You Don’t Like Trump? You Killed Christ.

I am rarely left as speechless as I was upon reading this post by James Riley. Riley is upset with evangelicals like Max Lucado who have come out publicly against Trump. Riley calls them Pharisees.

The #NeverTrump movement is defined by this Pharisee spirit.  It is chock full of it.  Texas pastor Max Lucado is a great example.

What did Lucado do? He spoke out against Trump, accusing him of being “a man who holds up a Bible one day, and calls a lady ‘bimbo’ the next.” Riley says “Donald Trump called a bimbo a bimbo,” making it no secret where he stands on appropriate ways to talk about women. Bear in mind that Riley wrote his piece in August, before Trump’s comments on sexual assault, and that Lucida’s comments were made the previous March. But I want to look at Riley’s piece nonetheless, because his Pharisee accusation is worth digging into.

Riley describes those evangelicals who reject Trump as Pharisees:

Another of my Pharisee correspondents on Facebook wrote this about Donald Trump:

“If you are unconvinced that a foul mouthed, arrogant, strip club and casino owning, philanderer who boasts about being able to shoot people in the streets without losing voters, is immoral then I’m not really sure where to go with this conversation.”

Yet another invoked scripture in his rejection of Trump:

“And have no fellowship with the unfruitful works of darkness, but rather reprove them.”

Riley responds to the allegations his friends have raised against Trump as follows:

Let’s take a few of these, one by one, starting with wagering.  The Bible, folks, doesn’t say much about gambling.  Our pious ancestors in New England used lotteries to build churches.  If your only objection to Donald Trump rests in casino ownership, you really would feel right at home with the Christ-killing band because you have imbibed legalism as doctrine.

Foul mouthed?  I’m guessing you haven’t read scripture with any real scrutiny, because when God gets angry, He doesn’t hold back.  His prophets call harlots harlots.  His Son called religious hypocrites, “white washed tombs full of dead men’s bones.” “Vipers.”  ”Sons of the Devil.” But even if you value a polite tongue, and that’s your virtue, don’t begin comparing that virtue to being courageous in the face of Islamic jihad.  I will take a foul mouth defender of life over a church-sitting coward any day.

Arrogant?  I always get a kick out of people who spend all day in some corner of the bureaucracy, who never need to make a sale, who never need to appear confident, because they get paid every day, whether they do anything useful or not.  Donald has to convince people a skyscraper is worth building, folks.  You are mistaking confidence, faith even, for arrogance, because you’ve never had to really make a sale.  Try it sometime, and see if you can do it without boosting your confidence and risking looking a little “arrogant.”

Strip clubs and philandering. I won’t make any defense for that, but I would ask you to look to yourselves.  Do you buy television cable services from a company that also offers pornography?  Do you stay in hotels with adult content on their television screens?  Is your stock portfolio scrubbed clean of anyone who profits from soft porn? What’s in your wallet and where are you spending it?  The press has been watching Donald pretty closely now for 18 months.  Have you seen any philandering stories?  I haven’t.

None of this gets to the heart of people’s concerns about Trump.

I’m going to move past the discussion of gambling, though I suspect that Riley is the sort of person who is all about rules when it’s an ordinary churchgoer who violates them, rather than a braggart billionaire turned politician. Next, Riley confuses arrogance as confidence. There’s a difference. Add to this that Riley apparently thinks Trump is being just like God (or something?) when he derides and belittles those around him. That’s . . . just weird. And finally, the last paragraph reads as rather humorous, coming as it does in the end of October, after the release of Trump’s 2005 tape and the women who have come forward in its wake.

But I don’t want to dwell on Riley’s excuse-making. Riley writes that:

And I would ask you to look to your Bibles again. God uses some pretty gritty characters to work His glorious and sovereign will. Jacob was a trickster who lied to his father. Abraham had wives and concubines.  Samson kept a harlot.  Solomon had hundreds of concubines.  Peter betrayed Christ.  Saul of Tarsus, was a murderous wretch.

You actually know all about that, but when you see a flawed man, in the flesh, you act just like a stoning torch mob, and you won’t even admit it.

Why do I get the uncomfortable feeling that Riley would be the first to join a stoning torch mob if the individual in question was a gay man or a woman having premarital sex, rather than a rich and famous real estate developer—unafraid to snub and use those around him—with his name on the Republican ticket?

Look, Jacob paid dearly for lying to his father. Abraham paid dearly for doubting God’s promise that Sarah would conceive and taking a concubine to bear his heir for him. Samson paid dearly for being indiscrete with Delilah, who had been sent to learn the secret of his strength. As for Solomon, while it was expected for a king to have wives and concubines, Solomon allowed his to turn him away from God, and, once again, he paid dearly for this—God literally tore his kingdom apart. Peter bitterly regretted betraying Christ, and while Saul of Tarsus did persecute Christians, he underwent a dramatic conversion and become a changed man before God used him to spread the gospel as the Apostle Paul. That transition was a painful (and long) one. I’m surprised Riley didn’t mention David, but he, too, paid dearly for his sin.

I get the feeling Riley doesn’t actually read his Bible very carefully, if he could throw out that list of names and then so flippantly suggest that Trump is somehow equivalent to them. When has Trump ever faced consequences for his actions? The men on Riley’s list suffered ostracism from their parents, the loss of children, death, and the destruction of their kingdoms. When has Trump experienced any of this as a result of his misdeeds? Then men on Riley’s list were either separated from God or underwent often dramatic conversions, their lives and even their personalities changing to meet God’s needs. When have we seen any of that happen with Trump? We haven’t.

