Give Me That Old Trump Religion

Photo by The White House from Washington, DC, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Christians, we need to talk.

I know a lot of you are Trump supporters, but a great many of you are taking The Former Guy’s felony conviction way too hard. You’re entitled to be disappointed and angry and even to lash out a bit because your guy got caught and is getting a small taste of justice. I’m not going to begrudge you some partisan anger, but I do have a problem with the way a lot of you are expressing that anger.

Specifically, a few memes are going around that favorably compare Donald Trump with Jesus. That’s going too far.

The most common meme that I’ve seen has several versions but the message is almost always verbatim: “Jesus was convicted in a sham trial. I still follow him.”

It isn’t just that comparing a political figure with Jesus smacks of heresy and cultism, although that’s certainly true. Donald Trump is no Christ figure. He’s not even close.

After all, even if the jury had acquitted Trump, the facts would have still condemned his character. As a reminder, this case came about because Donald Trump (allegedly) cheated on his pregnant third wife with a porn star. He then paid off the porn star in order to court Christian voters in the 2016 election. He had Michael Cohen do this dirty-but-not-illegal work and now attacks Cohen as a nefarious liar, which he is. But Cohen is also a person Trump had a very long and friendly association with until Cohen flipped.

In other words, even if he wasn’t a convicted felon, Trump would be a sleazy adulterer and a liar. And an unrepentant one.

Does that sound like Jesus, who was sinless and falsely persecuted, laying down his life voluntarily to save ours? That’s a rhetorical question. You don’t have to answer.

And the premise for the meme is wrong. Trump’s trial was not a sham. It was a real trial with real criminal charges for real allegations of law-breaking. Some Republicans, including some of my commenters, have alleged that there was no crime involved with Trump’s charges. That’s false. The charge was falsifying business records in the first degree. Per NBC New York, more than 3,000 people have been arrested for violating this law since 2013. Only one was named Trump.

It may be that Trump was singled out for political reasons, but it’s also true that there was reasonable suspicion that he broke the law. The law-breaking trumps (pun intended) the possible political nature of the prosecution.

If you are a shady businessman with lots of skeletons in your closet, it’s probably wise to avoid attracting attention to yourself by, just for example, running for president and becoming one of the most unpopular presidents in history. It’s not political persecution if you really broke the law and outed yourself by mounting a political campaign.

Just ask Hunter Biden. Hunter, who goes on trial this week, has a lot more reason to claim persecution than Donald Trump. After all, Hunter didn’t voluntarily become a public figure. He’s public by association, and his crimes only came to light after a long Republican investigation.

But Hunter is still guilty. (I’m not on the jury so I can say that.) Regardless of why and how his crimes came to light, whether it be attracting a cop directly or being the subject of a years-long investigation meant to embarrass his father, he still needs to be held accountable. (And Joe is not interfering in the process.)

And it isn’t just what people are saying about Trump and Jesus that is disappointing, it’s who is saying it. I’ve seen these memes on the Facebook pages of a lot of church people who really should know better. A pastor’s wife. Sunday school teachers. Even Eric Metaxas, a Christian author who wrote an excellent autobiography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the famed German WWII martyr, got in on the act. If anyone should know better, it should be Metaxas, the theologian and student of Nazi Germany.

At least some have deleted these posts when called out. My strategy has been to gently note, “Trump is no Jesus. Not even close.” That works pretty well, and I usually don’t follow up to let it devolve into an argument.

If people want to be Trump supporters, that’s their business. They can post “MAGA 4-ever” and I’ll keep scrolling but the pseudo-messianic posts need to be called out. With love. The Bible supports correcting church members, especially when it comes to false doctrine.

While I personally think that no Christian (or constitutionalist or conservative or anyone else) should support Trump, that is not a salvation issue. If we are honest, we have to admit that Christians have been involved in some pretty awful movements. The Crusades were wars of aggression cloaked in religious fervor. Far too many Christians were on the wrong side of slavery and civil rights, and they (mis)quoted scripture to justify their racism. We find Christians in the Ku Klux Klan and the Nazi Party, both at home and in Germany. It’s apparent that Jesus’ warning that the elect can be deceived has been fulfilled.

