Tag Archives: religion

As I wrote last week, one of the excuses the religious right offers for supporting the Toddler of the United States is that sure, he may not be a perfect person, but he’s doing god’s work. Israel’s King David was flawed but he served God; the Toddler is no different.

The trouble is, like the title of the post says, when you choose the lesser evil, you’re still choosing evil. And Christians are not supposed to choose evil.

Let me pause and say I don’t think they consider the Toddler all that flawed. When King David sent Uriah out to die in battle so he could marry Bathsheba, the prophets of Israel called him out. With the religious right, the response would more likely be “yes, the Toddler did a terrible thing but we are all sinners. He’s totally repented. And he’s still doing God’s work.” As long as he supports the classic American hierarchy — being white, male, Christian (and non-LGBTQ) or rich puts you above anyone who isn’t — murders in Minneapolis, his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, his corruption — are trivial offenses. They don’t care.

This is not some unique problem to the religious right; once you start choosing the lesser evil, it’s awfully easy to choose more and more evil. Consider American foreign policy. We overthrew multiple governments in the cold war we consider too socialist/communist/left-wing and supported many dictators —sure, Saddam Hussein or the Shah of Iran or Ferdinand Marcos (dictator in the Philippines) might be a son of a bitch but they were our son of a bitch! Once we made that decision we never objected to anything they did: murdering nuns and priests for teaching peasants to read (El Salvador), genocide (Guatemala), torture and rape of an American (Guatemala again), using poison gas on the Kurds (Iraq), murder of dissidents even in the United States (Chile).

They were supposed to be “our son of a bitch” but in practice we were theirs. Our government was apparently terrified that if we crossed them, they’d switch sides and ally with the USSR; somehow telling them “We put you in power, we can take you out” never came up (I suspect most likely our government didn’t give a crap). We compromised with evil and then we never stopped. And then many pundits and diplomats whined if we were called on it — dammit, how naive are you? We have to look out for our interests, just like any other country and that sometimes means allying with bad governments!

The flaws in this argument were 1)Looking out for number one is never a justification for screwing other people over. Finding the dividing line is a moral challenge and it’s often tougher than it looks, and 2)a lot of people can simultaneously argue the US is entitled to play hardball politics and still be treated as some kind of shining city on the hill, morally better than other countries (American exceptionalism becomes an excuse rather than a goal). Similarly some members of the religious right think they should be able to support the worst of the Toddler’s policies and still be immune to criticism — we should look up to them as our moral superiors, even if they aren’t.

This is not a unique issue to them. Lots of candidates I voted for have done morally objectionable things. While I largely dismissed criticism of Bill Clinton’s sex life in the 1990s — in the fire-hose of right-wing bullshit, it seemed like more bullshit — at a minimum he sexually harassed some of the people under him as governor of Arkansas (I also don’t buy his recent claim he was completely unaware of the stories about Jeffrey Epstein when they knew each other, but Epstein wasn’t on anyone’s radar during Clinton’s presidency. His administration did nothing about the Diana Ortiz case in Guatemala that I mentioned above. Obama didn’t prosecute anyone for the torture scandals under W, and the drone war in his presidency killed a lot of innocent people in the Middle East.

As a member of Amnesty International I did write to both Clinton and Obama where I felt human rights were being violated. That’s a minimum baseline for taking action and did not, I should note, produce a change in either case; if there was more I should have done, I didn’t do it. If the religious right objected to the Toddler’s actions, they could speak up similarly. However, his alliance with them hinges on them kissing his ass and assuring him God loves him; if they have any objections (I doubt they do), they won’t air them.

Keeping silent is a form of hypocrisy. I know people who swore they couldn’t tolerate Bill Clinton’s adultery who pulled the lever for the Toddler quite happily. One of them informed me in 2024 that they could never vote for Kamala Harris because she’s sexually immoral. No, if you vote for the Toddler, the candidate’s sex life is not a dealbreaker (though to be fair, it can be one factor among many). Hypocrisy is not a good path for anyone to go down, particularly not Christian leaders who are supposed to aspire to a higher standard. Unfortunately, as Fred Clark said at Slacktivist (I don’t have the link handy), when asked “what does it profit you to gain the world if you lose your soul?”, many of them would conclude “I gain the world! That’s my profit … I’m sorry, what’s your point?”

As a blogger at Obsidian Wings put it some years ago, it’s easy to conclude the world is rotten, the system is rotten, and the lesser evil is the best we can hope for — or we can hold out and call on politicians and leaders to live up to the standards they set. And sometimes, when we do that, it works. Even if it doesn’t, it’s still worth trying

According to Speaker of the House Mike “biblical worldview” Johnson, Americans misunderstand the separation of church and state: it’s supposed to let Johnson and people who share his worldview import their religion into government while protecting them from any government restriction.

Okay, that’s not how he puts it, but that is the gist. It’s Wilhoit’s Law again: government binds other faiths and doesn’t protect them; it protects conservative Christians but doesn’t bind them (much as he believes calling Republicans Nazis is bad but he’s fine when the shoe’s on the other foot). I’d quip that this proves Johnson’s the one who doesn’t understand but I suspect he’s more likely lying.

