Last weekend. a tornado outbreak hit the Southeastern United States, most especially Alabama and Georgia. The town of Beauregard, Alabama was hit particularly hard. Evidently, because Alabama is a state with a lot of Trump Supporters or something something gazpacho, Trump decided to make a personal visit, and I guess he ended up autographing people's Bibles.
Now hold on, what the fuck?
I'm serious, this makes no damn sense to me. It's your holy text, not a damn copy of Sports Illustrated. This whole bit strikes me as a perfect example of the spiritual confusion that grips modern American conservative Christianity...unless of course it's never really been about the things that they say it's about.
Which...if true...would make these people false prophets, hypocrites, liars...among other things.
But, quite honestly, to the average Evangelical (much less their leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr.) Trump seems to perfectly well embody something. I mean, I've been out of that mess for years, so it's not my problem...but from what I have been able to gather as an outsider, churches other than Pentecostal or Prosperity Gospel ones often struggle, whether they're backed by a denomination or not. My old church had trouble finding (and keeping) a Pastor for years after the one who was there when I attended retired. From what I can tell as an outside observer there simply is no money in it unless you want to believe in fake signs and wonders or tell people that God wants them to be rich. Given how much I had things like the importance of Biblical truth, decent behavior, marital fidelity, and simple stuff like work drilled into my head it mystifies me that these days, no one seems to care about such things...or at least almost no one in the conservative Evangelical subculture that I left does.
Except...
Then I think back to my ex-wife, her church, and her family...and I'll tell you straight up that no, not all of those people were bad. But here's the thing. My ex-wife, despite all her religiosity, loved to fuck and loved to party. Every weekend, and sometimes during the week, she would go out drinking and sing Karaoke and party it up. Some of the people she did this stuff with were church people. Yet every Sunday she and her Karaoke friends would be right up there every time there was an altar call. My ex didn't like to work...in fact so far as I know she has not held a job since 2007. Yet she's been married at least twice since me, she has (or at least had) a house, and I have no idea how she paid for all this. I'm a be honest, I have no idea what she does all day and living like that...or with somebody who did...would drive me crazy.
In 2008, my ex-wife spent hours trying to convince me to vote Republican because she thought Sarah Palin should be President. I kept trying to point out that Sarah wasn't the one at the top of the ticket, John McCain was, and that I wasn't going to vote for any ticket that included an obvious dumb grifter and wolf-in-sheep's clothing like her anyway. My ex bugged me about it right up until Election Day.
Such was the state of Evangelicalism a decade (or going on two, now) ago and it didn't change much over the nearly 10 years that I had some kind of regular contact with my ex. I can imagine it's only gotten worse since.
However, I've not heard a word about this crap from Evangelicals, and Republicans seem curiously silent about it too.
Okay, whatever. People have their priorities and I'm sure nobody can comment on every single scandal in the unending Human Centipede of Trump-related scandals. Just keeping up with it all requires a superhuman effort at times.
But you know what?
I can't help but think back to getting sex from my oh-so-religious ex-wife on our first date and many times before we got married...and for that matter many times over several years after we were divorced as well. I can't help but think of the easy carnality of a lot of the "Christian" women that I knew at the time, and how some of them were more than willing to crawl into bed with me long before the dust had settled from my breakup with the ex. I had given up on Christianity at the time, or did at least for awhile. But ya know, I came to realize that a lot of the men I was aware of were just like me...but without having gone through all the pain that I had. It turned out that I knew a lot of guys who fucked around on their wives...and a lot of girls who fucked around on their husbands, too.
That...bothered me. It was, in fact, a deciding factor in my eventual complete exit from Christianity several years later.
Today, I'm sure, a lot of these white supposedly-Christian and "Conservative" men likely aspire to getting hand-jobs from pretty Chinese prostitutes in seedy massage parlors.
Something in my brain wants to ask "Well if that's the case, why did you get married?" Of course, so far as I can tell all the compacts and holy contracts and sacraments that make up so much of Christianity these days are simply things that nobody has any intention of upholding. They've simply become a box that has to be checked to get Man's approval so that these fucking people can then go out and proceed to act like their God and all of His commandments don't really exist.
Far from teaching people to master carnal desires and human nature, Christianity has become mastered by them...which seems to be Okay so long as Evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell Jr. continue to accumulate money and power...so I suppose it should be no surprise that Evangelicalism has become little more than the Trump Cult.
But ya know, it bothers me when people talk about Trump as "Our" President, usually with the king of emphasis that means "Ours not yours, ha ha." Also, meaning like he specifically belongs to their group or something. The level of co-dependence/identification-with to the point of ownership just bothers me. Trump is a human being, if a shitty one, let him be that, and leave it at that.
These people proclaim Trump their God and pleasure as their sacrament, the more debased and selfish, the better.
But when they die it's not him they're going to be answering to nor how much they got to enjoy themselves at the expense of others that they're going to be judged on when they die.
And they will die, just like all the rest of us. Indeed this whole mess is largely driven by fear of death, and fear of change, and fear of the other.
And so, they also hunger for the Rapture, the Apocalypse and the second Coming of Christ...as if He would not catch them masturbating (or being masturbated) and be like "Hey, yo, I didn't want to see that crap." But of course, like any teenage boy or sender of unsolicited dick pics they think they're not going to get caught. Somehow, they seem to think (despite all the Biblical statements to the contrary) that Jesus is just like them and would put up with all this silly bullshit.
But when your spirituality is basically masturbation and telling yourself how great you are, what the fuck else can anybody expect?
These people are so damned self-centered that they want the world to end because they think that would mean they don't have to die. (And, also, these people that follow after all this silly bullshit think they're going to get to spend Eternity in heaven gloating while you and I are the ones who go to hell...come on, really?)
I have this creeping feeling that this party is going to end soon...and while it won't be good for anybody, it will be worse for these fucking people.
Have fun with that when your new god falls, Evangelicals.
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