Salon: Trump Bibles Make a Mockery of Christianity
As the news about the "Trump Bible" spreads, someone posted on social media that there's some real irony in Trump selling Bibles containing American foundational documents that he completely ignored while planning and conducting an insurrection against the United States, in order to deny the peaceful transfer of power, provided for in one of those documents. He's put everything he ignores into one volume.
Well, I thought that was funny.
Then there's the thought that Christians raise millions of dollars every year to have Bibles printed in order to distribute them as widely as possible, translated into as many languages as possible, and that any genuinely Christian billionaire would be giving Bibles away, not selling them. But here we have Trump, who is a make-a-buck opportunist when it comes to selling just about anything, profiting off the King James translation, because it is copyright free, and using the proceeds to pay legal expenses, including for defending him against rape, insurrection, stealing classified documents, intimidating election workers and trying to steal a presidential election. I'm pretty sure there are plenty of authoritative words in that Bible against everything he is using it to try to defend.
If you need a Bible, you can get a nice one for free, from just about any church in America. If you buy this one, you're helping make a mockery out of the faith you claim to believe in. Frankly, this borders on blasphemy. It is, at the very least, peddling the gospel for profit, something Jesus condemned, in his words which are recorded in that very Bible.
It's pretty clear that Trump doesn't believe anything in either the Bible, or America's founding documents. In spite of the conservative Christian sycophants he has attracted, he has yet to provide any confession of Christianity that fits the conservative doctrinal narrative when it comes to a Christian conversion experience. All his Christian sycophants want you to believe he has had a conversion experience. But he can't get past the first point, which is experiencing conviction of his sinful nature, and repenting, or turning away from it. In multiple interviews with far-right religious media persons, including his own "spiritual advisor," Paula White, his response to the question about his conversion is to claim he has his own religion and his own belief about God, and then, to declare that he has not done anything in his life that requires asking God for forgiveness.
That's a flat out denial of Christian conversion, according to the conservative, Evangelical doctrine of salvation by grace through faith. It's impossible, in their interpretation of the conversion experience, to be "converted" without first experiencing spiritual conviction of sin. Clearly, by word and by deed, Trump has not had that experience. And that makes his right wing, conservative Evangelical sycophants liars and hypocrites.
Hypocrisy That Knows No Bounds
The Baptist Review: Five Principles for Pastors in an Election Year
I've linked this article from the Baptist Review to illustrate just how hypocritical the Christian political right has become over the course of their involvement in politics. This particular author, Nathan Finn, is a Southern Baptist, a professor of "Faith and Culture" at North Greenville University, the Southern Baptist answer to Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, and also is teaching pastor at a megachurch nearby, First Baptist Church of Taylors, South Carolina. He is also a "Senior Fellow" for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the SBC [ERLC] and for the Land Center for Cultural Engagement, all of which identify him as a far right winger in terms of both doctrine and politics. Among Southern Baptists, he's one of those denominational "leaders" who manages to exercise influence on several levels, a "finger in every pie kind of guy," I like to call them. In the provincial, backward manner in which Southern Baptists operate, there are quite a few of these "influence peddlers."
If you link The Baptist Review, here's a word of caution. The content of other articles is all drawn from the same ideological and religious perspective, and there are few citations of evidence to support most contentions. There's also an inherent assumption that the reader is already familiar with all of the cultural innuendo and references to a Baptist world that bears little resemblance to the real world, even in terms of how that is engaged.
Predictably, if you look at points 3 and 4 in his article advising pastors on how to handle an election year, he ignores the character of candidates, and emphasizes the issues. In other words, we are getting the standard, hypocritical party line of the far right, because they are running a number of candidates, the one at the top of the ticket in particular, who have no character to speak of.
"Your preferred candidate may let you down by breaking promises, changing his mind, making unethical decisions on other matters or otherwise demonstrating a lack of character," he says, in a very general, nebulous manner, "But the issues themselves will still matter." And basically, that means there is just one issue that matters, against their lack of value for any other. In that interpretation, lying, adultery, rape, white supremacy, fraud, and the blasphemous denial of the Holy Spirit's conviction are all side issues compared to the one, of which they have no realistic understanding.
He left out the fact that "your preferred candidate" may try to start an insurrection against the government because he didn't like the election results but had absolutely no proof they were "rigged" or that it was "stolen," resulting in the injury of dozens and the deaths of five people. That the preferred candidate lies through his teeth, going well beyond "otherwise demonstrating a lack of character" and is on trial for an attempted coverup of an affair with a porn actress while his third wife, with whom he had an affair while married to his second wife, with whom he had an affair while married to his first wife, was pregnant with his youngest son. That this preferred candidate is a serial adulterer, admitting to affairs with women on all three of his wives with "hundreds," according to his own bragging estimate.
He also left out that there are issues associated with this preferred candidate that no Bible-believing, Conservative, Evangelical Christian, nor any patriotic American, should be even remotely considering supporting. Endorsing his affinity for a combination of a white supremacist, Christian nationalist America is heresy from a Christian perspective, and treasonous from a patriotic perspective.
He also failed, in every possible way, to provide even one connection to a single principle from the Christian gospel that would permit a sincere, practicing Christian to even consider casting a ballot for such a worldly, anti-Christian, anti-American candidate. Finn also ignores the fact that the entire religious political right wing took the exact opposite position when fellow Southern Baptist Bill Clinton was running for President. Character was all that mattered to far right wing Evangelicals then. The issues, for them, especially a roaring economy, they easily ignored while focusing on, well, on many of the same sins and shortcomings that they now completely ignore and blithely dismiss when it comes to Trump. By clear and concise definition, that is hypocrisy.
Perhaps Finn's most egregious obfuscation of the issue is found in point 4, where he tells pastors to "Make a distinction between jagged-edge issues and straight line issues." What he means by "jagged line issues" have to do with what the Bible says about things like tax rates, immigration policy, or, deliberately included, racial injustice. Let me translate for you. Ignore the Bible's clear teaching on the values and virtues of the Christian gospel, because they are subject to individual interpretation. But of course, the "straight line issue" is abortion, and in his thinking, that's the bottom line which excuses both bad character and ignoring the virtues and values of the gospel.
The point that Finn misses completely is that the United States Constitution does not allow for any "establishment" of religion, including Christianity. He ignores the fact that this first amendment principle was the key to setting the church free from any state control or interference and allowing it to minister and evangelize in America with a degree of success it has experienced in only a few places in the world, and at only a few times in its history. Establishment of a state church was deliberately avoided, and the fact of the matter is that if any American citizen who practices a different religion than Christianity, or who is not a Christian or a practitioner of any religion, has their freedom violated by laws which impose distinctively Christian principles upon society, then the Christians of America are also at risk of losing their religious liberty.
And if an anti-abortion position is the only issue that draws a Christian voter to a candidate, in a sea of worldly, evil, anti-Christian behavior and declarations, then the character needs to be repudiated, in favor of casting a vote for the other candidate who has a realistic chance of winning the election, in spite of a difference of opinion on this singular issue, especially if that candidate supports all of the other issues that are derived mainly from Christian virtues and values, such as treating immigrants with dignity and providing refuge for them, and for establishing racial justice.
How can a congregation trust anything their pastor says if he ignores the character of a particular candidate, while only preaching a small sliver of the Christian gospel? How can you admonish a congregation to be truthful and have integrity while promoting, with passion, a political candidate who can't utter a single truthful word, brags about his lack of integrity and denies that anything he does is sinful in the eyes of the god he believes in?
I think that says it all.
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