This Easter America’s Evangelicals No Longer Believe in the Risen Lord but in the Alt-Reality of Their Porn-Star Pres

Why do evangelicals support Trump instead of the evolution of empathy that is best represented by the ethical watershed event of the teachings of Jesus? Because evangelicalism isn’t about facts, let alone true spirituality. It’s a made up political reality based not on logic but theological methodology.

What is theological methodology? It is a belief system all of which must be wholeheartedly accepted for any of it to work.

Question anything theological as you would – say – something ordinary like traffic directions to a post office and it falls apart. There is no post office as it were, just a post office feeling that must be sustained at all costs by everything but facts.

Trump has been folded into this sort of theology-based “reality.” He can’t be logically defended any more than the resurrection can. He merely must be accepted as an inevitable manifestation of God’s will in a faux born-again type political experience of a theological, not logical, kind.

People who didn’t grow up in the evangelical bubble don’t realize what they’re demanding when they ask an evangelical to accept simple facts as true: say, that Trump is a lying fraud. The white evangelical brain is deaf, blind and dumb to reality given its cradle to grave conditioning as Nelle Smith writes about in “When You Argue with a Fundamentalist You Don’t Know What You’re Asking For” (Religion Dispatches)

It is an entire reality, based not on logic but on a web of ideas, all of which must be wholeheartedly accepted for any of it to work. It is complete unto itself, self-contained, self-justifying, self-sustaining. … It’s your community, your life, your entire way of thinking, and your gauge for what is true in the world. Evangelicalism feels so right from the inside… know this when you talk to an evangelical: in attempting to persuade them to your point of view—even on a topic that seems minor to you—you’re not asking for them to change their mind, you’re asking them to punch a hole in the fabric of their reality.

Trying to nicely talk evangelical fundamentalist Trump supporters into admitting there is such a thing as reality – say about the Earth’s age, or that guns kill people, or that Trump’s actual character is rotten to its slimy core, or that climate science has proved climate change is both real and manmade – takes too long. Better to vote for sane reality-embracing Democrats in November, and help to consign fundamentalists’ theology-tainted malign influence over our politics to the dustbin of history.

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