How does he put it? Quoting from the linked article: “To the contrary, the Founders wanted to protect the church and the religious practice of citizens from an encroaching state, not the other way around,” Johnson maintained, telling the audience that “our Founders understood that a free society and a healthy republic depend upon religious and moral virtue [to] help prevent the abuse of power [and] make it possible to preserve our essential freedom.”

I will state the obvious first: Johnson’s a devoted toady to the Toddler in Chief. Last week he gave the Toddler a made-up award for “solving all the domestic problems” (he hasn’t) and bringing on “the new golden era in America” (it isn’t). Ergo, Johnson doesn’t value moral virtue, nor does he object to the abuse of power.

Now, as to the main point of my post: yes, the Founders valued “religious and moral virtue” but those were the responsibility of churches — it wasn’t the government’s job to be the national chaplain. The government had no business enacting religious doctrine in law or laying down any sort of religious laws.

They’d also seen state churches in operation back in Europe and they saw where it led: violence, repression, revolution and civil war. They knew the only way to protect “the religious practice of citizens” was to keep government from aligning with any one faith or sect. As soon as the state does that, other faiths are in peril. As JFK put it when running for president in 1960: “I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish — where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source — where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials — and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.”

Republicans have made it clear it’s attacks on their religious liberty — which almost always means nothing more than their freedom to hurt the people they hate — that they care about. Rep. Andy Ogles declared recently religious pluralism is dead and we should deport all Muslims. Johnson sides with Ogles, declaring they have to prevent the threat of sharia law — which is not a threat in this country (and calling for mass deportation is about bigotry, not about sharia). And if pluralism is dead, it won’t stop with Muslims — it’ll be whichever sects Ogles or Johnson thinks do not qualify as Christian enough for a Christian state. Not to mention people like Christian theocrat William Wolfe, who thinks its Christian to keep America white and that it’s his right to impose his concept of Christian law on everyone else. Or the Christians who claim it’s godly to deny women the vote or that we shouldn’t tolerate non-believers in America. “White Christian nationalism doesn’t protect Christians. It decides which ones deserve protections and which ones can be discarded.”

Does anyone imagine Johnson or Ogles would meekly accept if some branch of the Christian faith that disagreed with them began imposing its policies on a God Says So basis? They’d scream with outrage that their religious freedom was violated. Any pretense this is a principle rather than Wilhoit’s Law is bullshit. Just look at the outraged reaction to liberal Christian James Talarico.

The defense the religious right sometimes makes is that sure, the Toddler may be a shitbag, but God can use shitty people to accomplish good things. This does not excuse them staying silent when he does evil things — because he’s still a shitbag. As witness Paul Campos’ discussion of the Toddler embodying all the deadly sins, followed by this quote from Virginia Heffernan:

“The president is not a moral figure in any idiom, any land, any culture, any subculture. I’m not talking about the liberal enlightenment that would make him want the country to take care of the poor and sick. I mean he has no Republican values either. He has no honor among thieves, no cosa nostra loyalty, no Southern code against cheating or lying, none of the openness of New York, rectitude of Boston, expressiveness and kindness of California, no evangelical family values, no Protestant work ethic. No Catholic moral seriousness, no sense of contrition or gratitude. No Jewish moral and intellectual precision, sense of history. He doesn’t care about the life of the mind OR the life of the senses. He is not mandarin, not committed to inquiry or justice, not hospitable. He is not proper. He is not a bon vivant who loves to eat, drink, laugh. There’s nothing he would die for — not American values, obviously, but not the land of Russia or his wife or young son. He has some hollow success creeds from Norman Vincent Peale, but Peale was obsessed with fair-dealing and a Presbyterian pastor; Trump has no fairness or piety. He’s not sentimental; no affection for dogs or babies. No love for mothers, “the common man,” veterans. He has no sense of military valor, and is openly a coward about war. He would have sorely lacked the pagan beauty and capacity to fight required in ancient Greece. He doesn’t care about his wife or wives; he is a philanderer but he’s not a romantic hero with great love for women and sex. He commands loyalty and labor from his children not because he loves them, even; he seems almost to hate them — and if one of them slipped it would be terrifying. He does no philanthropy. He doesn’t — in a more secular key — even seem to have a sense of his enlightened self-interest enough to shake Angela Merkel’s hand. Doesn’t even affect a love for the arts, like most rich New Yorkers. He doesn’t live and die by aesthetics and health practices like some fascists; he’s very ugly and barely mammalian.”

The title comes from a G. K. Chesterton quote: Christianity has not been tried and found wanting, it’s been found wanting and never tried.

It’s true in the sense that for most of Christianity’s history we’ve not even tried to live up to the standards set by our faith. However it also comes close to the “no true Scotsman” argument that the ugly behavior of so many Christians is not real Christianity.