Yes, it is consistent with evangelical beliefs to argue that God uses flawed people. But there are a couple of problems with using this argument in defense of Trump. Trump has neither repented verbally of his past actions nor changed his present behavior. Trump has made his career screwing people over, he has never expressed any regret or admitted wrongdoing, and he does not appear to have stopped screwing people over. Trump isn’t a flawed but otherwise well-meaning individual. Trump is flawed to his very core.

But let’s return to Riley:

Jesus knew all about this dismissive, self-righteous character of ours.  He knew our nature.  He knew there’s a Pharisee spirit in us that takes pride in being faithful to our wives, even as our horn-dog spirit wrestles with Donald Trump’s beauty pageants.  Are we righteous, or just jealous?  When the harlot adorns Jesus’ feet with precious ointment, are we accusing or praising God for forgiveness?

Oh interesting. It appears that Riley wrote his piece only for men, with his comment about taking “pride in being faithful to our wives” while “our horn-dog spirit wrestles with” beauty pageants. Could someone please let him know that women exist, and that we read blogs too? And let me just say that this bit does not make me think well at all of evangelical men, if Riley is a fair representation. The way he writes this makes me feel like an object that exists for either being faithful to or wrestling with. It makes me feel icky. I’m not a piece of meat, I’m a person.

But there’s a bigger problem here. Trump is not the harlot who adorned Jesus feet with precious ointment. Or is Riley really suggesting that Trump is a marginalized member of society who faces derision from the rich and powerful and ostracism from most others? Jesus did not defend the rich and powerful. No, he defended the poor and at-risk. When a rich man came to him wanting to be his disciple, Jesus told him to go and sell all of his possessions and give them to the poor. The rich man never returned.

What does it mean to be a Pharisee? As Riley uses the term, and as I heard it used growing up, it meant to be legalistic and judgmental of others. It meant to believe that you were better than others, and to believe that the letter of the law was more important than the spirit of the law.

Besides, where was this torrent of calls on evangelicals not to judge when the governor of North Carolina passed a law barring trans people from public restrooms? Where was it when evangelicals condemned Lawrence v. Texas, lamenting that gay men could no longer be arrested for having consensual sex? Where was it when a teenage Tina Anderson was sent across the country to bear her baby in shuttered silence? Where was it when Trayvon Martin lost his life? Why is it that evangelicals only seem to call on others not to judge when the person in question is wealthy, white, powerful, and male? What about the poor and marginalized whom Jesus spent so much time defending? Why is it acceptable to judge those at the bottom, who are often already struggling, while evangelical or conservative leaders can do terrible things and still get a pass?

Once again, let’s return to Riley:

Donald Trump is more righteous than you think.  He wants to protect you from Islamic zealots.  He wants to protect your right to defend your families with firearms.  He even wants to exempt your pulpits from IRS tyranny.   He wants to end the death tax, so you can pass on your farms and your family business to your children.  He wants to lower your taxes.  He wants to protect the lives of unborn children and appoint Constitutional judges.

But you and Max Lucado don’t like his style.

Your priorities are all mixed up, just like the people who killed Christ.

Ouch.

Speaking of mixed up priorities, though, I don’t remember the New Testament saying anything about resisting taxes, or about guns, or about protection. In fact, I’m pretty sure Jesus and Paul both instructed their followers to pay their taxes. I’m pretty sure, too, that Jesus told his followers to turn the other cheek when someone caused them offense, which rather speaks against the focus on guns and protection here. Whatever happened to “you shall know them by their love”? When did evangelicalism morph into “you shall know them by their political conservatism”? Actually, I know the answer to that. It happened over the course of the twentieth century. It wasn’t pretty, and was sometimes a calculated ploy by political activists.

Are you curious how Riley responded to the 2005 Trump tape earlier this month?

So spare me your indignation, Paul Ryan, at Donald Trump’s crude hot mic banter. Any honest man in America has heard that sort of thing, dozens of times, and so have most women. Does it represent our best and brightest moment? Of course not. Is it a crime against women? Get a life. This is precisely the sort of crude comedy that earns Sarah Silverman a spot at the Democratic National Convention.

Riley doesn’t know what consent is, or why it matters, and that’s scary.

[The Apostle Paul] even said that anyone dumb enough to attempt to please God by cutting off his foreskin should go ahead and cut the whole thing off. (That sounds something like Paul grabbing them by the p***y, doesn’t it? Would Paul Ryan approve?)

Um. Riley? You’re scaring me, bro. You really can’t tell the difference between someone messing with their own genitals and someone messing with someone else’s genitals without their permission?! HOW CAN YOU NOT. O_o

In the end, what is a Pharisee, and what does it take to not be one? I’d argue that a Pharisee is one who elevates rules over people. The problem is that while Trump may not care about the rules, he also doesn’t care about people. Do evangelicals who oppose Trump do so because he breaks the rules, or because he doesn’t care about people? That is an interesting question, and would have made an interesting blog post. But that is not the question Riley sought to answer. Instead, Riley’s goal was to defend a man who cares about neither rules nor people. And that, my friends, is both terribly sad and horribly frightening.

I have a Patreon! Please support my writing!