God Is Not Finished With Donald Trump. “He sees his claims of fraud as driving up donations – there’s nothing behind it beyond greed. Trump is using the moment to raise money.” Michael Cohen, a man who knows a thing or two about @RealDonaldTrump, surmises that Trump’s post-election misbehavior is all about keeping himself foremost in the minds of his followers and shaping public opinion in his favor. And, of course, making money off of it. Like his Election Defense Fund, a misleading but lucrative revenue stream intended to fund his post-presidency political apparatus. The Washington Post reports that there is no account associated with the so-called Fund, and most money goes to a new Super-PAC he recently set up. “He’s a brilliant thinker,” writes Paula Furr-Knight-White-Cain, “who tends to walk several steps ahead of the masses.” She could have added, “… and the courts”.

Operation Valkyrie; except without Tom Cruise. Prophet Dutch Sheets says it was revealed in dreams that “Valkyrie” was the demonic code name for the operation to steal the election. He put out a 24/7 prayer call – along with his donation plea – declaring his strategy would cause Valkyrie to fail. Perhaps he never saw the film by the same name, where the good guys used an operational plan to remediate the failure of an evil German government. Seems like quite an ironic inversion to me. Meanwhile, Prophet Rev. Dr. Sheets is making an “Appeal to the Supreme Court of Heaven”. You see, if facts go against your prophecies in “the natural” (translation: the real), you always have the supernatural, where you can simply make things up.  “It is God’s will for Trump to win this, not Biden,” he insists, a month after the election. Look for wacky charismatics pretending Trump really still reigns supreme, but in Heaven where sorry, you can’t see it. For the next four years, get ready for denying there is no President Biden, only a usurper like his former boss.

Gott Mit Uns. You would think that an erudite evangelical who wrote a sloppy book to pose as the world’s foremost authority on Dietrich Bonhoeffer would have better sense than to state that “God is with us”. Seriously? At the risk of invoking Godwin’s law, I have to remind people this motto was embossed on Nazi belt buckles. That God sides with nationalistic groups and their politically-radicalized churches is a recurring historical theme, most notably to me being the “white man’s country” of former South Africa, and its elevation by the white supremacist Nederduitse Gereformeerde Kerk, which supplied the mythical theo-political foundation of the Afrikaner identity. What evangelicals really need to be asking themselves is, “are we with God?” If they were serious, they would hear God’s answer is “No. Repent from your sinful self-pride.”.

“Oh! Listen, there’s an odor in there and I didn’t do it.” In My Point…And I Do Have One, Ellen Degeneres describes exiting a stinky airplane restroom and having to explain that the smell was there already. I feel embarrassed like that when people refer to “evangelicalism”, or rather the sociopathic free market religion it has become. I didn’t make the stink, but I have to live with it. I refer to those who seem comfortable in their own sanctified odor while calling out the farts of everyone else.  “We confess the sins of our country as proxies,” prays Michele Bachman. Proxies represent someone else. The self-narrative as the high priestly-class of America holds evangelicals back from admitting any sins themselves. National sin is the problem of other people; Christians are the good guys. Because sin has been externalized – so the argument goes – they are ordained to purify the rest of the nation. “But who,” wrote Solzhenitsyn, “if not we ourselves, constitutes society? This realm of darkness, of falsehood, of brute force, of justice denied and distrust of the good, this slimy swamp was formed by us, and no one else”.[i]

[i] Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr, From Under the Rubble, New York: Bantam Books, 1976, 117.