Hardly a day goes by now that I don’t wonder about how some in the evangelical community are feeling about Biden™ now. This requires a little explanation first because I rarely write about Christian factions, even when I’ve written much about the presidency and now Biden. Even though I have a significant amount of experience among evangelicals and having spent the past number of years within a more traditional body of faith, my perspective on evangelicalism is essentially now as a partial outsider. Over the past 5 years, I watched some longstanding deep-dyed evangelicals undergo a seismic shift from political conservative to liberal-lite, or maybe not so lite. Many seemed to do so directly in response to the personality-antics of Trump. When he was a coarse businessman outsider trying on newly acquired populist values, he was loved and championed in spite of his coarseness. After 4 years of presidency, having delivered on conservative agenda items far more than most other so-called conservative presidents, they hated him, not for things like his past womanizing and questionable business practices, things that used to irk evangelicals, but as far as I can tell, for his ‘tone’. Who-woulda-thunk it? Evangelicalism changed far more than Trump in just four years.
There are now two distinct bodies of evangelicals. I don’t claim to be an expert on Christian movements, so I won’t declare which one is real and which one is now an imposter, but they seem to have diverged with one part fully identifying with Trumpism as a specific brand of conservatism and the other pining for the days of establishment-brand centrism that now also owns ‘real-estate’ in the camp of ‘woke’. An irony of this consciousness is the belief that the latter form of identity keeps them free from mixing politics with faith, a distinctive that they accuse their opposite brethren of doing. This feeling is expressed as they look down over the length of their long nose sneering at the other camp as though the others were 1970’s Jerry Falwell Moral Majority activist dinosaurs. The self-deceit tied up in this view is deep.
Let’s circle back to the evangelical anti-Trumpers: Are you happy yet? When observing their distaste of all things Trump during the campaign season, like many turned off byTrump, their political preferences seemed to be focused on one sole issue. Biden was not Trump. Well, they did tie in a few other issues. Some were angry at Trump’s Covid response, in mostly unspecified ways; they were in a tizzy during the first debate fiasco, ignoring that both candidates were pretty bad; some actually went back and started to take exception to his pre-2016 issues that they largely ignored during the first campaign. In general, though, it was like millions of others, Orange Man Bad. The elephant in the room though is that Biden™ was the other candidate and as such, he represented very specific policy positions. More so than that, anyone that had any experience following politics – and evangelicals are as a whole group, more engaged than the average joe, they should have also been totally cognizant that: a) Biden was displaying serious cognitive failure a full year ago and, b) his ‘platform’ was being run by others in the now severe vacuum of his own once-upon-a-time legislative record; not that great at all, but certainly more moderate than what ‘the committee’ was choosing for him. On top of that, some evangelicals displayed some mind-boggling instances of willful ignorance, such as some that believed Joe Biden was actually pro-life. You can’t fix that level of stupid.
Since then, what I’ll call the woke wing of evangelicals is now conspicuously silent because, you see, Biden™ has real world consequences. Given that that wing is liberal-lite, maybe they didn’t dive fully down the rabbit hole, yet, my guess is that some may have buyer’s remorse, but more likely, even more may just be in long term denial. So much for the self-appointed intellectual superiority of that brand of evangelicalism.
I have a challenge that I’d love to hear from any neo-woke-Establishment evangelicals. I present just a partial list of positions, actions, appointees to administration positions that Biden has demonstrated. I’d love to hear if you still give Biden™ full throated endorsement while still claiming to be evangelical (and I don’t assume that you still claim it, as the Biden agenda is in such direct opposition to the evangelical world outlook). Maybe you’ve simply turned full on globalist progressive woke and that’s your new identity, in which case, you’re off the hook for my challenge.
What say you of:
- Central American and Mexican children in tents Children in tents (far more than during the Trump administration.
- Aggressively pro-abortion, even picking a HHS appointee that is rabidly in favor of partial-birth abortions, aka infanticide.
- Promptly and repeatedly bombing Syria without bothering to communicate to congress.
- Passing a 1.9 trillion-dollar Covid relief bill that is neither about Covid nor a relief, but rather, a pork spending ‘blue state’ bailout bill that saddles every single American with $68k in debt obligation in exchange for $1,400 cash and doesn’t even protect that sum against bill collectors.
- Fifty executive orders to date, bypassing congress on almost everything, representing exponentially more executive orders than Trump signed when taking office. Who is the dictator here?
- No accountability to press – no press conferences as if this date (3/15/21)
- Incoherent babble in many cases in which he is even ‘allowed’ to speak on camera, publicly and unscripted.
- That Kamala Harris is taking on chief executive duties in lieu of Biden and holding conversations with foreign leaders.
- That a bi-partisan group of congressmen have seen the necessity to discuss taking way Biden’s sole access to nuclear action, the ‘football’.
- The total obsession with trans-identity policies and forcing it into every facet of American life, even threatening with force of law, any that protest those policies.
- Forcing trans-identity policies and training into the military as well as overt feminization of the services.
- Deeply institutionalized racism in the form of strict raced based entitlements along with the expressed exclusion of other races for those same programs.
- Claiming full credit for Trump’s Covid vaccine development and distribution program well under way even at the point of the inauguration.
- Appeasement of China, clearly documenting to be committing genocide against the Uighur ethnic group, suppression of democratic Hong Kong, and making heightened military threats against Taiwan.
This list is just a highlights reel. Perhaps ‘evangelical’ is a worthless meaningless designation but the acts of the Biden™ administration are loaded with deep moral flaws – oh remember that word, moral? I have a vague distant memory that Evangelicalism used to stand on that concept long ago. This is not to say that the other branch of that faith is pure and without issues, such as the Q-anon oddity; speaking of which, the liberal-lite wing seems to be obsessed with that as well, projecting that as a nullifying characteristic of all others that don’t agree with them, fully overlooking that the Q-anon-ers are just another schism. Don’t point to them to justify your own denial of your Biden misjudgment.