A loved one passed along a link to this Washington Post piece attacking the "Evangelicals" who gave Donald Trump his victory in South Carolina's primary. The writer is Joseph Loconte, a history prof at Cru's King's College in Manhattan. The noteworthy thing is not where Loconte draws his salary, but that his piece ran in the Post.
Inside the Beltway, there's not one man, woman, or child of privilege who is not gnashing his teeth at the prospect of Donald Trump sitting in the White House, and they can't disguise their hatred for the voters who are threatening to put him there. Sitting in traffic waiting for President Obama's motorcade to pass has been a joy these past seven years, presenting one more opportunity for self-congratulation over the triumph of the college educated over cigarette-smoking, gun-toting, Bible-reading trash. Sitting in traffic waiting for President Trump's motorcade to pass would be beyond infuriating. It would drive the pols and their K Street pimps to gnash their teeth and drop-kick their iPhones.
Now as I've made clear, I'm no fan of The Donald. I consider him the perfect expression of the wicked man described by Psalm 73. As I wrote some weeks back, "Sorry, you who like Mr. Trump. I can't imagine any man who is a worse candidate for President, including Bernie Sanders. And I believe it is a Christian witness to say so." So now, I find abhorent those who put President Obama in the White House and have their fondest hopes set on putting Hillary Clinton there also, yet I do not have the slightest sympathy for Joe Loconte's attack upon the Southern Christians who voted for Trump. It strikes me as traitorous to the Church.
Loconte's approach to getting an oped piece in the Post was to draw an analogy between Pope Leo kneeling before Charlemagne back in A.D. 900 and Evangelicals voting for Trump eleven-hundred and sixteen years later. According to Loconte's narrative...
Pope Leo submitted to Charlemagne because he was afraid and he wanted Charlemagne to protect him. Southern Christians are voting for Trump for the same reason: they are fearful and look at Trump as their defense against the bullies.
Condescension toward those who fear is typical of smug intellectuals. Only uneducated people and mothers are fearful, and it serves those mothers right. If they stopped bearing children and became feminists, they'd be done with fear. Pity the poor religious southerners still stuck in churches whose God is still to be feared. It's understandable that fear has escaped their inner life and corrupted their voting.
Any how, Southern Christians know every professional politician has made his peace with sodomite marriage and abortion, so they're looking for a non-politician capable of saying "no" to all the soulless ghouls holding elected office in our nation's capital. They hope and pray for a President who can shut down the North's federal decadence and, just in the nick of time, along comes Donald Trump saying everything perfectly calculated to render the ghouls, their Supreme Court justices, and federal judges apoplectic. The elite who have corrupted our nation all seem to hate Trump with a perfect hatred, and that's good enough for them. Something about the enemy of your enemy.
Southern Christians are not voting for Trump because they love him. It could have been anyone who gave them hope he would take the stick to our nation's capital, and who better than a belligerent and egotistical real estate man with enough fame and money not to care a whit what anyone anywhere thinks of him?
The simple reality is that Trump did a better job of getting their attention than Cruz.
Loconte tries to shame Southern Christians for being fearful and wanting their president to protect them from the decadent oppression of our nation's elite. He trots out Charlemagne and Leo from the year 900 and warns that the price of Charlemagne's accession to the throne was the "ruthlessness" of Charlemagne's "wars against the Saxons, a Germanic tribe of pagan worshipers" and the 782 Massacre of Verden in which Charlemagne "ordered the execution of 4,500 prisoners, apparently for their refusal to convert to Christianity."
Yes, yes; those nasty religious wars throughout the very dark medieval age during which the Christian Church killed their thousands. Voting for Trump "sounds familiar" to historian Loconte. Stupid Southern Christians better watch out who they vote for because they may get him and he may... What?
Order the execution of 4,500 prisoners because they refuse to convert to Christianity?
Has the ban on dope-smoking been lifted in King's College's faculty offices? HELLO!
To anyone who knows the God of Scripture, the real horror to be feared is the continuation of any Democratic regime that joins Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton in their promotion of the slaughter of fifty million little babies around the world and in our own cities each and every year. But of course, somehow the filthy sexual perversions and wholesale slaughter of babies promoted by President Obama and Secretary Clinton slipped the mind of Professor Loconte and he is left spouting off in the pages of the Washington Post about the risk his fellow Christians down in the South are taking putting Donald Trump in the White House. He might put up a fence between us and Mexico and place a temporary hold on Muslim immigrants. Gasp!
Loconte warns Southern Christians against repeating "one of the saddest chapters in the history of Christianity [when] the courageous church of the martyrs became ...a fearful and persecuting church." He writes that Southern Christian votes for Trump are likely to be votes "consecrating a brutal political authority..."
Really? He's afraid that we are on the verge of establishing a brutal regime supported by Evangelicals? If only Southern Christians could see things as clearly as Christian intellectuals in Manhattan see them.
Professor Loconte's ship sailed long ago. The very worst Trump could do is to continue to feed the death machine, and hasn't every other Republican president done the same? As Joe Sobran used to say, "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Foot me three times, I'm a Republican!"
Engaging in high-brow identity politics and fear mongering is merely engaging in identity politics and fear mongering. Such behavior by men like Professor Loconte has left the "rest of the country" feeling like there is no choice but Trump.
Tim serves Clearnote Church, Bloomington, Indiana. He and Mary Lee have five children and big lots of grandchildren.
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