In this article, the New Yorker's religion correspondent describes the efforts of a "Christian left" pastor to teach Democrats how to speak a foreign language known as "Evangelical." Their bumbling past efforts are humorously described: it doesn't work, for example, to memorize a few Bible verses on the day of the pitch and then, when it comes time to impress and make new friends, say something like, "And God so loved the world that he gave his only forgotten son. . . ."
But it's a fool's errand, anyway. The speakers of "Evangelical" voted for Trump, who is obviously the biggest phony of all. After declaring that the Bible was his favorite book, he was asked which Bible verse he esteemed most. His answer was that he didn't like to talk about it—"too personal." Asked whether he preferred the Old or the New Testament, he replied that "both are great." Not sure whether this was before or after he paid Stormy Daniels $130k to keep her mouth shut.
The sorry funny sight of politicians acting like idiots in an effort to impress upon us their Christian bona fides doesn't fit very well with the claim, elaborately developed by Attorney General William Barr in a recent speech at the Notre Dame law school, that unnamed "militant secularists" have driven religion from American life. In that case, why do presidential candidates, who are essentially vying in a popularity contest, try to quote Scripture instead of the witticisms of "the new atheists," who after all are ascendant? How come, whenever Cory Booker is asked about "the partisan divide in Washington," he commences yammering about how he attends Bible study with some of his Republican colleagues in the Senate? It isn't true that religion in America is in decline. Compared to almost everywhere else in what is called the advanced world, it's positively thriving. It's possible that at this very moment my older daughter is being taught algebra in a public school recently renamed "Justice Page Middle School" (in order not to honor Governor Ramsey), while just down the street, at Annunciation School, one of her best friends is being harangued by a nun about the Virgin Mary. All as it should be, all perfectly legal. Autumn's school does not run on tax dollars because that would violate the Constitution's establishment clause. Duh!
But I'm only pretending to be confused about what Bill Barr could possibly be carping about. He's a combatant in the culture war featuring, for example, aggrieved Christian bakers who don't want to take the money of homosexual people. It's so unfair! Their complaint is the Attorney General's too, and I'm a little surprised that so many think they might have a point—"it's a hard case," we are gravely informed. No, it's not. I take it the bakers think their freedom of expression is being abridged or coerced and their religious liberty violated because they do calligraphy with cake icing. Give me a break! If they want to write a newspaper editorial—or a play or a poem or a novel or an opera—wherein they express their disapproval of homosexuals, they can. If they can't get it published, they can start a new business that promulgates such views—that's permitted, too. But I'm afraid that the logic of their argument would require my former employer to endure an employee who, on religious grounds, declined to perform the keystrokes necessary to make the public record show that by a duly recorded deed Adam and Eve had conveyed fee title in a parcel of real estate to Adam and Steve, as joint tenants, homesteaded. I have a hunch that Barr and other champions of religious liberty, if asked whether such an employee should be cashiered or receive an accommodation, would secretly like to know whether said employee is a Christian evangelical or perhaps a recent Muslim immigrant from Africa. Lady Justice trying to peek through her blindfold.
Just bake the cake, squeeze out through that papery funnel thing the nice message the gentlemen (or women) chose, write a bigger number on your nightly deposit slip, go to your weird church on Sunday—but quit the bit about how persecuted you are (I think it's called being a "snowflake," and is disrespectful to St. Stephen, shown kneeling in the above painting by the 19-year-old Rembrandt: the face peering out from between the armpits of the two men about to stone Stephen is the artist's earliest surviving self-portrait).
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