Have you murdered Hillary Clinton in your heart?

Every night after dinner, my sons and I read the Bible together. Tonight our scripture was Matthew 5:21-26 where Jesus offers an expansive definition of the sixth commandment not to murder. He says that harboring anger against someone or insulting them constitutes a violation of that commandment. Donald Trump’s dangerously reckless remark at a recent rally about “second amendment people” doing “something” about Hillary Clinton was definitely a violation of the sixth commandment.

But he’s not the first person to murder Hillary Clinton in his heart. A continuous lava flow of contempt (sixth commandment) and false witness (ninth commandment) has been directed at Hillary Clinton since 1992 by people who supposedly love their Bibles more than anything. The hate train against Hillary Clinton for most of my life has been one of the most prominent and visible symptoms of the toxic Christianity in our culture.

I’m not a huge Hillary Clinton fan. She’s a warhawk and a laissez-faire capitalist. But to be honest, it’s pretty well impossible to gain an objective perspective on her because of all the sixth and ninth commandment violations that have been committed against her for the past 24 years. There are seriously problematic things she has done, like her role in establishing the prison industrial complex and her treatment of her husband’s sexual victims.

But there is also an overwhelming sea of lies that have been circulated about her, and no one has ever been held accountable when the lies have been proven false. They just come back with another rumor and hope that it sticks. A whole cottage industry was spawned out of the hatred against Hillary Clinton. That’s how hate radio and half of the bestselling authors in the front section at Barnes and Nobles got their start.

The visceral hatred of Hillary Clinton is a serious sin that has had real consequences, not primarily for her physical safety or political career but in the erosion of the morality of the people who have harbored this hatred and delighted in spreading it as their own toxic form of pornography. So here’s a serious question for you to contemplate: have you murdered Hillary Clinton in your heart? Only you can answer that. It’s worth examining and repenting.

Repentance doesn’t mean you have to vote for her or agree with anything she believes. It just means treating her the way Christians are supposed to treat people: with basic human decency, that thing we Christians forgot about over three decades of culture war.

I’ve murdered other politicians in my heart when my visceral hatred of fundamentalism spilled over into contempt for people like George W. Bush. That contempt did spiritual damage to me. And furthermore I participated in the deterioration of our political discourse. The contempt against Bush was part of what laid the groundwork for the contempt against Obama. It’s not strictly cause and effect. There was this other thing called racism that played into it. But our contempt does breed more contempt. And so many people have built their careers off fanning the flames.

Donald Trump got to where he is because of our collective sin. He was able to exploit our murderous hearts. But his presidential candidacy is honestly a real gift to our country if it becomes the means by which white evangelical Christians wake up and engage in mass repentance. It gives us the opportunity to recognize the fact that our hate is no less sinful than premarital sex and the other sins we like to talk about. We are all guilty of breaking the sixth commandment in varying degrees.

Sin truly is a team sport. The worst thing about it is the way it creates an environment where great violence becomes possible. Even as grave as things seem in our culture, I’m hopeful. Because I know that God’s wrath is revealed for the sake of shattering our self-justification and bringing us to repentance. We can use this opportunity to heal our nation. The question is whether the Christians in our nation will ask Jesus to save the world from us.

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