The defeat of an idol — and its ramifications

Many Christian supporters of now-former President Donald Trump were doing so because they believed that he was going to spark a religious revival. That was always false on its face because God doesn’t work the way they want, primarily by reestablishing laws, most notably restrictions on legal abortion.

What has surprised — and dismayed — me is the amount of bitterness many are spewing these days in the aftermath of the election, what with complaints about the election being “stolen,” even though it wasn’t; their willingness to insult political opponents such as Nancy Pelosi and Kamala Harris; and even their participation in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

And that says something pretty telling: Their faith was always in the political process, never truly in God. And that’s why they are in fact sabotaging the revival they say they want.

For “Christianity” has for many become little more than a set of political positions independent of following Jesus — imitating His character, rejecting worldly ways and seeking reconciliation. Nor is there any emphasis on cultivating the “fruit of the [Holy] Spirit,” mentioned in Galatians 5:22-23 — “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.”

As a result, following Ezekiel 36:20, “But when [Israelites] came to the nations, wherever they came, they profaned [My] holy name, in that people said of them, ‘These are the people of the LORD, and yet they had to go out of [His] land.’ ”

That is what Trump represented — profanation of God’s holy name. It would be one thing if they voted for him but held him accountable for his racism and divisiveness and threatened to withhold their votes if he didn’t shape up, but they didn’t.

In other words, Trump became an idol in his own right, and we know how God feels about idolatry. The fact that so many Christians are enraged with by his defeat shows that they haven’t gotten the message — and will suffer more defeats in the near future.

Why Christians shouldn’t celebrate Rush Limbaugh

Rush Limbaugh often joked that his talent was “on loan from God.” That’s about the only true thing, at least in a theological sense, that he ever said.

Today the longtime radio host passed away from lung cancer, and it’s not hard to see that he misused that talent, using distortions and ridicule from 1987 to last year to lampoon those of a more progressive ideological stripe and in the process causing a major divide in this country that exists to this day. I for one refused to listen to him because, according to Psalm 1:1, “Blessed is the one who does not walk in step with the wicked or stand in the way that sinners take or sit in the company of mockers” — and there’s no getting around the fact that Limbaugh, considered the voice of the “angry white male,” was a mocker.

And yet millions upon millions of Christians hung on his every word for the latest broadside against his targets, playing into their bitterness and resentment. Eventually other right-wing talkmeisters hit the airwaves, and to this day they’re still spouting their bile, most making a mint in the process. And we often wonder why much of the church is in such bad shape — three hours of spiritual poison poured daily into one’s brain doesn’t lend itself to meditating on the things of God.

I know what you might be saying: “Aren’t ‘liberals’ just as bad?” No, and that’s not even relevant. You don’t even consistently have left-wing talk-radio, for openers; most of the time such shows don’t last because they don’t get the ratings (you have some late-night TV hosts, but they don’t have the reach). Besides, people of religious faith don’t watch them anyway, which is the point.

Since Donald Trump was defeated in November and is no longer president, some have said that this nation needs to take “time to heal.” But part of the healing process involves identifying and excising lingering attitudes, and it’s clear that Limbaugh fostered those — that is to say, they came from somewhere and didn’t just start in 2016.

The end of a political career

The current impeachment trial of now-former President Donald J. Trump, based on his alleged incitement of the rioters that took place on Jan. 6, is intended by Democrats as the end of Trump’s political career. The intent, of course, is to keep him from seeking federal office ever again.

Whether that happens or not and if he’s acquitted of that charge, which at this point appears likely, his political career is over anyway. Because — make no mistake about this — God Himself took him down. And that happened not because of the Capitol riot that his supporters took part in.

What really doomed Trump was that stunt during which he held up that Bible in front of an Episcopal church, which took place June 1 of last year. God ran out of patience with him because, like a lot of the so-called religious right, he intended to use it to promote his own authority rather than submit himself to the only real Authority that mattered.

And the dominoes began falling as a result.

While forces on the political left, including but not limited to voter-registration drives, were already marshaled against the Trump campaign, it turned out that the business community was growing tired of the political instability that he had always fostered, even though it agreed with most of his actual policies. After Jan. 6 its lobbying groups announced that it would no longer donate to Republican candidates that supported the insurrection.

But before that, some evangelical groups and individuals decided to throw their support behind then-candidate Joe Biden, bucking the trend of Trump-supporting Christians. Then you have his failure to lead on COVID-19, costing hundreds of thousands of lives. And did you notice at the Republican National Convention just how few Republicans were willing to put in a good word for him, a requirement to speak?

