Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 06:44 pm
You can sit back and enjoy the Religious Right tearing itself apart over the 2016 Republican presidential nomination. The process is well under way and won’t be finished until the votes are in after Election Day.
There are Cruz evangelicals and Rubio evangelicals and even Trump evangelicals. This latter category stirs the most amazement in observers, not least among evangelical observers. They can’t seem to wrap their minds around why their fellow “believers” (like Jerry Falwell, Jr.) would prefer Trump to the self-appointed messiah, Ted Cruz, who is, after all, the Chosen One of many Religious Right leaders.
As has been pointed out here and elsewhere, the so-called Religious Right is not all that religious – they don’t practice what they preach, with their babies born out of wedlock, their high divorce rates, their addiction to porn, their worship of money, and their failure to read their own Bible.
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What they do do well is hate. In fact, what unifies them is hate, not Jesus, whose message of love they avoid like the plague. And Trump has effectively tapped into that hate by skipping over the middle man.
He has proven you don’t need a Bible you’ve never read in order to hate effectively.
Sure, in Iowa, Cruz managed to out-hate Trump and get a win, but that’s bucking the trend. Iowa talk radio host Steve Deace, who supports Cruz, talked to the American Family Radio’s Sandy Rios after the Iowa caucus and despite his hero’s win, he is really having a hard time with Trump’s appeal.
What is amazing is how much of his hatred of Trump is directed at Trump’s use of tried and true evangelical attacks on President Obama, but directed this time against Cruz: “It doesn’t make any sense,†he said.
“He [Trump] was essentially betraying us on every single issue,” complained Deace. And apparently only evangelicals can be intellectually dishonest, because Deace hates it when Trump goes there:
“I can’t even begin to tell you how intellectually dishonest Donald Trump was in Iowa the last couple of weeks of this campaign. He did everything but call Ted Cruz an illegal alien. I’ve never seen anything like it … There was nothing Donald Trump would not say, there was nothing Donald Trump would not do.â€
He’s never seen anything like it. Except when Deace himself did it to Obama.
Yes, Deace is a birther. The Iowa Independent reported how in 2009 he lent his show to the birther movement, interviewing Orly Taitz and others. He whined and whined to World Net Daily that he and his fellow birthers were “ridiculed and mocked.”
Now forced to address freaks like himself, but from the other side of the equation, Deace told Cruz during an interview that “It’s like there is no factual amount of evidence that can be presented to the contrary when people get this issue stuck in their craw.”
Got it in one. Now if we could just aim him at a mirror when he says it.
If that isn’t enough to make a liberal or progressive laugh, it is difficult to imagine what would. Especially since legally, Obama’s qualifications are far more certain than those of Ted Cruz.
Cruz’s prayer team was convinced that no less an enemy that Satan himself was opposing them in Iowa. After all, Cruz’s is a spiritual war to become not just president, but to save America.
It had to be Satan, of course, because we now know for sure that just as he has with Palin and Bachmann and Perry and Santorum and Huckabee before him, God told Cruz to run.
There is no word if Trump is Satan. At the very least, Satan must be stumping for Trump, and not with Hollywood suave.
Deace, who called Cruz’s enemies (including Santorum and Huckabee) in the days leading up to the caucuses “sell-outs” and “not real Christians†opined that something sinister was going on: “I don’t want to necessarily get metaphysical but there was real spiritual warfare happening.â€
This is difficult for leftists to understand, but evangelicals really believe this sort of thing is going on. Aware of it or not, this level of warfare is taking place all around us, even as we appeal to logic and reason – and facts.
Apparently self-reflection is not something practiced by evangelicals because Deace, member of a pretty powerful cult himself, really doesn’t like the whole cult-thing surrounding Trump, telling Rios:
“I have never seen a cult, and I’m including Obama, I have never seen a cult surrounding a candidate in my life like the one around Donald Trump. You engage his followers on social media and they don’t want to know any truth and they’re proudly, belligerently ignorant about it. And I want to just say this to our fellow believers on your program this morning: Be wary of nationalism. Nationalism is a pagan philosophy and when it co-opts the church it always leads to tyranny.â€
“I have never seen a cult.” Dude, you’re IN a cult.
Never mind the tyranny that results when the church co-opts nationalism, or worse, co-opts the government.
Yes, both the GOP and the Religious Right are a hot mess. Scary as the candidates are, horrible as the results if either of them wins, it’s wonderful and hilarious to watch them tear themselves apart.
Trump has shown you don’t need to use the trappings of religion to justify hate. He doesn’t appeal to the Old Testament (he says he likes the New just as much) and the closest he can get to theology is talk of “little wine” and “little crackers.” But the man can hate like no other. Trump has effectively tapped the KISS principal in politics: “Keep it simple, stupid.”
They spent all that time building up a religious movement, taking over the Republican Party, and Trump just proved it was all wasted effort. He has done what secular humanists will never do: he has made religion irrelevant.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
