I recognize the selfsame pain, internalized shame and disavowed doubt accompanying the enduring evangelical Christian support of Donald Trump because these feelings are the unholy trinity of my own inherited religious tradition. Whereby I was “saved” by a God totally uninterested in anything but my ability to worship him —or else. Evangelical support of Trump isn’t an aberration, it is an incarnation of the God we were always taught to believe would save us from hell even if he had to put us through it to get to heaven.
So, in an election year, taking place during a global pandemic, it’s time to cut to the chase. We don’t end the pain of this presidency (and our democracy) by spilling more ink on the “abhorrent,” “toxic” or “confusing” support of Trump by evangelical Christians. It is what it is.
Nor do we get there by providing impressively vitriolic takedowns of his faulty philosophical, political or theological arguments for enduring power. They are what they are.
Instead, we get there by bravely entering into and helping to exorcize the pain of deeply complex religious men and women who have internalized a trickle-down snowball of shame and self-doubt emanating from a God who long predates the self-styled dollar store incarnation currently squatting in the Oval Office.
Read more at Baptist News.