It’s time to stop screwing around by saying Donald Trump might be another Adolf Hitler.
The fact is, he’s worse and the people who are supporting him make Der Fuehrer’s followers look like the Mickey Mouse Club.
Hitler was a nationalist and racist of the most rabid type, but it was pretty apparent he only paid lip service to religion. His hero wasn’t Jesus, it was the great names of Teutonic mythology. Trump’s hero is Donald Trump, and I don’t mean Junior.
Trump actually said the other day that if God and Jesus came down from Heaven to supervise next year’s election, he would carry every state including California and New York. Which if you’re paying attention, is actually a much worse way to take the Lord’s name in vain than to use it in a curse.
Yet somehow, Trump is a hero to people of a certain kind of faith. I don’t want to say Christians, because it’s only a certain kind of Christians who love Trump. The kind of Christians who don’t believe Roman Catholics are Christians.
The ones who call themselves Christian Nationalists, or Christian Dominionists. The ones who would like to roll back much of the social progress of the post-WWII era. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, radical reactionary Clarence Thomas said there was no reason not to revisit other cases he and his ilk hate.
Like Griswold v Connecticut, the 1965 case in which the court ruled that government could not restrict the right of married couples to practice birth control.
Like Obergefell v Hodges, the 2015 case in which the court effectively legalized same-sex marriage.
Add Roe to that and you have what Thomas and his ilk would consider the trifecta of bad behavior.. To them, God wants women to get pregnant, carry their babies to term and make sure they marry someone of the opposite sex (when they’re no longer babies).
It should come as no surprise that Thomas is OK with the least popular decision of that era, the court’s unanimous ruling in Loving v Virginia in 1967. That’s the one that said states could not ban interracial marriage. I remember reading that in the years leading up to that decision, nearly 90 percent of Americans believed interracial marriage was wrong.
Trump and his brand of religious folks would like more than anything else to turn the clock back 80 years, back when colored people knew their place, women knew their husbands were the boss, gay people had to hide deep in that famous closet and non-Christians knew to keep their mouths shut.
So imagine President Hitl-, er, Trump, backed by Christian Dominionist Republicans making homosexuality illegal and punishable at least by prison and maybe even by death. Imagine legally naturalized citizens having their status revoked and then being deported by being non-desirable citizens to Trump.
It’s one thing, even if incorrect, to call this a Christian nation.
It’s another thing entirely to call it that and then reject nearly everything Christ taught or caried about.