It was the most disgusting and bizarre thing I’ve ever heard a presidential candidate say: “I moved on her, actually. You know, she was down on Palm Beach. I moved on her, and I failed. I’ll admit it.” Wow... A presidential candidate admitting he tried to molest a woman. In the “olden days,” (pre-‘non-white’ Obama) an admission like that would have ended the candidate’s career (especially among the “Moral Majority”). But that was before the “black” president terrified all the white, racist, Christians, and before Jerry Falwell Jr. and Franklin Graham deified him to the right hand of God.
Since that revelation, we learned (again by Donald’s own confession), that he perved on underage girls at his Ms. USA pageants, and was an all-out creeper when he was onstage with his female political opponent during the presidential election. But he won the Electoral College (which, ironically was created to prevent people like him from becoming president) … He lost the popular vote by three million, but thanks to the freakin’ rich white men who created our Constitution and were afraid that non-rich “men” might win, we’ve become a banana republic.
The one group of people who were sure to be offended by such an act were guaranteed to be Evangelicals… those men and women who claimed to have a sense of superior biblical morality… but nope… they followed him right through the gates of hellish perversion.
When it was discovered that their “moral” president, “assigned by Jesus hissself,” was poking a porn star while his third wife gave birth to their fifth child, the Evangelicals gave him a “mulligan.” Hell, they even brought King David into the picture, grossly distorting David’s story of rape and molestation. When a special election came up in Alabama two years ago, black women had to “outvote” white Evangelical women to prevent a pedophile/child molester from going to Congress. They kept Moore out of office, but the white Evangelical women had the last laugh when boozer/molester Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed by the U.S. Senate for a spot on the Supreme Court. (These mothers must be laughing all the way to their daughter’s forbidden abortion appointments.)
Nobody—and I mean nobody—has had more “moral” violations against Evangelical morals than Donald Trump, and yet they love him. They adore him. You might even say, “they worship him”. And that’s the reality. They WORSHIP Donald Trump. This is the nature of cults… they find a strong, autocratic personality, and they devote themselves to him/her (usually him).
Having spent decades in various Evangelical traditions, including two that were considered cults at the time I was in them: Seventh Day Adventist and The Way International, I’m familiar with how cults work, and the influence of the cult leader. But that was years ago.
Nowadays, we also have smart people doing research who can tell us what a cult looks like in the first place and whether or not we’re stuck in one. According to the Atlantic, there are seven signs that you (or someone you love) might be in a cult.
- 1. Opposing critical thinking:
Well, this one’s easy to recognize. I’ve often had this conversation where I said, “if this were a logical conversation, we wouldn’t be having it.” Nothing is more annoying to today’s Evangelical than education and reason. In fact, if you read the Bible, when God said, thou shalt not eat from the Tree of Knowledge, well, Evangelicals have been avoiding knowledge ever since. This is the challenge of cults. Logic gets thrown away in effort to justify a ‘belief’ that, for some reason, the cult follower wants to embrace. - 2. Isolating members and penalizing them for leaving.
Well that one is easy. You leave the Evangelical ideology, you go to hell… you burn forever… you suffer “humiliations galore…” God will punish you in ways you cannot even imagine. - 3. Emphasizing special doctrines outside scripture.
Notice how desperate Evangelicals are to defend Trump’s actions (not to mention Kavanaugh and Moore) using the Bible but creating special “circumstances” which the Bible does not support. The fact that the Bible, on every level, condemns everything Conservatives stand for, doesn’t deter them. Instead, they have become profoundly creative at doing spiritual acrobatics to defend their “Dear Leader” and those who follow him. - 4. Seeking inappropriate loyalty to their leaders.
Loyalty? Well here’s an interesting article about the ideology of loyalty. But here’s my understanding, based on years of suffering through Christianity… the minute someone starts demanding loyalty, that’s the minute you must accept that they’re afraid of being challenged… which means they know they’re wrong, but they don’t want to admit that. - 5. Dishonoring the family unit.
We’re seeing this one in action now. The followers of the Donald Trump Evangelical Cult are, right now, offering their own daughters to the ideology of Trump, Moore, and Kavanaugh. Yes, they would hate if their daughter had to pee with a transvestite or transsexual, but they’re perfectly fine if their daughters are molested by the leaders of their cult. - 6. Crossing Biblical boundaries of behavior (versus sexual purity and personal ownership).
So: Roy Moore, Donald Trump, Brett Kavanaugh, Josh Dugger… In fact, there’s an interesting article published in “Christian Century” titled “Evangelicals ‘Worse’ than Catholics on Sexual Abuse. - 7. Separation from the Church.
Well, this one is the most difficult of all. Rather than face the reality that they might be heretical… or worse… wrong… they “leave the church” because they “know” they have a “truth” that cannot be accepted by the actual truth. And in desperation they create a new ideology to prevent them from having to deal with their own racism/hate/ignorance/desperation. (We call this “conspiracy theory”.)
Of course, it’s far more complicated than this, but this is the basic foundation of how cults function, and this is what Evangelicals/Conservatives have become. They are the “sheep,” and Donald Trump has become their “shepherd/Dear-Leader,” and they will do ANYTHING to defend him… even if that means sacrificing their own children on the altar of Baal as Israel did so many years ago… or worse, sacrificing Jesus and everything he stood for.
This is what a cult now looks like, and we’re only weeks away from finding out if we’re going to let them destroy our democracy. And as Pilot and Caiaphas showed us, no matter how compassionate the “opposition (Jesus)” is, they’re still subject to the some of the most evil and vile ideologies on earth. That means we’re in that same boat (pun recognized).