Christians Supporting Trump Aren't Christians
From John Pavlovitz:
"You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means." — Inigo Montoya, The Princess Bride,
The first Christians didn't call themselves Christians.
It wasn't some congratulatory self-identifier as it is today; a way of loudly trumpeting one's own supposed goodness, quickly slapped on Twitter bios and bumper stickers and t-shirts without forethought or personal cost or empirical evidence. It wasn't about a place you visited for an hour on Sunday before Cracker Barrel, either.
The term Christian was originally a designation of the community of people following Jesus, by those outside of it after his death—and it was quite likely a slur; a scarlet letter attached to a marginalized group who'd traded comfy allegiance with Caesar for dangerous devotion to an itinerant Hebrew street preacher from Nazareth.
In the Roman Empire in which it was born, Jesus' movement was fully countercultural; shunning its power and material wealth, breaking its barriers between the important and the inconsequential, fighting the stereotypes of the in and the out. It was a table builder and a wall breaker.
These "little Christs" as they were called, were derided by outsiders because the expansive, diverse, interdependent community they were creating stood in such opposition to Rome's singular trickle down might—and their presence created turbulence there.
Being called a Christian then, meant ridicule and threat and oppression from the Government and the religious leaders. It wasn't a cheap decal one adorned themselves with to declare their own righteousness; it was applied to them by powerful people who despised them.
Trump Christians wouldn't be called Christians by these people, they would be called Romans—and those following Jesus then, wouldn't recognize people supporting this President now, as their spiritual descendants.
There would be no bloodline to trace, no affinities to note, no visible family resemblance.
Christians then, destroyed social barriers between people—they didn't fortify them.
Christians then, welcomed the marginalized and vulnerable—they didn't harass them at school or in hospital rooms or on street corners.
Christians then, healed the sick and fed the hungry and clothed the naked—they didn't resent them for being lazy or making bad choices.
Christians then, pushed back against the corrupt power hoarding wealth—they didn't partner with it.
Christians then, loved their disparate neighbors as themselves—they didn't wall them off and send them away and lock them in cages.
People aligned with a Jesus who said "Let the children come to me and do not hinder them"—would have been fully sickened by families separated at borders.
People connected to a Jesus who said, "You cannot serve both God and money"—wouldn't be overlooking adultery, corruption, and bigotry just to pad their nest eggs.
People synonymous with a Jesus who fed a hillside multitude, not because they were right or saved or moral, but because they were hungry—wouldn't recognize a "pull yourself by your own bootstraps" callousness toward those in need.
People associated with a Jesus who touched lepers and healed the blind and bleeding—wouldn't be able to comprehend believers who penalized people for preexisting conditions or made staying alive a financial death sentence.
Most of all, people connected to Jesus they weren't tripping over themselves to publicly claim their Christlikeness. Other people decided that.
People currently supporting this President can label themselves any way they want.
They can imagine themselves sanctified while perpetuating something that far more resembles Caesar of Rome than Jesus of Nazareth.
They can try and retrofit Jesus' Christianity to the bloated, self-aggrandizing, malevolent Empire they're currently wallowing in.
They can try and bastardize Jesus expansive' "For God so loved the world" purpose statement, into a walled-off, gated community "America First" rally slogan.
They can even preach the angry gospel of white nationalism and contempt for outsiders—and call themselves Christian while doing so.
But no one in the time of Jesus would be calling them Christian.
Not the Romans.
Not the Christ followers.
Most of all, Jesus.
The first Christians were labeled Christians, because they emulated Christ—in all his compassionate, kind, loving, healing, welcoming, border-breaching, barrier-busting goodness.
These folks emulate someone antithetical to all of it.
Technically speaking of course, given the origins of the word, none of us should claim to be Christian—but if we're going to, we should at least seek some spiritual synergy.
They may be self-identified Christians, but from the outside the title is suspect.
They aren't "Little Christs"
They aren't "followers of the Way."
They aren't even Evangelicals.
They are "Little Trumps."
In that God of arrogance and greed and enmity, they truly trust.
Just Vomiting It All Up
Tweet of the Day
That's Granting Him WAY Too Much Power
Hope
Before You Ask…
Just Sayin'
Oh, We Understand Them Just Fine
From John Pavlovitz:
I think it's time to stop saying that we need to understand these people. I think we do understand them:
We understand that they have dug in their heels so deeply, they will not be moved by anything. We understand that there is no political scandal massive enough, no President's Tweet reckless enough, no legislation predatory enough to alter their allegiance. We understand that the past two years of viciousness and ineptitude haven't tempered their passions but inflamed them. We understand that the image of an angry white, American male God is so burned into their brains, that they see no conflict with a religion devoid of love or a world absent diversity or a theology made of malice.
