What has happened is this: the christian community in the U.S. is no longer a religious movement. It is a tribe.
Well, all right– it was always a tribe, but it was never as clear as it is now.
For decades now, the Christian evangelical community in the U.S. has loudly proclaimed itself the bastion of conservative virtue: self-restraint, monogamy, kindness, respect for authority, self-reliance, hard work, “character”, and devotion to the transcendent values embodied by the ministry of Jesus Christ, the Son of God. It rejected the licentious attitudes of the 1960’s: free love, peace, the environment, women’s rights, drug use, tolerance, and so on, because, unlike the hippies, Christians were virtuous.
Well, the mask is off.
This was all a hoax. Offered a candidate who embodies the worst excesses of narcissism, materialism, self-centeredness, egotism, and selfishness, a liar and a cheat, a man who tastes are crass and vulgar- in short, the opposite of Jesus, they ran for him and embraced him with a passion.
It is obvious that the Christian Community did not suddenly become apostate overnight. It has always truly embraced the values of Donald Trump, but has always pretended to embrace values that it knows more people will respect. This is a reflection of it’s patriarchal nature: the men rule and lie to the women and children that their rule is honorable and beneficent, and that the weekend in Vegas really was just to go golfing. The Las Vegas of the 1960’s, in fact, was almost the perfect embodiment of this kind of hypocrisy: Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. singing “My Way” at Caesar’s Palace” as women hurl their panties onto the stage.
The Christian Evangelical community is phony. They are liars. They are frauds. They are one with their leader, a two-bit bankrupt huckster and shyster, who routinely lies and exaggerates and brags, who chases women and assaults them, who pays off prostitutes, and whose knowledge set must be the most ridiculously inadequate of any leader of any developed country in the past 100 years.
The rabid support of Donald Trump– 80 – 85% approval among evangelical Christians– is obviously not due to the fact that he is like Jesus. It can only be due to the fact that he represents a tribe, at war with other tribes, finally ascendant, no longer humiliated by the sophistication, knowledge, and power of the “cultural elites”. His values mean nothing. His character means nothing. His qualifications mean nothing. The only thing that matters is that our side wins, and we get to kick all those condescending liberal educated elites who think they’re so smart in the teeth.
Keith Lockhart, Boston Pops conductor: He [Ted Kennedy] loved to sing. After dinner in Hyannisport we would retire to the living room, where he had all these books of Broadway songs. I was there once with a rather conservative Republican senator and his wife. They must have thought, Well, this is what those Massachusetts Democrats do—they sing Lerner and Loewe around the piano.