It has been a minor theme of this blog that the people who don't think like I do still deserve, for pragmatic reasons, respect, and for theological reasons, love. I am currently straining against both resolutions.
Electing Donald Trump to be president of the United States was a poor choice. This was not an election period with an excellent alternative, but nearly any of them would have been better choices than the one our electorate made.
I am told that evangelical Christians were a great help in putting Mr. Trump into office, and it is difficult to understand how someone who professes to follow Jesus could make such a decision. I have been able to empathize, if not agree with, many decisions that evangelicals as a body appear to make.
But this is an order of magnitude larger. Revulsion at Hillary Clinton is not an acceptable reason to choose Moloch as your king.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, you have made a poor choice, and explaining how and why does not seem to matter to your exuberance, if you were even to listen. You rejoice like the Israelites throwing together their gold to make a fertility idol the moment Moses heads up the mountain.
I don't know who our Moses is in this scenario. It seems to have been a while since we had a trustworthy national leader appointed by God. But I know exactly who the orangey-golden calf is.
===
From a pace back, this is not the express elevator to Hell. Existing American institutions are resilient and carry potent inertia. For instance, if the soon-to-come power does "cancel all federal funding to Sanctuary Cities"... well, first of all I'm not even sure what that means. But if it is as draconian as it is meant to sound, I do not imagine that the federal government will even function if it cuts off six of the ten most populous cities in the US, and Washington D.C. Will we stop paying senators, our most august federal employees in a sanctuary city? Trump (i.e. Pence) will have to find a loophole to pretend that enforcing that section of his "contract with the American Voter" was taken away from him. I'm confident one has already been prepared.
And roughly 50% of the population is stricken by this turn of events. And a fair number of the people who made it happen—from the top down—woke up queasy on November 9. That's also a fair amount of resistance in the gears.
However, though not a freight elevator, this shift in governance is a steep path to ever-more naked plutocracy, convincing cross-country truckers that estate taxes are meaningful issues in their lives, and that unemployed Rust Belt residents will somehow find Health Savings Accounts to be helpful without income to save.
And that's terrible because it makes our job harder: to tell people the good news; to show a way to freedom from silly, inconsequential shit; to grow toward a real life with God.
And it's additionally depressing because the people who are supposed to be doing this are the ones making it harder to do.
Brother and sisters, I love you, but you are dumbasses. I want to speak to you in grace and truth, but you are deaf and dumb asses. I will not give up on you, but I need to part ways with you, because you are so far into the weeds that I am losing sight of your heads in the tall, thorny grass. Please come back before you are choked out!
Electing Donald Trump to be president of the United States was a poor choice. This was not an election period with an excellent alternative, but nearly any of them would have been better choices than the one our electorate made.
I am told that evangelical Christians were a great help in putting Mr. Trump into office, and it is difficult to understand how someone who professes to follow Jesus could make such a decision. I have been able to empathize, if not agree with, many decisions that evangelicals as a body appear to make.
But this is an order of magnitude larger. Revulsion at Hillary Clinton is not an acceptable reason to choose Moloch as your king.
Brothers and sisters in Christ, you have made a poor choice, and explaining how and why does not seem to matter to your exuberance, if you were even to listen. You rejoice like the Israelites throwing together their gold to make a fertility idol the moment Moses heads up the mountain.
I don't know who our Moses is in this scenario. It seems to have been a while since we had a trustworthy national leader appointed by God. But I know exactly who the orangey-golden calf is.
===
From a pace back, this is not the express elevator to Hell. Existing American institutions are resilient and carry potent inertia. For instance, if the soon-to-come power does "cancel all federal funding to Sanctuary Cities"... well, first of all I'm not even sure what that means. But if it is as draconian as it is meant to sound, I do not imagine that the federal government will even function if it cuts off six of the ten most populous cities in the US, and Washington D.C. Will we stop paying senators, our most august federal employees in a sanctuary city? Trump (i.e. Pence) will have to find a loophole to pretend that enforcing that section of his "contract with the American Voter" was taken away from him. I'm confident one has already been prepared.
And roughly 50% of the population is stricken by this turn of events. And a fair number of the people who made it happen—from the top down—woke up queasy on November 9. That's also a fair amount of resistance in the gears.
However, though not a freight elevator, this shift in governance is a steep path to ever-more naked plutocracy, convincing cross-country truckers that estate taxes are meaningful issues in their lives, and that unemployed Rust Belt residents will somehow find Health Savings Accounts to be helpful without income to save.
And that's terrible because it makes our job harder: to tell people the good news; to show a way to freedom from silly, inconsequential shit; to grow toward a real life with God.
And it's additionally depressing because the people who are supposed to be doing this are the ones making it harder to do.
Brother and sisters, I love you, but you are dumbasses. I want to speak to you in grace and truth, but you are deaf and dumb asses. I will not give up on you, but I need to part ways with you, because you are so far into the weeds that I am losing sight of your heads in the tall, thorny grass. Please come back before you are choked out!
