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Atheism and the Power Vacuum of President Trump
The irony of evangelicals’ vessel theology
Conservative Christians voted en masse for Trump in 2016 and for the next few years remained diehard fans of his, but only as a means to an end; above all, they wanted to avenge themselves against secular liberal culture in the United States, to teach those liberals that God still rules in spite of any appearance to the contrary.
These supporters of President Trump are neither conservative nor Christian, but that’s another story. More to the point, Trump isn’t really a president.
Thus, what we’ve actually learned from the evangelicals’ political pet project — which might be called “Trolling with Trump” — is what it’s like to be leaderless. Ironically, these fake Christians have done us all the service of showcasing why we should be atheists.
Presumably, evangelicals had meant under Trump, rather, to reestablish godly morality, meaning the bigotry, xenophobia, toxic masculinity, and anti-intellectualism that are equivalent to what I call “Americanism,” that is, to the worst stereotype non-Americans have of Americans, which “conservative” Americans insist on vindicating. For no defensible reason, evangelicals and Christian fundamentalists identify those vulgar prejudices with the essence of Jesus and the New Testament.
