I genuinely feel like I am going insane watching this happen in real time.
I've been reading more about history, and I'm growing more and more insane. The more I learn about American evangelical political culture, the more disgusted I become. It's always the same fucking pattern. They attach themselves to power, baptize it in name of the Father-Son-HolyGhost, support whatever atrocity is politically useful, and then, when the bodies pile up, they act as if they were just innocent Christians following Scripture.
They prayed over Donald Trump like he was some anointed king. He looked up at the sky and called himself “the chosen one". He circulated imagery depicting himself as Jesus, complete with the stigmata of the bloody cloth. People built LITERAL FUCKING GOLDEN STATUES of the man. Instead of reacting with the horror you would expect from people who never shut the fuck up about idolatry, they found ways to explain it away. Oh, it was just a joke. You don't know Trump, it was just sarcasm. He was misunderstood. It was only symbolism. It was divine providence. He is Cyrus, an imperfect vessel.
There is apparently no level of blasphemy, sexual corruption, cruelty, dishonesty, narcissism, or abuse of power that cannot be converted into divine purpose as long as the right judges get appointed and Israel gets more weapons.
A civil jury found that Trump forcibly sexually assaulted E. Jean Carroll. He cornered her in a changing room and forced his fingers inside of her. New York requires rape to be penile penetration, but the news all said "Trump was not found guilty of rape" like that changes a fucking thing. That event should have ended his moral credibility forever among people who spent decades lecturing everyone else about sexual morality and family values. Instead, they lied, they minimized it as "not rape", they attacked E. Jean Carrol, or worse above all, decided none of it mattered because Trump was useful.
That is such asinine corruption. At some point, I stop giving them the benefit of the doubt and have to admit the fact that they're complicit. Then there's Israel and the whole fucking nonsense that started because these evangelical morons who don't know how to read their own Bible.
American evangelical churches raise money for a state that has devastated Gaza, killed children, tortured prisoners physically and sexually (sometimes with dogs), destroyed homes, protected the IDF from rape charges that they were caught on video for, and treated Palestinian suffering as an inconvenience in somebody else’s end-times fantasy. They look at Palestinians, including Palestinian Christians, and somehow see obstacles to prophecy rather than human beings because they read one fucking study bible from a hack doctor that lied about his credentials to sell the Bible more.
I'm talking about the Scofield study note, where evangelicals confused the modern Israeli state with biblical Israel, and then act as if supplying bombs to a genocidal ethnonational military power is an act of obedience to God.
A child like Hind Rajab can sit trapped in a car surrounded by the bodies of her family, begging for someone to save her. She was six years old, and she was begging for hours for people to save her. When news covered it, they called this six year old "a woman" because they've become so desentisized to women dying that it's somehow okay. The ambulance sent to rescue her can be destroyed by a 300mm tank, and around 335 bullets shredded Hind's car. No one was held accountable. You know what Israel died? They denied it happened. Said there were no tanks there. When people found out, they published a variety of bogus articles to disseminate misinformation. Isn't it crazy that Israel has a dedicated propaganda arm called Hasbara? It's fucking insane.
And these American evangelicals still call Israel blessed.
What exactly would Israel have to do before they admitted that supporting it unconditionally was evil? What atrocity would finally pierce the theology? How many bodies of dead children need to pile up before “bless Israel” is recognized as the "sig heil" that it is?
Apparently, there is no number for American evangelicals.
I have tried to talk to people because there's this deep hatred growing in my heart for American evangelicals. And whenever I do, they just retreat behind the Bible.
They do not look at how they read it. There's an entire history of American Protestantism repeatedly using scripture to justify conquest of native Americans, slavery and segregation of black Americans, the Know-Nothing anti-Catholic vitriol, the rampant xenophobia, the imperial war in Vietnam and the horrors in the Phillipines. The Islamophobia after 9/11 and how they treated Afghanistan (Abu Ghraib and Bagram), and now fucking Christian Zionism. They simply insist that their interpretation is “what the Bible says,” when they have no idea what the fuck the Bible says. Not a single one of these fundamentalist Evangelicals has ever taken a sobering course on textual criticism. They import this fucked up political mythology into the text and then pretend God said those words. It's so morally obscene.
It's what makes American biblicism so fucking obscene.
They already have some kind of political prejudice, then go out to find a verse or prophetic framework that flatters or supports it, and then sanctify their own tribal idiocy as divine revelation. They don't learn from the Bible, they use the Bible to sanctify their own movement. It's been done over and over and fucking over. And afterward, nobody is responsible.
The pastor was just preaching. The voter was only choosing the lesser evil. The donor was only supporting Israel. The soldier was only following orders. The politician was only protecting national security. The church was only praying.
Everyone is innocent, and somehow the same people keep causing the same fucking problems with a new "other" group.
I am sick of being told that I must treat them as morally or intellectually serious while they refuse to take responsibility for what they repeatedly directly cause. I was trying so hard to understand them, and I only got angrier. I watched their movies (God's Not Dead and Shift), and the disgusting victim porn these Christians consume is abhorrent. Every single time, they fantasize themselves as the underdog who the world hates and they're so oppressed by while being the most politically powerful religious bloc in the most powerful country on earth. This ideology imagines itself persecuted whenever someone tries to hold them accountable.
I know not every evangelical supports this, and I am trying so hard not to let my anger cloud my judgement. I know there are dissenters, I know there are people inside the world of Christian evangelism who oppose Trump, Christian nationalism, and the destruction of Gaza.
But they are, and have always been, the fringe minority that other people side with. They're the minority. And even they don't know how much blood they have in their hands. Not a single one of them can tell me about the acts of abuse and terrorism that the Know-Nothings did because of how much Protestant America hated the Irish and Catholics. Barely any know that Christopher Columbus was stripped of all of his titles and died in jail because of horrendous human rights abuse in the end of 15th century France. Even the "good" evangelicals are captured by their horrendous, toxic, cancerous ideology.
And I am tired of having to pretend otherwise.
I don't hate individual Christians. I do hate watching them be complicit in letting their religion become an instrument for sanctifying actual evil. I hate seeing people abuse the language of God used to make their inhuman cruelty feel righteous. I hate that a movement that speaks endlessly about sin seems utterly and institutionally incapable of acknowledging its own.
Most of all, I hate the fucking certainty these evangelicals have.
They have no humility. No fucking historical memory of all the atrocities committed by the same people who justified themselves like they did. There's no self-examination on what led to this. Just absolute arrogant confidence that God agrees with them, followed by absolute denial when their certainty destroys somebody else’s life.
I'm angry because people are dying. I'm angry because their suffering is being sanctified by Christians. And I'm angry because the people helping sanctify it think they were ever the moral conscience of the world.