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William Rivers Pitt | A Call to Evangelical Trump Voters

The mental gymnastics required to pull the handle for Trump while clinging to the scraps of your alleged moral code must be dynamic.

Part of the Series

Dear You,

Well, here we are. Super Tuesday is in the rear-view, thank God, and ol’ Donny pretty much ran the table by huge margins thanks to you. Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, with Massachusetts and Vermont bringing up the rear. The math at this point is stark; as reported by The Boston Globe, “Not a single candidate with those win records has ever lost his or her party’s nomination in modern presidential political history.” Unless Jesus himself swoops down from heaven and incinerates Donald Trump right down to the shoelaces on his Buster Browns, the man will be the Republican nominee for president of the United States.

Which begs the question: What are you people thinking?

For more original Truthout election coverage, check out our election section, “Beyond the Sound Bites: Election 2016.”

I mean, seriously. Ronald Reagan invited you to the party in the mid-80s, and you’ve been breaking the furniture ever since. I have always said that despite my hard distaste for their views and tactics – not to mention the wide-reaching, harmful consequences of their campaigns – the plodding durability of the anti-choice protesters who daily set themselves at the door to Planned Parenthood clinics teach a lesson in how to do it.

But no, instead we get you and your ersatz piety. Oh, we must think of the fetuses and save them from The Gay and preach a gospel of love even as we burn the Koran and cut funding for poor people and cling like lampreys to the pleasant fiction of a gun wrapped in the flag that obscures history and science and all the bodies on the floor because since they weren’t mentioned in the Bible, dinosaurs never existed, so let’s make purity promises with our daughters.

With Trump’s every word against immigrants, Muslims, women and even his opponents, he betrays the teachings of Christ as described in Matthew 25:40: “Truly I tell you, whatever you did to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did to me.” Trump is a man of vanity and pride and brute inchoate rage, and last I heard, “Pride” was on the no-no list of deadly sins.

So is greed. “It’s hard for me to turn down money,” Trump said after his victory in Nevada, “because that’s what I’ve done in my whole life. I grab and grab and grab. You know, I get greedy. I want money, money. I’ll tell you what we’re going to do, right? We get greedy, right? Now we’re going to get greedy for the United States. We’re going to grab and grab and grab. We’re going to bring in so much money and so much everything.”

People of genuine faith are appalled and horrified by your support of this man. They genuinely don’t understand it. I have a friend, the scion of a vast family of deep evangelical faith, who just got back from building houses for poor people in Africa. He wants to throw up when beholding this preposterous phenomenon. I disagree with just about everything he stands for politically, but the man has sand, is a wonderful father and has honor to spare. He practices what he preaches, and the very idea of evangelical voters supporting the walking lie that is Donald Trump makes him want to dig a hole and die in it.

Why is this happening? I have a fairly straightforward explanation: You’re a pack of marauding frauds. The “morals” and “values” you’ve been attempting to ram-feed the country for going on 40 years are ashes in your mouths if you stand up for Donald Trump. He represents everything you allegedly despise, and yet you run through walls to support him. Donald Trump is the moneychanger Jesus whipped out of the temple in his wrath, and here you are hitching your wagon to his star. You’re not “evangelicals.” You’re football fans rooting for a team, jumping on board with the guy you think can win, and to hell with the contradictions. You literally reek to high heaven.

I have long believed that your kind are the worst type of swindlers. There are millions of good people in this nation, evangelicals and others of like kind, who live honestly and truly by the tenets of their faith. My father’s mother was one, my mother’s father was another, my friend is another yet again and I do the best I can. Whether I agree with them or not, I respect them, because they walk the talk.

Matthew 6:5-6 teaches, “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret.” Pretty sound advice under any circumstances.

Matthew is talking to you people, you who slather yourselves in false piety while flaunting your vivid hypocrisy. Your support of Donald Trump has finally revealed you, at long last, for what you are and for all to see. You have somehow convinced yourselves you’re doing God’s work. Grifters have more personal honesty. The mental gymnastics required to pull the handle for Trump while clinging to the scraps of your alleged moral code must be dynamic.

Jesus wept.

Very Sincerely,
William Rivers Pitt

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