I don't get it.
Isn't Donald Trump the opposite -- flagrantly so -- of everything that Jesus preached?
I am not the one to write about what Christians are thinking. I am no longer a “person of faith.” I was brought up in a Protestant home and learned the standard version: the Jesus story, Christmas and Easter, original sin, the teachings ascribed to Jesus, and salvation through belief in Christ as God. Then, in college, I learned how Christianity was constructed by squabbling groups over its first few centuries, then refined and re-refined ever since. Oh. It’s all made up, I decided. It was made up at the start by opinionated, disputatious people we know very little about, and the documents are full of forgeries and later writings passed off as earlier ones, created as propaganda, not history.
I likened the creation of Christianity to a centuries-long argument built from the same mix of politics, group dynamics and ideology I saw in the squabbling anti-war groups of the late 1960s: SDS, Progressive Labor, the Eugene McCarthy liberals, the peace Republicans, and so on. It was just people arguing.
Christianity, I decided, is real the way the English language is real: a foundational cultural artifact. But it isn’t real the way rocks are real.
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I keep thinking of a scene from Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments, which I saw as a child. The Israelites, tired of waiting for Moses, have made a golden calf. The narrator intones: “They bore him upon their shoulders and rejoiced, saying ‘This be our god, oh Israel.’”
Have Republican Christians simply given themselves up to sin and the worship of a golden calf? Maybe that’s it, and they are on a binge they will later regret. But that is a harsh judgment, and I am an outsider.
I know there are people of faith among my readers. Maybe they can explain the Christian/Trump deal from the inside.
So I am asking for guest posts. Maybe I can hear from Trump-supporting Christians who can explain their thinking, and from Christians who don’t support Trump who can tell me what they think is going on.
Send your guest post to my email address: peter.w.sage@gmail.com
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