By Robert Conner ~
Lately we are informed by some of America’s leading Evangelical High Muckety-Mucks that Donald John Trump is literally the fulfillment of Bible prophecy. Not, as you might logically expect, the Whore of Babylon or the Beast of Revelation bearing blasphemous names, but Cyrus the Great, the Persian monarch who established a policy of repatriation following his conquest of the Babylonians. Deutero-Isaiah calls Cyrus Yahweh’s anointed and the books of Ezra and 2 Chronicles claim the tribal god of Israel impelled Cyrus to release captive Jews, although an authentic reflection of ancient Persian belief, the Cyrus Cylinder, proclaims the god Marduk as the source of Cyrus’ inspiration.
Just as ancient Jewish scribes rewrote Persian history to suit their theopolitical ends, modern evangelicals, busy as ever putting the “mental” in fundamentalist, have predictably glommed onto Old Testament prophecy. Lance Wellnau, a prophet and “leadership coach” who hails from Dallas, Texas, led the charge. After a “revelation” that Cyrus is mentioned in Isaiah 45 and that Donald Trump is also the forty-fifth president, Doctor Wellnau, inspired by this piece of infantile numerology, proclaimed Trump to be the Latter-day Cyrus and the designation stuck. It is likely no coincidence that Wellnau has earned his Doctorate in Ministry from the prestigious Phoenix University of Theology, a Jesus-accredited school that appears to have no classrooms, no faculty, and no curriculum.
After spending nearly eight years earnestly praying for Barak Obama’s children to be left fatherless—"imprecatory psalms," if you must—the evangelical mob finally got its best ever president. No less than 80% of evangelicals voted for Trump, the pussy-grabbing, porn-star-paying, narcissistic reality show host. ReelWorks Studios, a religulous definitely-not-Hollywood outfit, teamed up with Liberty University’s propaganda arm, its School of Cinematic Arts, to produce The Trump Prophecy, an “incredible true story” about a firefighter with PTSD convinced God was speaking to him about an American election. The film contains interviews with the usual suspects from the Christian lunatic fringe such as former Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN), whose neighbors, I’m told, still gather in the evenings to watch the bats fly out of her head.
The Olympic contortions of evangelicals in defense of America’s Creepy Uncle, mall crawler and Alabama theocrat Roy Moore, pale in comparison to their anamorphic shape-shifting in defense of Donald Trump. No revelation about the Vulgarian-in-Chief is sufficient to shame his simpering evangelical disciples—the thrice-married confessed voyeur is their long-awaited revenge, the wrecking ball that will discredit the hated main stream media that dismisses them as kooks, the philandering misogynist who will appoint judges to enforce their authoritarian wet dream on women and LGBT’s.
When credible allegations surfaced that the Trump campaign had paid off an adult film personality, Tony Perkins, head honcho at the Family Research Council, a right wing lobby the Southern Poverty Law Center identified as a hate group, broke both ankles and a wrist rushing to Trump’s defense. Preacher Franklin Graham has claimed against all evidence that Trump is “a changed man.” Of course Graham was merely continuing his family’s venerable legacy of colluding with criminals—Franklin’s father, Billy Graham, prayed at Richard Nixon’s inaugural and infamously advised the president that bombing North Vietnam’s system of dikes, a measure that would have drowned hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese non-evangelical civilians, had the approval of American White Jesus.
Christians bring to Trump’s never ending reelection campaign talents honed by a century of apologetic fact-twisting, fear-mongering, and fantasy promotion—evangelical preachers slithering around the sawdust circuit had been playing the rubes for suckers for over a century before Trump came along. If the union of Trump and his fawning evangelical sycophants is a marriage made in Heaven, there’s a problem: Trump honors marriages no more than he respects any other contract.
Granted, evangelicals have much in common with Trump aside from bad taste: authoritarianism, bullying, lying, shady finances, dodgy associations, homophobia, hypocrisy, misogyny, and heartfelt devotion to money. But above all they share his transactional, winners-versus-suckers ethics and his reptilian lack of empathy. After the Senate unanimously passed the Justice For Victims of Lynching Act this past December, Liberty Counsel’s main thug, Mat Staver, threw a red-in-the-face enuretic hissy fit because the legislation included protection for the LGBT community. In short, maxi-Christian Staver’s precious family values are offended to think federal law might offer some protection against being murdered to queers and the transgendered.
As ex-wives, ex-attorneys, ex-White House spokespeople, ex-advisors, ex-cabinet members and federal workers without paychecks have discovered, Trump is an accomplished user. If Donald Trump is the new Cyrus the Great, it can only mean the suck-ups of the Christian Right, the “court evangelicals” as religion writer John Fea tagged them, are his entourage of disposable eunuchs.
