When I was a kid in the 1960s my mom was a Jehovah's Witness. She had been recruited by a woman going door-to-door for the Watch Tower Society. My dad didn't like it, for some good reasons (Witnesses are opposed to blood transfusions and discourage interaction with non-Witnesses), and for some bad ones (they condemn certain sex acts that my mom didn't want to do in the first place -- and yeah, it's weird that my mom told me that when I was a kid).
My dad went to the church closest to his real estate office and sought advice. The pastor told him that the Bible says the wife must obey the husband. My father battered my mother with this argument endlessly: "But the Bible says!" he would intone, even though he didn't believe in God or the Bible. Eventually she relented and quit the Witnesses.
The Jehovah's Witnesses are a cult, and it's a good thing my mom got away. The Watch Tower Society is infamous for predicting the end of the world is nigh. They predicted some form of Armageddon would come in 1878, 1881, 1914, 1918, 1925 and 1975. My mom was caught up by the Witnesses in the late Sixties and early Seventies, when they were pushing the "World-Wide Jubilee."
We didn't go to church, but before joining the Witnesses my mom sent us kids to an evangelical "Good News Club" at a neighbor's house, where we sang songs, did crafts, had treats and studied the Bible.
But the most important Bible lesson came from my father, who didn't believe in the Bible at all: he showed me that the entire purpose of religion is control. My father controlled my mother by using her own beliefs against her. The same way religion has been used to control people since time immemorial. It's not an opiate, as Marx would have it, as much as a yoke to keep the people pulling the ruler's plow.
Religion has always been a favorite tool of dictators for keeping the population in line: today in Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Iran with Islam, Russia with the Orthodox Church. In the past, Chinese emperors with Confucianism, Japan with Shinto (which deifies the emperor), Medieval Europe with Christianity, which stipulated that kings ruled by divine right.
Tyrants had a fling with Communism in the 20th century, but it just doesn't work. True communism states that everyone is equal, that the working man has dignity, that everyone should have a voice in the operation of the commune. That's a hard sell when everyone on the Central Committee is a rich fat cat and your kids don't have shoes or food.
Religion, on the other hand, is extremely hierarchical. It preaches that you should suffer in silence and mindlessly obey those at the top, rendering unto Caesar, etc. The Bible is full of stories about kings who commit vile acts of murder and slavery, yet still enjoy God's support.
And this is where we get to the point: religious conservatives are all in for Donald Trump, even though he is the most corrupt, immoral, mendacious, sclerotic, vengeful, petty, cruel, greedy, hate-filled, immature, boastful, blustering, narcissistic, irreligious, gluttonous, racist, sexist, back-stabbing, money-laundering, mobbed-up, emolument-soaked, pussy-grabber/president this country has ever seen.
Oh, sure, religious conservatives pretend to deny Trump is all these things. But everyone knows what kind of scumbag he is. And yet his religious supporters don't care. "He's the modern King David," they intone, as though a Biblical analogy for sinfulness excuses all crimes.
“God uses imperfect people through history. King David wasn’t perfect,” Rick Perry said, before relating that he’d told the president that he embodies “God’s plan for the people who rule and judge over us on this planet in our government.”But as Eliot Cohen points out in his article in The Atlantic, Trump is no King David. For all his faults, David was a man of God, even though he was consumed by his other passions. He felt guilt and remorse. He repented and confessed. And he could actually read and write poetry!
Trump is utterly without conscience. He will not admit error, much less repent, confess or ask God for forgiveness. He does not or cannot read. His only use for religion is use it to control his supporters. He is bent on revenge and the accumulation of wealth (usually at the same time). He lies incessantly, without surcease, to sow chaos and confusion and hatred.
Trump supporters often claim that they hate liberals because liberals think they're so much smarter than conservatives. It's not so much that liberals think conservatives are stupid, it's that Trump plays them for fools (constantly telling lies that are demonstrably false and committing dozens of clearly unethical, immoral and illegal acts), and they go along with it. Some Trump supporters might be naive or misled or truly stupid, but that means the rest are complicit in Trump's perfidy. Which is far worse than being merely stupid.
And besides, it's Trump who is constantly telling us how much smarter he is than everyone else, when clearly he knows nothing about anything, especially religion (Two Corinthians, anyone?).
The David analogy plays right into this. Trump supporters claim he is an imperfect vessel of God's will, like King David. But his followers are being played for fools again, because they have forgotten (or never knew, as I didn't) what David's ultimate fate was:
As Cohen sums it up:
Nor does God (or man, for that matter) simply disregard David’s sins or dismiss them as peccadilloes that might perhaps merit private punishment but no public reaction. David lusted after Bathsheba, the wife of one of his soldiers, the Book of Samuel relates. He arranged to have her husband, Uriah the Hittite, placed in the front of a desperate attack. He died, and the king carried off the widow. Not quite murder, perhaps, but a foul and tricky deed.
In the next chapter, Nathan the prophet stormed into the royal palace, and told the startled David a story about a rich man who has stolen a poor man’s ewe. When David expressed indignation at the villain of the tale, Nathan thundered at him, “You are the man!” And then followed David’s doom, intoned in the name of the God of Israel:
“And so now, the sword shall not swerve from your house evermore, seeing as you have despised Me and have taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be your wife.” Thus says the Lord, “I am about to raise up evil against you from your own house, and I will take your wives before your eyes and give them to your fellow man, and he shall lie with your wives in the sight of this sun. For you did it in secret but I will do this thing before all Israel and before the sun.”
David confessed and repented, but the doom came nonetheless. His son Absalom revolted against him, he was chased from his throne (which he recovered after much hardship); he was humiliated by his inferiors; and he ends his days in the midst of another son’s revolt, decrepit and apparently impotent. David’s sin was not only a private sin, and it did not receive a merely private punishment. Nor did he alone suffer: His humiliation included a revolt that turned his kingdom upside down, and led to waves of political murders even after his death. Apparently, the Ancient of Days was not willing to let bygones be bygones.Conservatives: please, please, please don't let Trump use your own religion to lead you away from what you know is the righteous path. Because he is not one of you. He is just using you to escape prosecution for decades of tax evasion and money laundering for the Russian mob.
In the end, Trump's reign will be just as disastrous as David's.
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