Just stop… please, just stop

Dear Trump-supporting US Evangelicals, especially the pastors,

Please stop it.
The lying, the misuse of God’s name, the support of a (soon to be ex) President who stands against just about everything you claim to stand for, the claiming to know the will of God “without even having to pray“.
Just stop it.

You are tying yourself up in knots.
You are breaking every single one of the Ten Commandments you claim to stand for.
You are being a simply terrible witness to Jesus.
You are leading astray the folks in your care.

President Trump has lost the election. I know you don’t like this… just as lot of people didn’t like it when he won the 2016 election.
But he lost. It’s over. There isn’t going to be a sudden dramatic reveal of new evidence to save his skin or anything like that.
He’s lost. It’s over.

It’s astonishing that you continue to claim that that’s not the case, that this election was “stolen”, despite the fact that every lawsuit Trump’s team have brought bar one (which apparently was irrelevant anyway) has been defeated. Your cries of foul play, of theft, of Satanic deception or whatever just sound like the words of sore losers.

But what’s more astonishing is that you hitched your wagon to someone like Trump in the first place.
Why?
He’s a man who lies, who at the very least encourages racism and racists, who boasts of ill-treating and sexually assaulting women.
He’s a man who’s been married three times, the second of which happened shortly after they had a child out of wedlock. You claim to stand up for “family values”, yet you throw your lot behind a man like this.
He’s a man who openly chases money and who’s main motivation seems to be greed – for money and for power.
You should be condemning him, you should be urging people never to vote for him or his allies again.
And yet here you are, trying to invoke the name of God and Jesus to prop up his failing legal cases against an election he lost.

Again: why?
For pity’s sake, he mocked you after you prayed for him. He’s no friend of yours, or of the faith. He doesn’t care for you. If he’d thought you were an impediment to his winning the election he’d have thrown you off like he seems to do to women. You’re a tool for him, you’re people he can use to get what he truly wants: power.
Except now it’s failed; he’s lost and you’re left alone. Which I guess is part of the reason you make the ridiculous claims you do.

But there’s something more, isn’t there.
It was about power, wasn’t it. He got power; but in the process, you got power, too.
The power you had under Bush Jr, the power you seemed to have lost under Obama, the power you could regain under Trump.
You supported and continue to support him because he put you in places of power. He may have despised you, but he knew your usefulness. So he gave you the power and the influence you craved, because he knew you’d prop him up, you’d support him and will go on supporting him.
You were at the top table again, you had influence over a whole nation, you had a platform from which to spout your prejudices, your bigotry, your weird interpretations of the “end times”; a platform from which to try and impose your view of what America should be.
So you were willing to overlook it all: all the abuses, all the denial of what you claimed to hold dear, all the sins – you turned a blind eye to it all.

All in the name of the One who gave up His heavenly status, His claim to earthly power, and became like a slave – even to death.
Hypocrites.

“Oh but he’s not perfect,” you said. “Nobody’s perfect.” True enough; I make no claim to moral perfection or anywhere remotely near it.
But Trump isn’t just “not perfect” in the way we’re all not perfect. He’s not perfect in his own, Trumpian way, for all the ways mentioned above – things that, if Obama had committed them, you’d have been all over like a rash.

“Oh, but God uses imperfect people for His purposes.”
Yes, He can do – in a sense, He has no option.
But, He also can reject those whom He has put into positions of leadership who refuse to follow His ways; see King Saul or the religious and political leaders of Jesus’ time (kinda sounds familiar, huh?).
And even if we take, say, King David; after his affair with Bathsheba and his murder of Uriah, his reign went downhill, he was never the same again.

So just stop it.
The talk of “spiritual warfare”.
The lies.
The vain attempts to cling to some modicum of power.
The deliberate misusing of the Bible and of God’s name in order to shore up your own position.
You have no right to do any of this.
The best thing you could do now is step aside from your media positions, your podcasts and webcasts and your positions of political power and influence, go back to your congregations and apologise for all you have done and said, for misleading them, for holding up this man who has done so much damage to your country as a man of God.

Because it’s over.
He lost.
And you are hurting the name of Jesus.
So stop. Please – just stop.