The result was the kind of broad-based organizing coalition that would have been required to beat Trump at the ballot box — and, of course, did.

By the time he tried to strongarm GOP-dominated legislatures and secretaries of states in swing states into changing election results amid baseless accusations of voter fraud, it was clear that he was finished.

It wasn’t simply the voters who had spoken at that point, you see. Ultimately, God had as well, in the process putting to shame those so-called prophets who tried to convince people that Trump was a shoo-in and then doubled down after Nov. 7. The riot failed to change the result because, really, Trump and his supporters were fighting against God, Who refuses to be mocked.

And while Trump still has his base, which is as strong as ever, he’s already finished as an electoral force because he’s alienated virtually everyone else — including the people at the hands of the mechanisms required to get people elected in the first place. And let’s not forget his other legal issues — charges of financial fraud in New York state and election tampering in Georgia, either of which could put him away for a while.

In that context, the impeachment might prove anticlimactic because even if Trump gets off he may end up going from the proverbial frying pan into the fire. He tried, and was still trying, to play God, and the True and Living God doesn’t appreciate anyone trying to knock Him off His rightful throne.

Finally being ‘owned’

Over the past four years the modern “conservative” movement has fallen to new depths as for what it really stands for. Or perhaps more accurately, what it stands against.

Because, as much as it tried to put a positive spin on what it believed, such as “less government,” it really wasn’t at all descriptive of not just its agenda but also its intent — which, as things turned out, is capsulized in just one phrase that became popular since Donald Trump’s election as president in 2016.

That phrase?  “Owning the libs.” That sounds like an effective rallying cry, and it has been over the years, but it also epitomizes what its focus has always been.

Modern conservatism has always been at bottom a reactionary movement, enviously pushing back against the progressivism that first reared its head in the 1960s. In other words, it’s based almost exclusively on bitterness and resentment toward what it sees as the “left,” though that side of the political fence is far more diverse that it believes (e.g., “liberals,” the hard left and the powers that be in the Democratic Party are not the same people) and tends to equate anyone not on its team as an existential threat. Not for nothing does it target those agitating for social change — it takes personally any challenge to its own desire for power and refuses to listen to anyone else. This is why, for example, it tried to besmirch the Black Lives Matter movement that dominated many news cycles over the summer, saying falsely that it was inherently violent and fostering riots.

And then we see government in general and the “deep state” — that is, bureaucrats who actually run things professionally — in particular and the mainstream media as two more groups that in such a mindset need to be denigrated. (The reality, however, is that you simply can’t run a functional society without those two institutions.)

Conservatism is especially poisonous when combined with religion, the dominant faith in the United States being Christianity. That’s because the heart of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, which is reconciliation through Him, is necessarily excised for the sake of dominating others — in other words, the faith itself becomes liberal.

Yes, liberal, in that certain “liberties” are taken with the Word of God and reinterpreted to mean things that He never said or authorized.

Such as the riot that took place at the U.S. Capitol Building on Jan. 6, as electoral votes were about to be counted that would confirm Joe Biden’s legitimate election as president. It broke my heart to learn that Christians were not only involved in it but even trying to justify it, with the singing of Christian songs and the offering of prayers that the vote would be stopped to allow now-former-President Donald Trump another term in office. And make no mistake — that attitude is how he got to be president in the first place.

It’s also why he lost last year, however, as when you focus on power for its own sake you lose the reason why you seek office in the first place — to serve, not to dominate, everyone else. We saw that with COVID-19, which Trump tried to ignore because the idea of responsibility was always foreign to him. (This is a place where the Bible’s commands were in fact tossed out.) Basically, he wanted to rule, not govern, which is why he ended up being “owned” by those same “liberals” that he denounced.

Oh, sure, you did have a school of intellectualism in conservatism, which I did respect despite my disagreements with it, in such publications as National Review and the late Weekly Standard, the latter of which went under because of its opposition to Trump. But as Pat Buchanan said in 2008 in The New Yorker, “You can write columns and all that, but they don’t engage the heart.”

And in this case, the “heart” represents denying others the same status as what folks want for themselves. In essence, the conservative movement in practice wanted to turn those that didn’t agree with it into second- or third-class citizens not even worthy of an ear. As such, I can’t see why we can have any sense of unity and reconciliation in a post-Trump country — when the opposition is labeled as “socialist,” as it has been, there’s nothing more to say.

To wit, “owning the libs” has been a good rallying slogan but one that actually helped to make this country virtually ungovernable. To our eternal shame.