We understand that infidelity, dishonesty, obscenity, and cruelty are no longer liabilities to those they would have lead them. We understand that the FoxNews poison has so fully circulated through their systems that truth is no longer necessary. We understand that [to them] white supremacists in the Cabinet and Russian infiltration in our elections and children separated from their parents are acceptable collateral damage to winning. We understand that their capacity to rationalize away human rights atrocities now borders on complete delusion.
The Miserable People
From John Pavlovitz:
Miserable.
Every time I see them, this is the word that prevails.
Whenever I encounter a supporter of this President on social media now, or scan the crowds at his propaganda rallies, or see his surrogates bloviating on talk shows or pounding upon pulpits, I am left with the same conclusion: they are a people bereft of joy.
There is no happiness, no benevolence, nothing life-giving left there.
The emotional deficit is continually on display:
In their contorted, sneering countenance; in their so readily brandished middle finger; in their steady spit shower of verbal filth. With each angry gesture and with every slandering epithet, they reveal in high-definition detail what it looks like when someone loses the light inside them.
War does this to the human heart. These people are at war with the world.
They're against gays.
They're against immigrants.
They're against Muslims.
They're against foreigners.
They're against scientists.
They're against atheists.
They're against Liberals.
They're against the Democrats.
They're against the Media.
They're against teenage shooting survivors.
They're against athletes and entertainers.
The world in their heads is composed almost entirely of enemies and adversaries—and as a result they are perpetually disgusted. If I had that many enemies to fight, I'd be unendingly pissed off too. I'd probably pity them a lot more if I didn't have to endure them.
These are the wildest of ironies: Their President is in the White House, their politicians commandeer the House and Senate, the Supreme Court is tilted In their favor—and yet they still manage to feel themselves oppressed, still picture the world unfair, still rage against a machine they've made and are part of. So many of them claim faith in Jesus, and yet live in almost polar opposition to his example.
The only time they do smile, is to reflect the arrogant, self-satisfied sneer of their leader; almost always in the face of someone else's heartache or misfortune, almost always when someone else loses something. They only joy they seem capable of manufacturing, is in response to pain.
I try to imagine what it feels like to be so afflicted with contempt for the planet: to be forever scowling, to be so viscerally sickened by the breadth of diversity around me, to be relentlessly in a fear-birthed battle posture—but I can't.
Thank God, I can't. If you can't imagine it either, consider yourself fortunate.
I realize that this has become the difference now; the dividing line in this version of America. It is between joyful people and miserable people.
There are those who live open-handed toward the world, and those whose fists are balled tightly; those who are driven by compassion, and those fueled by anger; those who want a bigger table, and those feel the table is exclusively theirs.
As disheartening as it is to witness people this internally toxic, it's a cautionary reminder of who we do not want to become, of what we can't let the fight do to us.
We have to fight to keep goodness inside us, despite the outside badness; to never be defined by how many things we hate.
I want my default response to this life to always be hope and not derision.
May we who oppose this national malignancy, never become so devoid of lightness that we resemble those who celebrate it.
May we never applaud someone's suffering, never weaponize our religion to do harm, never grow comfortable with hearts that are only capable of anger.
May we never lose our laughter, our softness, our lightness in this life, and let a smile come easily to us.
May we never become as miserable as those who support this President.
That is when we know we've really lost.
You Can't Reason With His Base
"Let's not be surprised when 35 percent or so of voters consistently tell pollsters that the president is the victim of a witch hunt or that they agree with every policy position and action he takes. Trump fans' politics is not the politics of rationality, considered judgment or empirical observation. Blind hatred and unthinking boorishness are not moderated by new facts or observable phenomena. We should stop marveling as his "success" in holding his base as if this were a reflection of his political skill, let alone the efficacy of his policies. Rather, the unbreakable and unblinking devotion of his unhinged base is confirmation that he now must rely on support from people oblivious to reality."
– Trump's Tampa circus proves you can't reason with his base
True Dat
You Know How to Beat Trump and the Republican Co-conspirators Who Enable Him?
From Politicalprof:
Lots and lots and lots more people who oppose Trump and his enablers need to show up and vote in November. And guess what? If enough show up, then all the gerrymandering and vote suppression and Citizens United shenanigans in the world won't be enough to stop the blue wave.
To paraphrase General Ulysses Grant when troops under his command first met troops under Robert E. Lee's command in the US Civil War, "You need to stop worrying about what Lee is going to do to us, and start thinking about what we are going to do to him."
