God, Mammon and politics
The evangelicals have made their peace with Donald Trump, and that fact drives liberals to paroxysms of spluttering, spewing, purple-faced anger.
Nothing gets them more pxxxed off.
“Remember” — say the liberals — “how piety-purveying conservatives called down the wrath of Elohim on Bill Clinton over his salacious adventures with the opposite sex?” Liberals now pose the rhetorical question: Does Trump worship well-endowed Priapus, god of the male libido, any less fervently than Bill Clinton did?
At least Bill Clinton, hailing from Bible-Belt Arkansas, could work a scriptural quotation into his slippery shtick every now and then. Trump could no more quote you scripture than he could quote you Schopenhauer’s ruminations on metaphysical will. Yet the evangelicals — one-quarter of the population, according to a Pew Research Foundation survey — stick with sinner Trump.
Given Trump’s tabloid history of multiple matrimonies and extramarital dalliances, liberals reckoned that the Bible-brandishing Christian right would greet the prospect of a Trump presidency as akin to handing over the Kingdom’s keys to Beelzebub himself. Has there ever been a more grave miscalculation in all of politics?
Without having to furrow their brows or tug their chins at all, even the church-going hayseeds of the hinterlands prefer the ostentatious, sybaritic Trump of Sodom-and-Gomorrah Gotham to the Democratic Party’s stultifying “progressive” offerings. It was not always thus. Once upon a time, there were Democrat politicians who could fill up the tent meetings with party holy rollers. Not anymore. “Trump may be a sinner,” the evangelicals tell themselves, “but at least he doesn’t regard us with a hostile sneer.”
The truth is, however, that many Republicans, with their close ties to the Temple of Mammon, are equally uncomfortable in the presence of the evangelical right. They regard the evangelicals as tongue-talking God-botherers. Besides which, it was not Marx but Matthew who was first to cite the troublesome socialistic notion of “from each according to his means, to each according to his needs.” Republicans, however, have developed the sneaky talent of being able to conceal their contempt for the unfashionably faithful — a talent Democrats lack.
It must be conceded, though, that Church folk, on occasion, have themselves resorted to politics down through the centuries to serve their own ends. Augustine made his accommodations with slavery, fearing that abolition might discombobulate the status quo and trigger destabilizing chaos. Besides, he hoped that government would reciprocate and, through taxation and redistribution of wealth, help the Church fulfill its declared mission of
giving succor to the downtrodden and poor.
Though Jesus declared it would be easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God, the Church has always made arrangements with the fat cats and politically connected of the day to help cover the costs of its stone-and-mortar, mundane needs. And let us not overlook this role reversal: Originally opposed to torture and execution — having suffered so much of it themselves — Christians came to terms with both to fend off doctrinal deviation.
“Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s and to God the things that are God’s,” said Jesus. If only it were so simple. The earthly Vicars of Christ occasionally found themselves needing the protection of armies. Or found themselves called upon to consecrate the military initiatives and worldly ambitions of ruling or aspiring emperors.
Today, both parties claim to attend to the demands of God while attending to the demands of Mammon. Reality pretty much dictates the hypocrisy. Republicans tend to preach God while all but openly worshipping Mammon. Democrats preach fire and brimstone against Mammon while slyly seeing to Mammon’s requirements.
Since 1990, Mammon — in the form of Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, Sabran Capital, JP Morgan Chase, Citibank, American Banking Association, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley and UBS — has donated $166.8 million to Republicans in federal elections and a comparable $161.1 million to Democrats.
On top of this, Republicans have pocketed an extra $44.7 million in folding money from the Koch Bros. industrial empire. And Democrats have banked an extra $277.7 million from billionaire hedge-fund huckster Tom Stayer and billionaire international financial magnate George Soros. Skeptics are tempted to wonder: Are these two fabulously rich champions of income equality sneakily holding back a little something from the cause, as Ananias of the scriptures did?
In the presence of such major-league company, can Donald Trump — comparatively a mere Double A league billionaire — be made out to be the arrival of Gog and Magog? Well, history has witnessed the success of far greater distortions of reality.
Cynics are now noting the news that the Democratic Party’s two leading avenging angels of “economic justice” — Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Liz Warren — are not exactly gnarled and bent from proletarian toil. Au contraire, mon bro, both have ascended into the rarefied ranks of the 1 percent, millionaires themselves. Certainly neither one is a Tom Stayer or a George Soros. (Or a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffett — also multibillionaire Democrats and leading apostles of Mammon.)
Self-declared tribunes of the laboring masses, Sanders and Warren in Stalin’s day would have been written off as “kulaki” — as peasants whose prosperity offended political dogma, as bourgeoisie money-grubbers out of step with the ideological cadence. They would have been dealt with accordingly.
Speaking of Stalin leads us around to the point that history keeps trying to make, repeatedly writing it down for us in blood. There are, after all, worse false gods to worship than Mammon: namely, empowered utopian ideology, riling up mobs of resentment and envy.