My prophecy about Donald Trump is simple. By the time the election rolls around in 2024, he will be serving time in prison for the first of several convictions resulting from indictments stemming from both the January 6th Trump Insurrection and the scandal surrounding his deliberate attempt to take classified documents from the White House, his refusal to return them, his lies to the FBI and whatever circumstances have occurred as a result of that.
Perhaps the state of Georgia will also indict and convict him for attempting to subvert their election process, though I have more doubts about that coming to pass. And of course, this is my profound hope and it is possible I will be disappointed because, after all, there are two Americas, and law and order and justice are elusive in the other one. Also, I do not claim that this comes from some divine revelation. It comes from looking at what's happening as the media coverage of his crimes appears to be intensifying in recent days. God isn't telling me this, and my best bet is that he isn't telling anyone else anything, either, including the array of false prophets among the Charismatic and Evangelical branches of the Christian faith who keep spouting predictions that are wrong.
Take Pat Robertson for example. Robertson claimed that God told him Trump would win in 2020, without a doubt. He explained his error away by following the "election was stolen" line, saying that Trump really did win but Satan got in there and messed it up. That's a great way to avoid accountability, since Deuteronomy 18:22 says, "If a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, but the thing does not take place or prove true, it is a word that the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuosly; do not be frightened by it." [NRSV]
Christians who claim to take the Bible seriously, and who claim that it is inerrant and infallible, which would include most of the Evangelical and Pentecostal/Charismatic branches of Protestantism, don't really take this Old Testament verse seriously. If they did, the assortment of evangelists and televangelists that have attempted to use their position and power within the church to bring assurances that God is on Trump's side, holding his coat-tails and cheering him on, who made predictions about his re-election would have lost all credibility and would be ignored. But of course, in the tight little fantasyworld in which they and their followers live, even an all-powerful God can be thwarted by a stolen election. Or so they claim. The predictions were not wrong, according to them, but somehow God was unable to forsee this, and didn't have foreknowledge of this "trick". And that means the false, phony prophets have some convoluted, inexplicable means of getting out of accountability to the Bible.
This isn't the first time Robertson has made calculated errors in what he claims are divine revelations. Even when his so-called prophecies are made with the most predictable information available, his prophetic utterances are not exact, and more often than not, they are just flat wrong. The only thing that keeps him in business is the ignorance of his 700 Club audience. A piece in Christianity Today, Failed Trump Policies Offer a Lesson in Humility written by Craig Keener shortly after the January 6th Trump Insurrection, claims that even a majority of Charismatic and Pentecostal Christians do not accept these outlandish prophecies. OK, if that's the case, then why are these people still collecting cash from their constituents to keep peddling lies in the name of Jesus?
An Embarassment Which Completely Undermines Credibility
The patchwork of various denominations, fellowships, organizations, conventions, or whatever other label is applied to the fragmented, fractured entities that claim to be the true church of Christ, are engaged in a commercial competition with each other which is worse than some of the more cut-throat competitions for sales reveue between entities of corporate America. They devote resources from offering plate collections to efforts that they label "evangelistic outreach" and "missions" or "ministry" which are really nothing more than ways to proselytize the members of other churches, claiming "they are wrong and we are right" and coming up with ways to convince people to join their bandwagon and then put dollars in their own offering plates.
Among most Evangelicals, this takes the form of "theological purity," which is the claim that their particular group or denomination has hit on some interpretation of the Bible that is "distinctive" to their brand. Growing up Southern Baptist, I heard this all the time, that this denomination, which came into existence in 1845 in Augusta, Georgia because the Triennial Baptist Convention of Philadelphia, representing most American Baptist churches, wouldn't appoint slave owners as missionaries, had somehow come up with a truer, purer, more accurate, "closer to God," approach to interpreting the Bible than any other group in the 2000 year history of the Christian church.
And while they are willing to develop a system of convoluted hermeneutics to support their claim to immaculate perception, most Baptists frown on modern predictions of the future that are unsupported by the written text of the 66 books they claim make up "The Scriptures." Pentecostals and Charismatics, who work themselves up into an emotional frenzy in their church services, are quite willing to claim they've been given a "word from the Lord," about some future event or international trend or impending disaster about to occur, without considering the failure of the same "prophet" to accurately predict anything, and regardless of its total inconsistency with "the scriptures."
Raping the Minds of Millions of People
Oral Roberts, the Tulsa-based evangelist after whom the university he founded is named, probably holds the record for the single most ridiculous prophetic utterance ever made by an American pseudo-Christian evangelist. Back in the 1980's facing a mountain of debt because of the unwise decision to build a hospital in a city that wasn't filling up its existing hospital beds, Roberts told his followers that God had told him if they didn't send him $242 each to finish the hospital, God would take his life.
This was followed by another threat, this time over raising $4 million for his medical students, and if he didn't receive that amount by a March deadline, God would kill him.
What is really frightening about that is that people sent him money!
This letter writer to the Los Angeles Times in 1987 is pretty descriptive.
"For more than a century now, these fundamentalist evangelists have raped the minds of millions of people with their fear and guilt-producing authoritarian mind set," said Ron Nelson, of Culver City, California. What an apt description of what is still going on. And how appropriate, that Trump is now the subject of their false prophetic utterances.
The Odds Make for Good Guessing, but not Accurate Prophecy
Even a broken clock is right twice a day.
There is no example anywhere in Judaeo-Christian tradition of God using an evil, unbelieving, worldly person to accomplish his will. There are instances in Jewish history, from the Old Testament, where the failure of the spiritual leadership of the Jewish people led their nation into disaster at the hands of the enemies that surrounded them, but there is no instance where God took an evil pagan ruler, and made that person the spiritual and political leader of his people. He didn't do it under the old covenant with Israel, and he would not do it with the Christian church.
What is actually happening here is that these Charismatic, Pentecostal and Evangelical "pseudo-prophets" know they are phonies and frauds, and this is about money. They don't believe in the power of God to do anything they claim, they always depend on the money they rake in to give them the appearance of power and of God's blessing on them, and they see supporting Trump as a way to buy into the power of politics to do what they claim God wants to do. I doubt that any of these people believe in God. Political power is a sure thing, once in their hands, a means by which to keep the dollars flowing in and to protect them from any real accountability. And like Trump, their organizations are a miasma of immorality and corruption.
Yeah, and They Have Religious Liberty
Well, after all, this is America. And this is one of those intersections in our culture, where faith meets free enterprise. It's not a new thing. The Protestant Reformation flamed up over the sale of indulgences by the Pope to raise money for the church. Creating a market for the excess good works of the saints, so that people could buy their spot in heaven, was a great marketing ploy, and a demonstration of the utter contempt the Pope had for his own church membership.
Just keep in mind, the prophets who claimed Trump would be re-elected, and those who went even further to claim that this would be the beginning of some kind of Christian nationalist vision, were wrong. And that, according to the Bible they claim is inerrant and infallible, means that they are false prophets, they have spoken presumptuously, and are not to be feared.
If There is Justice in America...
...then this charade of a presidential campaign being run by Trump must come to an abrupt end in a federal courtroom, where he is under indictment for the crimes he committed. If we are a nation of laws, and a nation of people of integrity, then we, the people, must make our voices heard, and our will known. Long before any party has a nominating convention, Trump must be facing indictment and trial and not only be rendered ineligible to run for public office, but must serve time as a consequence for his crimes against the nation.
It doesn't take prophetic insight to know that this is what should happen. I wish I could be certain that it is what will happen.
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