Many who claim to be Christian want The Ten Commandments prominently displayed on school and courthouse lawns, in courtrooms and elsewhere. Sometimes I wonder if they’ve ever read and thought about the Commandments in trying to justify and defend Donald Trump’s propensity for lying and bearing false witness. However much they’ve read them, they haven’t internalized the meanings of them.
I will say one thing for Donald Trump, from whom lies fall from the lips like hard rain you can’t see but definitely can hear in astonishment.
In just under a week’s time in office he has managed to give the whole of God’s world a massive nervous breakdown and damaged relationships with our best friends and allies in the world, starting with Mexico.
In his first full weekend on the job he created a constitutional crisis with his signature on a most unconstitutional order banning anybody from Muslim countries excepting the countries in which he does HUGE business. (Saudi Arabia, for example, which gave us Bin Laden and the 911 psychos.)
(In addition, his counselor added a new term to government arena: “alternative facts.”)
That’s a huge accomplishment, however dubious.
I’m still trying to process the brazen lies he told in one week on duty.
His insistence against all empirical evidence that he had the largest turnout at his Inauguration, for example.
That is simply an astounding lie that anyone with two eyes and one reasonably object mind can see and know.
Also, his insistence that 3 to 5 million immigrants committed voter fraud, and that that’s why he lost the popular vote.
That’s a lie.
Period.
(Trump did have an overwhelming victory, county-wise. But he still lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes. And his electoral college victory ranked 46th out of 58 presidential elections.)
And the investigation he seems hell-bent on having into allegedly massive fraud into his own election promises to be a huge–huge!–waste of taxpayer time and money. (Gotta love that Republican fiscal responsibility.)
As some of the more sensible Republicans in D.C. like Sen. Lindsey Graham have maintained, this new President is simply undermining his own credibility, hurting no one but himself and the country.
But the fact is that he’s hurting Christianity big-time.
I can’t repeat this enough: Christianity is The Truth and Christianity is about the pursuit of truth.
Setting aside the Truth that our Lord Jesus embodied, consider that whole Ten Commandments thing.
For years and years and years we’ve been hearing fundamentalist Christians insist on having The Ten Commandments posted in school classrooms, on courtroom walls and even carved in stone on courthouse or school lawns.
So what is it about “thou shall not bear false witness” (i.e., lying against another) they don’t understand.
Trump has so intensely and unceasingly borne false witness against so many of his critics and enemies that the list of all those he’s lied about, hurt, and assaulted with his verbiage wouldn’t fit on a 50-foot-long scroll.
Consider also the idolatry of the sort we’ve seen attached to this President from the time he was a new candidate. It’s clear to me that many Christians (they who practice the bastardized version of Christianity that is Trumpianity) worship at the altar of this President in a way that amounts to worship of a false god.
They are convinced that God actively placed President Trump in his position of world power in order to save America first and in doing that, saving the world.
The kind of God that would actively place a pathological liar and character assassin in the White House would be a God that has nothing to do with truth.
But that kind of god is not God the Almighty, Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer.
The Redeemer was the walking, talking Truth.
Donald Trump is a walking, talking Lie.
And that’s the Truth.
The 1st amendment and freedom of religion aside for a moment, even if it were OK to impose religion in the schools and courthouses, it still comes down to whose religious or even whose Christian view.
If we are going to impose biblical commandments, why the 10 Commandments in the Old Testament instead of what Jesus himself said were the two greatest commandments: to love your God with all your heart and the second was to love your neighbor as yourself.
Why the harsh judgment of the Old Testament instead of the love, grace and salvation of the New Testament?
Let’s be honest, this not a matter of being religious, or being Christian, this is picking which part of Christianity with which to judge and condemn others.