The "pro-life" hypocrisy of Christian Republicans
This is the "pro-life" party. Uh-huh. Tell me another one.
The hypocrisy is staggering, As a tweet I saw today observed, one can't help but think that today's Trump-supporting "evangelical" Christians would disapprove of Frodo Baggins' decision to hurl the Ring of Power back into the fires burning at the heart of Mount Doom where it was forged. "Just imagine the good he could have accomplished with that ring!," they would probably think. "Imagine the blows he could have struck for religious liberty!" And just think how it could have helped him stick it to the libs, which is surely the most God-pleasing good work of all!
The way Donald Trump has made the Republican Party prostitute itself is sad enough. But it grieves me far more to see the way he's caused what seems to be the greater part of the conservative Christian Church in America to turn aside from following Christ and to lust instead after an orange idol who offers them exactly what the Ring offered its possessor: the very power over the kingdoms of the Earth with which the devil tried to tempt Jesus Himself.
Rejecting the values of Jesus in order to ensure the freedom to better follow Jesus doesn't make a lot of sense. Somehow, I keep hearing Thomas More in Robert Bolt's A Man for All Seasons, upon hearing that Henry VIII has purchased Richard Rich's perjured testimony at More's trial with the Attorney Generalship of Wales, telling his one-time protege, "Richard, Richard. It profiteth a man nothing to gain the whole world and lose his own soul. But for Wales?"
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: I sincerely hope that none of those people who find the deaths of 177,000 Americans- likely at least 300,000 deaths before this pandemic runs its course, many easily preventable- to be "acceptable" have the chutzpah to ever again describe themselves as "pro-life." But of course, if they had the moral self-awareness to see the contradiction, they probably would agree with Frodo (and Jesus) rather than with Franklin Graham and Jerry Fallwell, Jr. and Beelzebub and shun the temptation to compromise their witness for the sake of earthly power.
Comments