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“Satanists in Christian Clothing”

AP: Mar-a-Lago, Florida

In a press conference Wednesday, President-Elect Trump admitted to having literally sold his soul to the Devil in order to win re-election.

“I summoned Him up myself, conjured Him up, at Halloween, just before the Election,” he told reporters, “that's His birthday, you know. You should have seen me, it was wild! He showed up, too—in person, of course. Hey, when the Donald calls, even the Devil comes.”

He laughed. “How else do you think a worthless, incompetent piece of sh*t like me could possibly have got back into office?”

“Talk about the Art of the Deal,” he continued. “I traded something that you can't even see—you can't even see it, everybody knows that—you can't smell it or taste it or hear it or feel it, some people would say it doesn't even exist. I signed the contract, the pact with the Devil—He's my buddy, you know, my good buddy—traded nothing for something, nothing, and now I'm going to be the most powerful man in the world!”

When asked if the revelation—which puts to rest the swirling cloud of rumors that have dogged his campaign since the election—would damage his popularity with Evangelical voters, a key voting bloc in his reelection, Trump laughed.

In Praise of Seasonal Pragmatism

According to the borborygmic rumblings of Evangelical paranoia, the greeting “Happy Holidays” is a foisted Deep State plot to elbow Christmas out of its rightful (and deserved) first-class civic preeminence.

Well. After the November election just passed, I guess they sure showed us.

Or maybe they just need to get out more.

Me, I know people who celebrate—or at least acknowledge—all sorts of holidays at this time of year, including (in roughly numerical order):

• Yule
• Christmas (religious)
• Christmas (secular)
• Hanuka
• Solstice (secular)
• Nativity
• Saturnalia
• Dies Natalis Solis Invicti
• Chaumós
• Pancha Ganapati
• Hogswatch
• Lurlinemas

Not to mention Thanksgiving and New Year's.

I don't personally know anyone who celebrates Kwanzaa—which friends tell me is largely a top-down affair anyway, more officially- than privately-observed—though no doubt that's only a matter of time.

(Festivus, of course, is a NY in-joke, not a holiday.)

 “Behold, in the nostrils of the nations, they have caused the name of the LORD to stink.”

Once upon a time, the Mainstream churches assumed—and maybe at the time they were right—that most of America was Christian.

In such a cultural environment, what mattered most, then, was not that you were Christian—which was largely taken for granted—but rather what kind of Christian you were.

So the Mainstreamers pretty much stopped using the C-word in public. To call yourself a “Lutheran Christian,” after all, smacks of the redundant.

Then along came the Evangelicals, who picked up the disused term and ran with it.

The media—which mostly, generously, calls people by their preferred name—unthinkingly acquiesced.

Shame be upon them, the media still parrots conservative Christians when, in effect, they claim proprietary rights to a name that is not theirs alone. In plain words, the media—not, let us admit, particularly well-versed on matters religious—not only let them get away with it, but abetted the theft.

That's how the nazzes stole “Christian.”

“Oh my gods,” says my friend.

We're stopped at a red light behind a car sporting an unconsciously hilarious bumper sticker.

IN CASE OF RAPTURE, THIS CAR WILL BE UNMANNED

I snort, and shake my head. Oh Evangelicalism. My friend puts it into words.

“I'd say that driver was unmanned a long time ago.”

“Why do they hate us so much?” a boy growing up Evangelical once asked his father.

(True or not, this is a common belief among Evangelical Christians.)

“Because so many Christians are such jerks,” his father told him.

There are forms of Christianity that I, as a pagan, respect, even admire.

With its intellectual vacuity, utter lack of social conscience, and political triumphalism, Evangelicalism is decidedly not one of them.

Like many gender-non-conforming kids, I grew up socially isolated.

Elementary school wasn't so bad. Having grown up with me, the other kids mostly just accepted me for who I was. Junior high, though, was hellish. There I was the weird kid, the outsider. (There must be easier ways to learn self-reliance.) In high school I finally made some friends among the other egghead creatives. I loved my new friends all the better for understanding the worth of what I'd worked so hard to gain.

Then I lost most of those friends again to the so-called “Jesus Revolution.”

By then, my pagan identity was already fully formed. I could see their so-called “revolution” for what it actually was: a total abrogation of intelligence, an unthinking embrace of the worst kind of reactionary conservatism.

(I was right. My former friends and their co-religionists were precisely the demographic that betrayed us to Reagan and his successors, including Trump.)

Suddenly, the witch-boy was the pariah again. Finally, I decided to end it.

Of all forms of government, theocracy has got to be the worst.

If you haven't noticed yet that a Kreesh-chun America is the Great Evangelical-American Wet Dream, you're not paying attention.

What do you call it when a power-driven and dictatorial religious minority bullies, lies, and stacks courts, in order to legislate its own religious values onto others?

Sure sounds like tyranny to me.

Well, the Trump Court of partisan hacks has overturned Roe v. Wade, as we all knew it would.

For me personally, the hardest part of all has been hearing the smug, sanctimonious voices crowing about their victory, and vaunting about what they're going to do next to shove their hate-filled religion even further down everyone else's craws.

(Make no mistake, the war over abortion is at heart religious. Anti-abortionism is a specifically Christian movement embraced almost exclusively by certain forms of Christian conservatism, both Catholic and Protestant. When it comes to abortion, Jewish and Islamic religious law tends to be both more pragmatic and more nuanced. Nuance, of course, has never been an Evangelical strong suit, and Catholicism threw it out with Vatican II.)

So here's what we need to remember when it's our turn—as it eventually will be, because the Evangelical cause has already failed; having to legislate your religion onto others is already a concession of defeat—and the shoe is on the other foot.

Win graciously.

Acknowledge that this triumph is painful for others.

Acknowledge the humanity of the other side.

Acknowledge that their positions are as deeply-held, and honestly-held, as ours.

Affirm that we go forward together into a shared future.

In some ways, the new paganisms and Evangelicalism have a lot in common: they're brash, impetuous, young religions, inexperienced, with poor impulse control and a strong Do-It-Yourself ethic.

So in these Latter Days, as Evangelicalism shows its true colors, what lessons can we learn from our successful, but callow, neighbors?

Be for, not against.

In the old days, I always say, Christians used to fight about whether the Spirit proceeded from the Father, or from the Father and the Son, or about whether or not the Son was equal to the Father: substantive issues.

Now they fight about gay sex.

Evangelicalism started out in the early “20th” century as a protest movement against modernity. A hundred years on, they're still reacting.

When you let yourself be defined by what you hate, rather than what you love, you become—by definition—a monster.

Q.E.D.

Embrace history.

Having largely rejected the historic Christianities, Evangelicalism's time-depth is shallow. For the Evangelical, there are two important times: Bible Times and Now.

A people without a history is a people without a memory, without identity. Lacking the lessons and precedents that history cannot fail to provide, you make the same mistakes again and again and again.

Support the arts.

Just look at all the great art, music, and architecture that Evangelicalism has produced.