I’ve become quite jaded about my faith over the past few years. Seeing the religious right are even more disgusting than I used to think. The long list of church officials engaged in sex crimes (and the churches that turned a blind eye). The conviction that contrary to Jesus if they gain the world but lose their soul, that’s a win. Their refusal to break with the Necrotic Toddler on any point —and then whining when they’re criticized over it. Even if they assume the Toddler is doing god’s work in some fashion (most obviously ending Roe) it doesn’t follow everything he does must be godly — King David was god’s anointed but the Uriah-Bathsheba business was not.

Their view of religious freedom is very much “freedom for us, not for others.” It’s perfectly fine for them to punish LGBTQ individuals based on their religious views but pro-immigrant Christians should remember we separated church from state — their views don’t count.

Then there’s Minneapolis, where the Toddler’s ICE storm troopers have imposed a state of siege. It’s bad, and people have suffered horribly, like a five-year-old ICE kidnapped from Minneapolis to Texas without telling his family And ICE claims that they are not bound by the Fourth Amendment. And now a second murder (more here) and Kristi “Nazi” Noem lying about it. I’d say more but I don’t think I have insights that haven’t already been said.

Despite which, Minnesotans are refusing to submit and give in, including a number of Christians. Here’s one example: “Ben, 17, and Sam, 16, donned warm hoodies, said goodbye to their parents and piled into a well-loved sedan. Cranking the engine, they skirted a wild turkey that stalks their yard and headed out to find U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.”

On the other side, a pastor prays God will smite Minneapolis for defying ICE.

One pastor at Cities Church (which seems to be creepy right-wing patriarchal) turns out to be an ICE official. It seems a numbe rof people are fine with a Christian leader being in charge of such non-Christian behavior but they’re horrified people disrupted church services to protest. As noted at the link, it’s unlikely any well-behaved protest would have done better. JD Vance, for instance, complains that people should confine themselves to writing letters to the editor or talking about things on social media — not anything that would stir things up.

Switching to another topic, a Catholic racist discusses online how he only takes communion from white people, then brags that he goes to confession about it, therefore his shitty sins are forgiven (that is not, from what I’ve read, how confession works). Fred Clark suggests what the dude wants is absolution without repentance — someone to assure him he’s not one of the bad racists, even as he continues being racist. Hindu extremists are trying to turn the case into a tool for competing nationalism.

Clark again: “White evangelicalism has been captured by the Republican Party and vice versa, but neither variant of the merged product encourages or permits what Dad once believed about what it means to “look American,” or about who is and is not “precious” in the sight of Jesus.”

To wrap up, here’s a story from last year about how New Orleans’ football team helped the local Catholic Church’s reputation management after the abuse scandal became public.

Years ago, evangelist Billy Graham established an Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability to oversee church finances and ensure everything was on the up and up. Now they’re adding a new standard, that boards are watching over church leaders’ integrity. Which seems like an excellent idea given church leaders perform plenty of sinning and boards often do nothing. And more sinning. And. And. Nevertheless, Billy Graham’s son Franklin has withdrawn the Graham ministry from the ECFA over the new rules. As Slacktivist says, “When somebody literally runs away from accountability, you’ve got to ask why.”

“To James, “the world” refers to the systems and structures and Powers That Be that deny the worth and humanity of those orphans and widows, the aliens and the poor. To be polluted by the world is to accept what “the world” tells us about them — that they don’t matter, that their distress is just how it is or, even worse, that their distress is what they deserve.”

“This is how we conquer the hatred and prejudice of the world: not with an eye for an eye, but with an inundation of love.“

Oklahoma state Senator Dusty Deevers, a self-righteous theocrat misogynist, who unsurprisingly thinks separating church and state violates his rights. I guarantee if a Christian America embraces some version of theocracy that doesn’t fit Deevers’ beliefs, he’ll be screaming about tyranny. The same for theocratic creep Joshua Haymes who claims “liberalism is a greater threat to the US than neo-Nazism, and that the Bible is “pro-Ice raids”. On X, he has also advocated for capital punishment for adultery and abortion, and appeared to call for the drowning of LGBTQ+ Pride marchers.” If your religion thinks liberals are worse than neo-Nazis …

Homophobic hatemonger Tony Perkins is optimistic the Necrotic Toddler he reveres will convince Americans dictatorship is good.

“Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) … Miller wrote on X that the man, Giani Surinder Singh, “should never have been allowed” to lead the prayer and called for Congress to uphold the “truth” that “America was founded as a Christian nation.” George Washington would like a word.

Is there a difference between Christian leaders and D&D dungeon masters?

“The Civil Rights Movement and the brief Second Reconstruction it produced were not about sex, drugs, and rock & roll.”

What Johnson, Deevers, Perkins and other believers in theocracy don’t admit or don’t grasp: “the establishment of one, official state religion might inhibit the freedom of those not belonging to the One True Official Sect, but they don’t perceive how such an establishment also fundamentally alters the relationship of members of that official sect to their own church — requiring lockstep assent to its official doctrines and practices as set forth thereafter by its official and legal enforcers.

The establishment of any sect casts suspicion on all members of that sect. Coerced belief is belief that cannot be trusted. Coerced belief, therefore, will never be trusted — it will be dis-trusted, inspected, codified, measured and forced to demonstrate its loyalty and legitimacy time and again.”