Watching Roy Moore’s wife, Kayla, defend her husband in front of cameras and supporters couldn’t have been more disturbing. Especially when she announced that her husband was a Christian fighting for God.
“He Is a Loving Father and a Grandfather. Most Important, He Is a Christian.”
And while that stands as one of the most repugnant defenses of Christianity ever uttered, it’s hardly a surprise. For decades Evangelicals have railed against immorality, but with the election of Donald Trump, have had to do a complete about face. Which brings us to a sort of WTF moment as we watch their intellectual somersaults in defense of Moore as a “Christian”; while trying to make pedophilia okay, even to the point of using the bible as a defense.
Take the Bible: Zachariah and Elizabeth for instance. Zachariah was extremely old to marry Elizabeth and they became the parents of John the Baptist. Also take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus. There's just nothing immoral or illegal here. Maybe just a little bit unusual.
Wow! I’ll say it backwards: “!woW”
Yet this is why religion was created in the first place: to serve human interests (mostly men). Want to own women? Start a religion that justifies polygamy. Want to sell science fiction books? Start a religion based on your book. In the case of Christianity, start a new denomination or just pull out a few scriptures that support your personal bias, and viola—just become a sect. Hate gay people? Think white people are superior? Hate immigrants? There are scriptures that will support you.
Even in the bible, the god of the Old Testament comes across like an alcoholic father, who, when sober, is loving, compassionate, and a great guy to be around. But when he’s on a bender—it’s hellfire and damnation and killing every first born male. Christians decided to soften that image in the form of a New Testament. In their version, God was sober and on step nine of the 12-step program: Making amends… However, as Christians started taking heat for their attacks on the Roman religions, along comes John the Revelator, who turned both God and Jesus into vengeful, vindictive genocidal maniacs.
Christianity is much different than the religion Jesus taught. The creator of Christianity, by his own admission had an emotional breakdown (on the road to Damascus) and had to face the trajectory of his life up to that point. Here he saw Jesus. Why Jesus? That’s a good question. It’s highly unlikely that they ever met. Paul was, presumably, a Temple mercenary sent to Damascus by Temple leaders to kidnap someone… a Christian perhaps… which may have influenced his hallucination.
Despite his “calling,” Paul had a problem. He was anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and unable to commit himself to the radical way Jesus told his disciples to live and love. So he created Christ: a Hellenistic deity who died and rose again so that Paul would not have to do any of those things, and claim forgiveness should anyone challenge him.
In his book, One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America, author Kevin Kruse details the ways in which Wall Street took over one particular segment of Christianity. After the Great Depression, Americans were pretty angry at those who wrecked the economy and destroyed many lives. So Wall Street turned to Christian mega pastors, who helped created what we now call the “Prosperity Doctrine.” In this new doctrine, Jesus didn’t hate the rich, he loved them. Being rich was God’s reward. If you were poor, there was sin in your life, or you didn’t have enough faith. In other words, it was your fault, not God’s (and especially not theirs). To combat Harry S. Truman’s Fair Deal, they created “Socialism” and linked it to doing good toward the poor.
One of their greatest champions was none other than Billy Graham.
Ever since the inception of the Mormon church, Evangelicals have considered it a “cult,” and therefore dangerous to Christianity. A cult, as defined by The Christian Research Institute is one of the following:
These groups deny or distort fundamental Christian doctrines such as the Trinity, the deity of Christ, and salvation by grace through faith alone. Some cults that would fall into this category are the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Christian Science, The Way International, and the Unity School of Christianity.
Yet in 2012, when Mitt Romney ran against Barack Obama, Billy Graham removed Mormons from the list of cults, giving Evangelicals the green light to vote Romney.
We saw it again when Donald Trump, the very antithesis of everything Evangelicals SAID they believe, ran for president. Their defense of him was essentially to say that he wasn’t running for Pastor in Chief, but for President, and therefore, his actions didn’t matter. Even now, after all Trump has done to insult everything Jesus stood for, he has not lost the support of Evangelicals, and it’s likely that he never will. Instead of challenging him, they adopt new beliefs that justify his behaviors.
So here we are, watching Evangelicals once again surround a person who would make Jesus so angry he would take the whip he used in the Temple and repurpose it for this latest batch of those “Children of the Devil.” We see pastors come to his defense. His own wife. Women. And even the Governor, who acknowledged that she believed the young women, told reporters that she would still vote for the pedophile.
And this is why we will never have a reasonable debate with Evangelicals. Many have tried quoting Jesus to illustrate how far they have fallen, only to realize that it no longer matters. Evangelicals simply changed their beliefs to fit their ideology.
Roy Moore is probably going to win, and he will be seen as a “liberator” to those poor Evangelicals who have been forced to share America with black and brown people; atheists, agnostics, or ‘spiritual-but-not-religious’; Muslims; gay and trans; scientists and the educated…
But that’s what we face. Religion is created by humans to justify ideologies, and even though they claim that they believe in the literal Word of God, they have altered the book significantly… burying passages, cherry picking others, and denouncing Jesus in the name of Christ. These people cannot, or will not allow Jesus back into their ideology, and that means that we have to acknowledge what has taken place, and find a way to work around it.