The big lie that led to the Big Lie

It’s no secret that supporters of now-former president Donald Trump are subscribing to the nonsensical notion that he lost the 2020 race for president on the grounds that the Democratic Party committed fraud. Given that no solid proof has ever been offered — his campaign filed some 60 lawsuits, all but one dismissed and that one here in Pennsylvania allowed to stand only on a technicality — it may seem like a mystery.

Well, it isn’t a mystery if you go back several decades. You see, this didn’t start with Trump.

It actually goes back to Newt Gingrich’s arrival in Washington in 1978. Gingrich, a congressman from suburban Atlanta, decided not only to promote his Republican Party as fundamentally good but also the Democratic Party as irredeemably evil. The nascent conservative movement that dominated the GOP followed, as did the “religious right” in its Machiavellianism. That means in practice that, no matter what we do, they’re inherently worse.

I suspect that’s the reason that the political right went after Bill Clinton so hard. After all, there was far less on Clinton than on now-Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who was credibly accused of sexual harassment during his hearings in 1990. (Clinton escaped his impeachment, of course, in part because much of the nation knew what was up.) It couldn’t ensnare Barack Obama in any kind of scandal, so beginning in 2011, hopefully in time for his reelection campaign, it decided to institute voter-ID laws to keep minority voters out of the voting booth and thus turn him out of office; fortunately, that failed.

And then you had Trump.

Basically, as I have mentioned earlier, you have an ideology where anything connected to “liberals” is inherently evil; by contrast, any opposition to them has to be inherently good. The trouble is that such a mentality cannot be justified using the Scripture — no, not even with abortion, which in fact is nowhere directly mentioned there. (My opposition to abortion has never had any connection to my faith.) Underhanded tactics simply have no place in the Christian toolbox regardless of the reason; remember that God sees all, including people’s hearts.

And that’s the real big lie that led to the other “big lie” about the election being stolen.

That’s why Christian support of Trump has led to a major braking of spiritual commitment, with younger evangelicals leaving churches in droves —  the trust of their elders always has been in the political process, not in an omnipotent, almighty God Who is willing to move mountains to prove His sovereignty.

We just saw hearings during which police officers endangered by Trump supporters on Jan. 6 offered testimony. What should be insulting, but for some reason isn’t, is that many of the rioters claimed Christ as Savior and LORD, that they were doing, shall we say, “His work.” Thing is, He would never authorize anything like that for any reason.

What we have here is people unfaithful to Jesus Christ, willing to sell Him out for the porridge of power and not looking to Him for spiritual sustenance. It is actually a practical form of atheism that focuses much more on receiving than giving His blessings — and thus making Him, as well as them, look bad.