A response to evangelical Trump voters and participants in January 6th
Melody Kay Young
Aug 11, 2023
This summer, I had the opportunity to visit Washington DC, a trip I really needed after January 6th. I needed to know it was still there, that we still had beautiful and graceful buildings, that our dignity was somewhat yet intact. It was a painful wound to know that many, somewhat more rural, often professing Christian, Republicans, didn’t care enough about our country to value our Capitol building, let alone the lives contained within it, on January 6th, 2021.
Mostly male Americans, some of whom had reportedly never even been to their own capitol before, traveled all that way to trash it, to overthrow our government, to throw down our flag for that rapist’s flag. I grieve that; all Americans should. It seems to me there are Europeans and British people in my friendship circle, who are more upset at this abuse, than the Republicans I grew up with, were.
I grew up in the UK, and I studied French and German. I am well aware that history is littered with revolutions and uprisings and destruction and wars. There is no such thing as a “civil” war; there is only the murder of your neighbors, and how can murder be called “pro life”? It was a deeply shameful thing, seeing apparent Christian symbols at the capitol, knowing that many of the people who waved those flags or carried those signs would have been as devout as I was, growing up in evangelical churches.
So this is the crux of the matter, the moment where all points cross and merge: what is happening in American Christian circles that would result in minimizing or participating in such destruction and loss of life?
I cannot reconcile the beliefs of MAGA, with the God I love, nor the behavior of many fundamentalists, even those who disavow MAGA, with the simple faith I was taught. That said, I understand that this is what passes for Christianity stateside. It’s not just megachurches; it is evangelicalism, not-monoliths be damned.
I will preface everything in this blog with the disclaimer, that while I am critical of Catholics and Orthodox Christian views, I don’t have the expertise to talk very deeply about those versions of pro life faith, though I may have opinions on what I observe. So I will mostly focus on what I grew up immersed in, and try to communicate to you what I do know to be true about evangelicalism.
I had to leave evangelical churches for good in 2016.
Evangelicals [stateside] openly or tacitly supported Trump. I can count on one hand, the one evangelical man, who came back to me and apologized for arguing with me about truth and lies, when I said once that Kellyanne Conway was a liar. I was right, unfortunately: there are no alternative facts, there are only fabrications.
Good on my friend for apologizing, I respect that, but it should bother more Christians what they were willing to excuse. I have observed a truly deficient morality among evangelicals, who observably believe that the teachings of Jesus are not enough anymore.
Holiness and humble discipleship has been replaced with cheap grace and violent abuse.
It’s not simply that this group doesn’t want to suffer “persecution”, it is more than that: they want to have the right to persecute others.
They want to be in control over the lives of those who aren’t part of the church and don’t want to be. I never, ever understood that as a Christian concern, having been raised in evangelicalism in the UK. I understood from Scripture that people outside of the church don’t follow our rules, governments may be godless, and everyone has freedom, not just Christians.
What is going on, in Christian circles in the States, doesn’t make any sense to me, because there is no Biblical basis for it, not if you see things in terms of loving God and loving your neighbor. There’s even a verse for the idea of not judging those outside the church.
If Christians stateside can’t even elect a mostly good person who loves our country, how dare they determine what is right and wrong for our country?
They’ve lost the plot, as we say in the UK.
I can’t understand staying in a movement so corrupt as to promote and overwhelmingly vote for a boastful sexual abuser, and we all have no excuse now to know that Trump isn’t just a deeply immoral man who cheated on all his wives, including with a porn star, when his wife had just given birth; worse than all that vileness, he is, by definition, a rapist.
We are dealing not only with a grotesque sort of misogyny in Christian circles, we are dealing with the raging heart of abuse: a deeply entitled, depraved person who grasps at power and control, no matter who they harm in the process, and even in order to do harm and get revenge on anyone who stands in his way.
That is anti-Christ character.
So this is the context in which I write... now: the total depravity of the evangelical church, who are nothing more than just Republicans now.
(It was never “just politics”.)
I renounce their Christianity, but it is not possible to divorce Christianity from their failure in America. We have to own our extremists and our doctrinal fallacies, just the same as any other world religion should be held accountable to do.
Which brings me back to my trip. I enjoyed Washington DC, although there were some Christian Nationalists preaching loudly around the Washington Monument, having set up some sort of makeshift event. Dominion (not love) seems to be a theme, and that is not about freedom for everyone, no matter what they continue to claim.
It did me good, though, to see that our Capitol building was being honored by the tour guides who led us through it, respected by the tourists who visited, including the one with the F*** Joe Biden t-shirt. There was no drama or other rudeness in that space; there was only history, imperfect and sometimes brutal, as well as a deep sense of love for freedom and progress. It was a moment of peace.
What I want to know is, having sat through the whole of January 6th online, with a break to go get my kids from school as quickly as I could, what did these Christians think was going to happen, when they got into their “civil war”? What were their Q fringe going to do once they had murdered and brutalized politicians on live stream on the Capitol lawn? What was the plan?
We had a bunch of Americans who preach to trust God, or trust the plan, but when it came down to it, they refuse to count the cost of what they did.
They left the cost to their victims, and they are not at all sorry.
I say that because I haven’t seen it: I haven’t seen any real repentance from Christians; Trump is still the front-runner of the Republican party! There were few, if any, humble statements of contrition from pastors and thought leaders who abused language of civil war (and if QAnon-adjacent, mass executions) and violent rhetoric leading up to January 6th.
They condemned violence smugly, having un-repentantly led the way, in the heart issues that led to it.
It’s not so much that I want an apology: words are cheap, but an apology was something that should have happened immediately, and it barely did.
Instead, now we know what these Christians are, and I do not believe it is possible or wise to trust people of such poor character, with our lives. That is the issue here now.
But I really would like to know, what did they think would happen next, once they had overthrown the government, and the Trump flag replaced the flag of free Americans?
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