I’m not going to say that MAGA and Republicans can’t be Christian. I’m not going to say that Democrats can’t be Christian. We each have different priorities and different understandings when it comes to politics. Thank God that salvation does not depend on getting politics right, especially with the choices we’ve had lately.

As an example, I had an online conversation with an elder from my church yesterday. He’s a great guy, a veteran, and an extremely nice man, but he’s also a Trump True Believer. He’s a Boomer who probably gets most of his information from Fox News or OANN or something similar.

It’s hard to have a political conversation with him because I feel like we inhabit different planets. He is thoroughly convinced that Trump was railroaded because Michael Cohen had the affair. He does not believe that Trump paid off Stormy Daniels even though Trump has admitted as much while continuing to deny the affair.

I also pointed out to him that Salem Media, the publisher of Dinesh D’Souza’s “2,000 Mules” movie about the 2020 election, retracted the film last week and admitted that it was false. Salem joins Trump lawyers Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and others in admitting that their claims about massive election fraud were lies. Fox News paid $787 million in a defamation suit related to its election claims when presenting evidence that its personalities told the truth would have been a viable legal defense.

Yet the True Believers won’t believe their retractions. To them, it’s all part of the conspiracy. Like the Gnostics of Jesus’ day, they believe they have access to secret truths in their conspiracy theories.

The Christian embrace of conspiracy theories is not without cost. I had a good friend and coworker who laughed at the Christians swarming to vote for Donald Trump in 2016. After watching the Christian Right debase itself and throw out every principle that it ever had in exchange for Supreme Court appointments, he told me that he had no desire to have any part in the church.

The message that the modern American church is sending out is two-fold. First, the message is that we want to control your lives but we don’t want to live by our own standards when it isn’t convenient. The second message is that we love Donald Trump more than we value biblical doctrines and teachings.

If the unsaved and unchurched don’t want that sort of Christianity, who can blame them?

Over the years, I’ve had some spiritual doubts and questions myself. At least some of that was brought on by watching people in the church act like they really don’t believe what they are preaching.

The focus for Christians should be on Christ, not on other members of the church. People will let you down. Jesus won’t.

The problem is that this strategy doesn’t work for the people who don’t know Christ and who are being chased away by bad Christian behavior. The thought of driving people out of the church and into an eternity without Christ should break Christian hearts.

Jesus had stronger words for religious hypocrites than for unsaved sinners.

And I’m not going to say that all religious hypocrisy is related to Trump either. I’ve known religious people to be gossips, backbiters, philanderers, drug addicts, and even a bank robber. Thankfully, none of my churches has had an issue with sexual abuse, but my old denomination, the Southern Baptists, certainly have. Cliques and bullying within churches probably do as much if not more to drive off members as Trump worship does to keep the unchurched away.

I’ll be the first to admit that Christians aren’t perfect. I’m definitely not, just ask my wife (ba-dump-bump). We aren’t perfect, but we should be striving to become more Christlike and, to coin a phrase, asking what Jesus would do.

And Jesus would probably remind us that the First Commandment is “You shall have no other gods before me.”

That includes Donald Trump and the Supreme Court and politics in general.

As one of my pastors used to say, “Amen or oh me.”

Probably more of an “oh me” for most of us.

If you’re a Christian, you’re called to love your fellow man. That includes people of other races and other political parties. You’re also also called to be a light to the world. We can’t do that if we are calling each other names on the interwebs.

So, if you want to double down yet again on a man who is morally bankrupt, no longer a pro-lifer, and a newly convicted felon, be my guest. But don’t compare him to Jesus. It makes all Christians look crazy and it makes MAGA look like a cult.

I’m pretty sure Jesus would not do that.