By Diane Roberts
The party that calls itself “Republican” worships a petty, angry, and aggressively white god.
I’m not talking about Donald Trump — though they often confuse him with the Son of Man. (Check out the fake courtroom sketch of Jesus sitting next to Trump at the defense table.)
But their god conveniently hates the same people Trump hates: Black people; book-readers; science-believers; women; Latinos; Muslims; LGBTQ — all of whom aren’t true Americans and clearly headed for hellfire.
This mean little deity enjoys making threats, at least according to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who recently posted on her Twixxter account, “God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent. Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come.”
Kids, this is what happens when you don’t pay attention in fifth grade science.
Moscow Margarine goes on, insisting Vladimir Putin’s only killing thousands of Ukrainians to protect Christianity.
Obviously.
Many of her MAGA co-religionists agree: Vlad the Impaler is a fine Christian leader who invaded Ukraine because it’s full of, you know, Ukrainians, and Jesus doesn’t like them.
Donald Trump desperately wants to be Putin when he grows up: wouldn’t it be fun to have your political enemies killed instead of having to face them in a free democratic election?
Meanwhile, there he is, a criminal defendant in a grubby courtroom, alternately glowering and nodding off, whining he’s being persecuted because — just like Jesus! — he’s God’s anointed, leader of a battle between Good and Evil.
He insists he was “PRAYING not sleeping!!”
Almighty’s representative
Trump claims the “Good” role, which shows how far the geniuses in his party have strayed from any grasp of reality, not to mention the faith they claim to espouse.
I seem to recall non-white, non-nasty Jesus favoring the poor, the powerless, the old and the sick over the rich, the authoritarian, and the heavily armed.
So much for the New Testament.
Trump has convinced his acolytes that he’s the Almighty’s representative on earth, so holy he’s now selling bibles.
Seems the tacky-ass $399 gold sneakers didn’t rake in enough cash, so for the low, low price of $59.99, you can have a “God Bless the USA Bible,” the only one “officially endorsed by Donald Trump and Lee Greenwood.”
That would be Lee Greenwood, the spiritual leader and musical giant who brought you the immortal McDonalds breakfast song: “McDonalds and you, McDonalds and you/Fresh scrambled eggs, sausage, hotcakes, juice, and coffee too./Just like sunshine every morning, McDonalds and you!”
And, of course, the ubiquitous and bellicose anthem “God Bless the USA.”
Fun fact: Greenwood once tried to trademark the phrase “God Bless the USA” for, he said, “accent pillows; decorative centerpieces of wood” and “wall hangings.”
Move over, Old School Messiah: The money changers are now welcome in the temple and MAGA Jesus is all about profit and power — forget all that peace, love and understanding crap. “Christianity” now means white supremacy, misogyny, and xenophobia.
A ‘real scumbag’
Take Matt Gaetz, charitably described by one of his Republican colleagues as a “real scumbag.”
Gaetz, the eminently punchable congressman from Florida’s First District, claims he’s a faithful Baptist, a Believer with a capital “B.”
The guy seems a couple of quarts low on the milk of human kindness, however.
Gaetz has made racist remarks about Florida legislators and says pro-choice women shouldn’t worry about abortion because they are fat, ugly spinsters no one wants to have sex with, anyway.
He does favor suffering the little children to come unto him as long as they’re 17, female, and cute.
The House Ethics Committee is still investigating him for this particular religious practice.
Another fine MAGA Christian, Sen. Josh Hawley, famously raised a fist in support of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists, then courageously hid from them as they rampaged through the Capitol.
Hawley has grandly quoted Patrick Henry saying, “this great nation was founded, not by religionists, but by Christians; not on religions, but on the Gospel of Jesus Christ. For this very reason, peoples of other faiths have been afforded asylum, prosperity, and freedom of worship here.”
Problem is, Patrick Henry never said that. It comes from a 1956 article in an anti-semitic, anti-Black magazine called The Virginian.
Demonstrating his brand of Christian humility, Hawley posted a “clarification” that was mostly snark aimed at the historians who called him out: “I’m told the libs are major triggered by the connection between the Bible and the American Founding.”
Hawley has a degree in history from Stanford.
Foolishness about the Founders
Ron DeSantis has a history degree from Yale. Yet he, too, has a troubled relationship with actual history.
He’s just signed a new law allowing taxpayer-supported schools to bring in chaplains. All these chaplains have to do is pass a background check — as if background checks catch every lunatic, pedophile, proselytizer, anti-vaxxer, and racist fruitcake likely to apply to “counsel” students.
DeSantis claims he’s “restoring the sense of purpose that our Founding Fathers wanted to see in education” and says that, back in George Washington’s day, “every school was a religious school. Public schools were religious schools.”
Perhaps he fell asleep in class: 1. There was no public education system then; 2. The Founding Fathers never put forth rules for public education, though some of them thought religion should be taught in schools while others, such as Thomas Jefferson, were adamantly opposed; and 3. There was indeed prayer in schools until the Supreme Court figured out that was horrendously divisive, but public schools were not expressly religious.
To be fair, Massachusetts passed the Old Deluder Satan Act in 1647 (more than 100 years before the Declaration of Independence) which required towns to teach children to read.
They weren’t focused so much on Satan except if you couldn’t read the Bible and understand the Word of the Lord, you might end up in his clutches.
Ron DeSantis is, however, focused on Satan — or at least the Satanic Temple. He imagines all these chaplains will be Baptist preachers, a few Catholic priests, and a handful of rabbis.
But Florida, with its diverse population, may see Muslims, Hindus, Zoroastrians, and — inevitably! — ministers of the Satanic Temple who want to become chaplains.
Aryan tough-guy Jesus
DeSantis insists he will not allow those pagan monsters to get near your young’uns, insisting the Satanic Temple is “not a religion” and “not qualified to be able to participate in this.”
Newsflash: Satanism is a religion and the Satanic Temple is, in fact, a church, recognized by the IRS, so excluding its, er, ministers is unconstitutional.
DeSantis has a degree in law from Harvard.
But since when have Christo-white nationalists cared about the law? When have they cared about America’s cherished separation of church and state?
Fear and hatred make people accustomed to unchecked power do strange things.
MAGA adherents to Aryan tough-guy Jesus see America becoming less white and less Christian, so they’re freaking out, flailing around, breaking things — such as your right to control your own body, your right to read what you want, identify however you want, and love who you want.
I liked the old Jesus better.
Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books.
