Christianity and the Big Lie

We are all aware of the damage that has been done by Trump’s big lie. Anyone with even a tenuous grasp on the ability to reason or to think logically has to recognize it for what it is, a desperate attempt by a drowning man to retain power in a nation set up to function democratically and thereby demands the peaceful transition of power based on the will of the people.

But there are large groups of people, a great percentage of whom identify with the Christian Evangelical movements that are unwilling to open their minds to the reality that Donald Trump’s statements about our last election are not the truth, not reality, but only the ravings of an insane egomaniac, clinging to any possible untruth that will save him from his own deeds and desires.

But why are so many of these true believers associated with the Christian Evangelical movement and why are the numbers of willing acceptors also so great in the Catholic Church?

Well to start with, these groups count in their membership an overwhelming number of white males, a group driven by latent fear of losing power in a country in which they have long had an iron grip on all the power and all the prestige.

This country has always been the battleground of the struggle between those who are established and those who are striving to get their piece of the pie. Up to now, the struggle has always been between rival groups of European immigrants. In the last 70 years that struggle has changed with the emergence of black citizens from 200 years of suppression and the arrival on our shores of immigrant groups from parts of the world, which do not include Europe, in numbers that surprise and shock those who are attempting to maintaining the status quo.

What is really frightening to the establishment is that the newcomers are not necessarily looking to just blend into the American community but concurrently to maintain their own ethnic identities while working to force their way into the established power structure.

The Republican Party has been reacting to this population change for the last 30 years, adopting strategies to control the upward mobility of the newcomers and flaunt the Democratic strategy of inclusion.  There has been a continuing policy of pushback on the Right. Recognizing their numbers will soon be overwhelmed by the increasing influx of non-white immigration, the GOP has accelerated their attack on voting eligibility in an attempt to retain their place in the power structure. What started as a strategy has now exploded into a full time war against voter registration. Senior Republicans have openly admitted that the only way to maintain any hope of party viability is to keep minorities from voting.

Then along came Trump, a con man with a once popular TV show that promoted the false image of him as a tough guy who fired people; an image he built on by being brash, gross and uncouth. He appealed to the uneducated and often undervalued among white blue collars that identified with this faux tough guy and despite his wealth and privileged background foolishly accepted him as one of them.

The only thing that Trump did right was to understand that these people had been abandoned by everyone they had ever followed, and therefore needed to believe in him so badly that they would buy anything he said no matter how false or preposterous. He told them he had won by the greatest margin in election history even though he had lost the popular vote. He told them he had the best first hundred days of any president in history and they bought it. He told them that his tax package would make them all rich, when it only made those who were already rich richer, and yet they believed him. When the pandemic hit he told them it was nothing and now it has killed over half a million Americans, and when the bottom fell out of the economy he pointed to the stock market gains and they truly believed that they weren’t hungry and that their jobs still existed. And finally, when he realized that he couldn’t win the 2020 election, when his ass kissing sycophants told him it was over, he gave them the big lie. “The election was rigged.” That’s why it appeared he had lost. And just as Roy Cohen had instructed him years ago, he kept telling the same lie, over and over and over until they bought it and now they’re stuck with it.  How can they possibly give it up? Even when every judge and state official that dealt with the processes and the frivolous Trump issued suits told them it was all nonsense, that Biden had won, they refused to relent.

They had to buy it because if they admitted it was a lie, that Trump had conned them, they would have had to admit they were fools, suckers and dummies and who could ever do that? Who could accept that kind of humiliation? So they stormed the capitol because they had to stop the certification of Joe Biden as president or everything they stood for, everything they believed in would be a lie.

But it was a lie! And now all they have left is to stick to the lie and fight for the power that just might make that lie something else.

That fight for that power is what is going on now and people who bought lies from their preachers, their pastors and their priests long before they ever heard of Donald Trump, are more than willing to buy them now. It allows them to be right and gives them victory over those others.

They will embrace the bullshit about QAnon, they will repeat the lies about conspiracy theories and they will preach the nonsense that Biden lost the election and took the White House because it was rigged, because they don’t have anything else. These are people who long ago surrendered their ability to reason and think logically to the preachers who promised them salvation if they filled the collection plate, or the priests who threatened them with hell and then went after their children. When the elected members of the Republican Party allowed Mitch McConnell to put a religious fanatic cult member on the Supreme Court it appeared to be a message to all those true believers that God was really on their side, but in fact it was just a smart, morally vacant, power broker doing what he could to extend the limits of his power far beyond anything the constitution had ever intended.

I have asked many people: What has Trump done for you and what has he done for the country that would prompt you to want him to return to power? Every response, every reason, every excuse, every platitude has been a lie or the product of a lie. Biden won! And you can take that to the bank.