Several books authored by Robert Conner are available on Amazon.Com: The evangelical nabobs currently sucking on Trump’s toes have a couple of other looming concerns as well: demographics and human consciousness. Let’s take the demographics first: by some counts 62% of White Evangelicals are over 50 years of age and only about 10% are under 30. The exact numbers, whatever they are, don’t much matter; it’s the trend that counts. Geriatric evangelicals are reliable voters, but there’s another activity at which oldsters traditionally excel: dying. To paraphrase Max Planck, progress is made a funeral at a time and as the graying evangelical core shuffles off its mortal coil, progress will continue to be made. Meanwhile, the evangelical movement smells increasingly like the inside of a hooker’s handbag.
Consciousness is harder to quantify, but it is perfectly clear that the collective consciousness, particularly among the young, has shifted on issues such as women in leadership roles, LGBT rights, and gun violence, areas in which the evangelical leadership has traditionally aligned itself with the most reactionary elements in American politics. At the moment, 46 years after the APA removed homosexuality from its list of psychiatric disorders, fourteen American states and numerous municipalities have finally declared “conversion” therapy for minors to be malpractice and have made it illegal despite the bleating and mewling of preachers and priests.
The discontinuity between Christian fable and facts on the ground is so stark, so jarring, that even some evangelicals have taken notice. “Exvangelical,” a term popularized by blogger Blake Chastain, describes a growing number of evangelicals disgusted with the knee-jerk authoritarianism, homophobia, nativism, and misogyny of their parent’s generation. The danger for conservative Christianity is that once the prejudices and hysterics of fundamentalism are cast aside, a considered examination of Christian theological claims might then begin—the evangelical power elite knows this process rarely ends well from a biblicist point of view as evidenced by the profusion of apologists and apologetics in evangelical pseudiversities and Bible colleges. In point of fact, every skeptic of my acquaintance who argues against the logical and moral insanity that follows from literalist belief began as a believer.
Evangelicalism’s meretricious attempts to insinuate itself into the halls of power, the Miss USA of evangelical camp followers, is likely to go the way of Trump’s casinos, Trump Shuttle, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Mortgage, Trump Magazine, and Trump University.
Lately we are informed by some of America’s leading Evangelical High Muckety-Mucks that Donald John Trump is literally the fulfillment of Bible prophecy. Not, as you might logically expect, the Whore of Babylon or the Beast of Revelation bearing blasphemous names, but Cyrus the Great, the Persian monarch who established a policy of repatriation following his conquest of the Babylonians. Deutero-Isaiah calls Cyrus Yahweh’s anointed and the books of Ezra and 2 Chronicles claim the tribal god of Israel impelled Cyrus to release captive Jews, although an authentic reflection of ancient Persian belief, the Cyrus Cylinder, proclaims the god Marduk as the source of Cyrus’ inspiration.
Just as ancient Jewish scribes rewrote Persian history to suit their theopolitical ends, modern evangelicals, busy as ever putting the “mental” in fundamentalist, have predictably glommed onto Old Testament prophecy. Lance Wellnau, a prophet and “leadership coach” who hails from Dallas, Texas, led the charge. After a “revelation” that Cyrus is mentioned in Isaiah 45 and that Donald Trump is also the forty-fifth president, Doctor Wellnau, inspired by this piece of infantile numerology, proclaimed Trump to be the Latter-day Cyrus and the designation stuck. It is likely no coincidence that Wellnau has earned his Doctorate in Ministry from the prestigious Phoenix University of Theology, a Jesus-accredited school that appears to have no classrooms, no faculty, and no curriculum.
After spending nearly eight years earnestly praying for Barak Obama’s children to be left fatherless—"imprecatory psalms," if you must—the evangelical mob finally got its best ever president. No less than 80% of evangelicals voted for Trump, the pussy-grabbing, porn-star-paying, narcissistic reality show host. ReelWorks Studios, a religulous definitely-not-Hollywood outfit, teamed up with Liberty University’s propaganda arm, its School of Cinematic Arts, to produce The Trump Prophecy, an “incredible true story” about a firefighter with PTSD convinced God was speaking to him about an American election. The film contains interviews with the usual suspects from the Christian lunatic fringe such as former Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN), whose neighbors, I’m told, still gather in the evenings to watch the bats fly out of her head.
