The Trumpist Perversion of Christianity

Bill McKibben notes that Trump is doing to America what right-wing evangelicalism did to American Christianity. Whole thing is very much worth your time. Here’s an excerpt:

Trumpism’s most revealing and defining moments – not its most important, nor cruelest, nor most dangerous, nor stupidest, but perhaps its most illuminating – came earlier this autumn. In the course of a few weeks, the US president started showing everyone his plans for a gilded ballroom twice the size of the White House and then began unilaterally ripping down the East Wing to build it. Then, after nationwide protests against his rule, he posted on social media an AI video of himself wearing a crown and piloting a fighter jet labeled “King Trump”, which proceeded to bomb American cities and Americans with a graphically vivid load of human poop.

He has done things 10,000 times as bad – the current estimate of deaths from his cuts to USAID is 600,000 and rising, and this week a study predicted his fossil fuel policies would kill another 1.3 million. But nothing as definitional. No other president would have dared – really, no other president would have imagined – unilaterally destroying large sections of the White House in order to erect a Versailles-style party room, with the active collaboration of some of the richest Americans, almost all of whom have business with the government. And no one – not Richard Nixon, not Andrew Jackson, not Warren Harding, not anyone – would have imagined boasting about defecating on the American citizenry. Even the worst American leaders were willing to maintain the notion that they represented all the people; Trump has managed to turn America’s idea of itself entirely upside down. And he has done it with the active consent of an entire political party. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, when asked about the poop video, for once did not bother lying that he had not seen it. Instead he said: “The president uses social media to make the point. You can argue he’s probably the most effective person who’s ever used social media.”

As disorienting as it is to watch the president try to upend the old idea of democracy and replace it with its polar opposite, there is one large group of Americans who should not find it completely novel. That is those of us – in older age cohorts a near majority – who were raised as mainline Protestant Christians.

We have watched over the years as rightwing evangelical churches turned the Jesus we grew up with into exactly the opposite of who we understood him to be. At its most basic, they turned a figure of love into a figure of hate who blesses precisely the cruelties that he condemned in the Gospel; we went from “the meek shall inherit the Earth” to “the meek shall die of cholera.” This has happened more slowly, over decades instead of months, but it is nonetheless unsettling in the same ways, a disorienting gut punch for many of us.

What particularly hurts is the fact that at no point did we manage to fight back, not effectively anyway. Without intending to, we surrendered control of the idea of Jesus. It is a story that may provide some insights into how to fight the attack on democracy.

It’s worth noting that the decline of the mainline Protestant denominations really was a disaster for American political life, not to mention religious life.