I have a friend who is a fairly hard core Trumpanzee.
Actually I have two, but I think one of them is that way because he has a fairly twisted view of politics in America. My other friend was a very good one in the 1970s and in fact both introduced me to my first wife and stood up for me at our wedding.
I haven’t seen him since 1985, but I discovered him on Facebook recently. The only posts and responses I see from him deal with Donald Trump and/or politics.
While I disagree with almost everything he says, most of the disagreements are reasonable. Only one really bothered me. My friend said he was for Trump because …
“I believe in freedom of religion.”
If that seems ironic, it’s because Trump and his Christian Nationalist backers don’t believe in freedom of religion at all. Whether it was Trump himself who tried to ban Muslims from entering the United States or Christian Nationalists who are a minority of their own faith trying to impose their views on others, this is not a quest for freedom of religion.
In fact, it’s the one area in which they reject the original intent of the Founders, who went to great lengths to say the U.S. had not been founded as a Christian government. In fact, a treaty between the United States and Tripoli said exactly that.
“The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion…”
Many of the Founders were Deists, believing that God created the universe, set things in motion and then just sat back and watched. Four of our first five presidents — George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe — as well as Benjamin Franklin were Deists.
The great irony is that evangelicals — the main driving force behind Christian Nationalism — make up only about a quarter of American Christians. That doesn’t mean there aren’t non-evangelicals who agree with them. On the Supreme Court, for example, six of the nine justices are conservative Catholics. One other is a liberal Catholic and the other who seats are filled by a Protestant and a Jew.
All three of Trump’s appointees are conservative Catholics, a big reason Roe v Wade was overturned. Several of the Catholics are members of Opus Dei, a very conservative group within the church.
Nobody is preventing conservative Christians from practicing their religion. What is being prevented is them forcing everyone else to obey the tenets of their religion.
And that is not freedom of religion.
That’s religious oppression.
And that’s un-American.