Saturday, March 16, 2024

Hey, Evangelical "Leaders"! Are You on Board With Trump's "Bloodbath" Talk?

At this point, after the news of Trump's "bloodbath" remarks have had a chance to sink in, I can imagine evangelical church leaders who have sold out to him frantically searching their Old Testament for historical passages to twist into some kind of justification of what he has said.  That's been the pattern for his conservative Christian supporters ever since he sucked them in and took over their churches and denominations, replacing the Christian gospel with political rhetoric.  

As Trump sinks further into a miasma of mental decline and personal hysterics, and his remarks become more and more extreme, and he loses support by the day, the response of his far right Evangelical supporters is silence.  No comment.  Tacit justification and occasional prooftexting old historical accounts from Jewish history that bear no relevance at all on what the response should be from those who claim to believe in, and follow the Christian gospel.  

If they're with him, and many of them are, because they do not pay any heed at all to the principles of the Christian gospel, or to Christ's teaching, but they go back to a historical period of time, long before the Christian covenant was established by Jesus, and try to justify violence because it's "in the Bible."  Some of them know better.  Others, in their Biblical "literalism" and fundamentalism, take each section of the Bible literally without applying any historical context to it.  So they'll cite King David triumphing over the Philistines, or the thwarting of attacks by the Assyrians as justification for their desire to enforce their way of thinking on everyone else, violently if they think it is necessary.  

And while that is completely contradictory to anything Jesus said or taught, they get away with it because most of their followers are dependent on their leaders to interpret the Bible for them.  They're not interested, or committed, or care enough about it to do it on their own.  

Taking the Christian gospel seriously makes one a pacifist.  

Explaining it away, justifying it, saying it's all in God's plan that is predestined and preordained, all of the excuses will be made in order to avoid actually seeing this for what it is.  It is discrediting what little credibility American Evangelicals had left, if there still was any.  Their numbers are dwindling because of this, and there are leaders who have noticed.  The Christian gospel is no longer recognizeable among its conservative, Evangelical proponents in America.  It's been replaced by MAGA Trumpism.  And it will suffer the consequences of that choices.  


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