Power isn't given. It's taken. Trump and his conspirators and apologists aren't going to be embarrassed into quitting. They're not going to skulk away when their obvious hypocrisy is exposed. They're not going to change their minds when they see a funny meme mocking Trump and his Trumpettes.
They have to be beaten. And we have to beat them. That's the way it works.
Trump and his minions know this is coming. That's why The Orange Shit Stain is already floating the false narrative that Russia is going to interfere in November…for the Democrats!
The Ultimate Colorado Insult
Don't Be Like Donald
Submitted Without Comment
Once Again…
…Trae perfectly sums up what's going on in my own head and expresses it much better than I ever could.
Rachel: Worst Case Scenario
Rachel lays it all out for us. If you haven't yet seen it, this is definitely worth 30 minutes of your time.
In Light of Last Week's Indictments…
We Can Hope
Well Duh!
It Turns Out They're Garbage Human Beings
From Daily Kos:
In the New York Times' quest to get to the bottom of what makes every last Trump supporter in America tick, we have been treated to endless interviews, loving tributes to downtrodden towns in which nary a non-white person is ever seen, and one particular day when the op-ed pages were turned over to Trump supporters to argue for Trump's genius directly. But this is still not enough, and so Sunday's paper included a zoological analysis from a journalist who grew up among them.
It is meant to be flattering, or at least neutral, but the short version is that the people who have been bleating about "family values" for the last half-century do not actually give a flying damn about family values and never did. It was all garbage from the get-go. While people from "college" or "in New York" or "religiously conservative" or "liberal" or take-your pick all had harsh words for the crooked, lying, adulterous, misogynist trash-heap of a human being, the salt-of-the-earth Trump supporters back in Nebraska could not possibly care less about the bullshit-laden values attributed to them in fawning tributes to the heartland's common clay.
To hell with it all: Go team adulter-crook!
In contrast, almost all of the people I know in my hometown in Nebraska proudly supported him. They glossed over his infidelities and stressed that he seemed to be a good father. They were impressed by his "respectful" sons and admired the success of his daughters.
"Glossed over" is a fine phrase. "Good father" is quite the phrase itself. And this new notion of "respectful," which apparently consists of "glossing over" his sons' histories of charity fraud, public attacks on black politicians, and that whole 'met Russian agents in Trump Tower' thing, is doing quite the heavy lift.
Reading between the lines, what we have here is a group of people who practice what is known in the rest of the world as aggressive ignorance. You can't say that Trump's behavior bothers you if you drive wooden stakes into both ears and swear you didn't hear about any of it.
Read the rest here.
Legal vs. Illegal
Burn!
Good Boy!
Punch a Nazi
On This July 4th…
Posted by my friend Michael:
"Sweet America, I am not unpatriotic, I am an American. I was born in this county and I grew up in this county, I feel privileged to do so. I have never lived in any other county. I love the fact that I live in diversity in a County of immigrants, though I do deeply weep for the fate of our beautiful Native Americans. I wish history could be re-written. So, why the flag in distress? Because I grieve each day for the current condition of our sweet home. I have no respect for our leader or his pack of lying hate-mongers. I hang my head in shame for what our face in the world has become. I cry for the families destroyed, lives senselessly ended and people of color and diversity miserably repressed by an old worn-out "White is Might" pack of fools with nothing but hate in their hearts. I pray that this regime of madness is short and that the damage caused heals quickly. I am not unpatriotic, I am an American." ~ @monster.poodle on Instagram
Punch a Nazi
You May Have Noticed
…that I haven't written much about the tragedy occurring along the Texas border. It's not because I don't want to. It's because I can't. Since news started breaking of the orange shitgibbon's tent cities/concentration camps, there has been a knot in my stomach that will not go away. With each passing day's news of some further atrocity, I am becoming fully convinced that demons are real and they walk among us, circling the dotard like moths to a flame.
People ask how Hitler was allowed to rise to power in Germany. This is how. We are witnessing history repeat itself. It's not like we weren't warned. The tiny glimmer of hope is that we do have history to look back on (unlike the Germans), and that this horrific treatment of children is causing a lot of people to wake up and say, "Not only no, but HELL no!"
Cheetolini may—may—have finally overstepped to such a degree that this will be his undoing, and will hopefully bring down the entire Republican party with him.
It can't happen soon enough.
If the GOP can't be bothered to care about children being shot dead in school, they certainly aren't going to worry about a few thousand brown babies being separated from their parents. In fact, they seem to be reveling in it.
I want to go Nuremberg on their asses. I want to see them all swinging from ropes.