The Olympic contortions of evangelicals in defense of America’s Creepy Uncle, mall crawler and Alabama theocrat Roy Moore, pale in comparison to their anamorphic shape-shifting in defense of Donald Trump. No revelation about the Vulgarian-in-Chief is sufficient to shame his simpering evangelical disciples—the thrice-married confessed voyeur is their long-awaited revenge, the wrecking ball that will discredit the hated main stream media that dismisses them as kooks, the philandering misogynist who will appoint judges to enforce their authoritarian wet dream on women and LGBT’s.
When credible allegations surfaced that the Trump campaign had paid off an adult film personality, Tony Perkins, head honcho at the Family Research Council, a right wing lobby the Southern Poverty Law Center identified as a hate group, broke both ankles and a wrist rushing to Trump’s defense. Preacher Franklin Graham has claimed against all evidence that Trump is “a changed man.” Of course Graham was merely continuing his family’s venerable legacy of colluding with criminals—Franklin’s father, Billy Graham, prayed at Richard Nixon’s inaugural and infamously advised the president that bombing North Vietnam’s system of dikes, a measure that would have drowned hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese non-evangelical civilians, had the approval of American White Jesus.
Christians bring to Trump’s never ending reelection campaign talents honed by a century of apologetic fact-twisting, fear-mongering, and fantasy promotion—evangelical preachers slithering around the sawdust circuit had been playing the rubes for suckers for over a century before Trump came along. If the union of Trump and his fawning evangelical sycophants is a marriage made in Heaven, there’s a problem: Trump honors marriages no more than he respects any other contract.
Granted, evangelicals have much in common with Trump aside from bad taste: authoritarianism, bullying, lying, shady finances, dodgy associations, homophobia, hypocrisy, misogyny, and heartfelt devotion to money. But above all they share his transactional, winners-versus-suckers ethics and his reptilian lack of empathy. After the Senate unanimously passed the Justice For Victims of Lynching Act this past December, Liberty Counsel’s main thug, Mat Staver, threw a red-in-the-face enuretic hissy fit because the legislation included protection for the LGBT community. In short, maxi-Christian Staver’s precious family values are offended to think federal law might offer some protection against being murdered to queers and the transgendered.
As ex-wives, ex-attorneys, ex-White House spokespeople, ex-advisors, ex-cabinet members and federal workers without paychecks have discovered, Trump is an accomplished user. If Donald Trump is the new Cyrus the Great, it can only mean the suck-ups of the Christian Right, the “court evangelicals” as religion writer John Fea tagged them, are his entourage of disposable eunuchs.
Several books authored by Robert Conner are available on Amazon.Com: The evangelical nabobs currently sucking on Trump’s toes have a couple of other looming concerns as well: demographics and human consciousness. Let’s take the demographics first: by some counts 62% of White Evangelicals are over 50 years of age and only about 10% are under 30. The exact numbers, whatever they are, don’t much matter; it’s the trend that counts. Geriatric evangelicals are reliable voters, but there’s another activity at which oldsters traditionally excel: dying. To paraphrase Max Planck, progress is made a funeral at a time and as the graying evangelical core shuffles off its mortal coil, progress will continue to be made. Meanwhile, the evangelical movement smells increasingly like the inside of a hooker’s handbag.
Consciousness is harder to quantify, but it is perfectly clear that the collective consciousness, particularly among the young, has shifted on issues such as women in leadership roles, LGBT rights, and gun violence, areas in which the evangelical leadership has traditionally aligned itself with the most reactionary elements in American politics. At the moment, 46 years after the APA removed homosexuality from its list of psychiatric disorders, fourteen American states and numerous municipalities have finally declared “conversion” therapy for minors to be malpractice and have made it illegal despite the bleating and mewling of preachers and priests.
The discontinuity between Christian fable and facts on the ground is so stark, so jarring, that even some evangelicals have taken notice. “Exvangelical,” a term popularized by blogger Blake Chastain, describes a growing number of evangelicals disgusted with the knee-jerk authoritarianism, homophobia, nativism, and misogyny of their parent’s generation. The danger for conservative Christianity is that once the prejudices and hysterics of fundamentalism are cast aside, a considered examination of Christian theological claims might then begin—the evangelical power elite knows this process rarely ends well from a biblicist point of view as evidenced by the profusion of apologists and apologetics in evangelical pseudiversities and Bible colleges. In point of fact, every skeptic of my acquaintance who argues against the logical and moral insanity that follows from literalist belief began as a believer.
Evangelicalism’s meretricious attempts to insinuate itself into the halls of power, the Miss USA of evangelical camp followers, is likely to go the way of Trump’s casinos, Trump Shuttle, Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Mortgage, Trump Magazine, and Trump University.
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