them forever (which was a concept I spent many a night in my youth trying to get my head around).
But any religion is subject to perversion of its core beliefs, whether in the pursuit of money, power, or both. And make no mistake, nationalistic Evangelicalism is a perversion of Christianity. It has literally nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus. It’s a bizarre cult that believes a 10-year-old should be forced to carry a rapist’s baby to term, that everyone should carry guns, and whose political representatives are now passing laws prohibiting women from crossing a state line to get a medical procedure they disapprove of.
This Christian Taliban thinking led all but eight Republicans in Congress to vote last week against a bill guaranteeing the right to contraception. Think about it: Ninety percent of Congressional Republicans literally voted against guaranteeing people the right to buy condoms.
Also, last week: Georgia Congress-beast Marjorie Taylor Greene said on television: “We need to be the party of nationalism. I say it proudly. I’m a Christian Nationalist!” So were the Nazis, Marge.
Colorado Congress-gun Lauren Boebert said, “We need to get over this idea of the separation of church and state, because we’re a Christian nation.” The Founding Fathers would be surprised to learn that, LB.
And there was Florida Congress-putz Matt Gaetz, who offered the novel theory that women demanding abortion rights shouldn’t worry “because they’re all 5’2” and 300 pounds and no one’s going to want to impregnate them.” So, only hot chicks get abortion rights?
How deep does this crazy go? And more important, how far do we let these dangerous freaks go before we stand up and vote-shame them back into the guano-glutted bat-caves from whence they came? If we don’t take these people seriously — right now — we will regret it for the rest of our lives. They’ve gotten a taste of power (and money) and now they’re coming for our freedoms.
