WTF?!? A huge reason why people are turning away from organized religion.

 Someone posted this on their wall-

I know...the ones who SHOULD read it, won't.

An open letter to white evangelicals from North Carolina Pastor John Pavlovitz

We’re done with you.

Dear White Evangelicals,

I need to tell you something: People have had it with you. They’re done. They want nothing to do with you any longer, and here’s why: They see your hypocrisy, your inconsistency, your incredibly selective mercy, and your thinly veiled supremacy.

For eight years they watched you relentlessly demonize a Black President; a man faithfully married for 26 years; a doting father and husband without a hint of moral scandal or the slightest whiff of infidelity. They watched you deny his personal faith convictions, argue his birthplace, and assail his character—all without cause or evidence.

They saw you brandish Scriptures to malign him and use the laziest of racial stereotypes in criticizing him. And through it all, White Evangelicals—you never once suggested that God placed him where he was, you never publicly offered prayers for him and his family, you never welcomed him to your Christian Universities, you never gave him the benefit of the doubt in any instance, you never spoke of offering him forgiveness or mercy, your evangelists never publicly thanked God for his leadership, your pastors never took to the pulpit to offer solidarity with him, you never made any effort to affirm his humanity or show the love of Jesus to him in any quantifiable measure.

You violently opposed him at every single turn—without offering a single ounce of the grace you claim as the heart of your faith tradition. You jettisoned Jesus as you dispensed damnation on him.

And yet you give carte blanche to a white Republican man so riddled with depravity, so littered with extramarital affairs, so unapologetically vile, with such a vast resume of moral filth—that the mind boggles.

And the change in you is unmistakable. It has been an astonishing conversion to behold: a being born again.

With him, you suddenly find religion. With him, you’re now willing to offer full absolution. With him, all is forgiven without repentance or admission. With him, you’re suddenly able to see some invisible, deeply buried heart. With him, sin has become unimportant, and compassion no longer a requirement. With him, you see only Providence.

And White Evangelicals, all those people who have had it with you—they see it all clearly. They recognize the toxic source of your inconsistency.

They see that pigmentation and party are your sole deities. They see that you aren’t interested in perpetuating the love of God or emulating the heart of Jesus. They see that you aren’t burdened to love the least, or to be agents of compassion, or to care for your Muslim, gay, African, female, or poor neighbors as yourself.

They see that all you’re really interested in doing is making a God in your own ivory image and demanding that the world bow down to it. They recognize this all about white, Republican Jesus—not dark-skinned Jesus of Nazareth.

And I know you don’t realize it, but you’re digging your own grave these days; the grave of your very faith tradition.

Your willingness to align yourself with cruelty is a costly marriage. Yes, you’ve gained a Supreme Court seat, a few months with the Presidency as a mouthpiece, and the cheap high of temporary power—but you’ve lost a whole lot more.

You’ve lost an audience with millions of wise, decent, good-hearted, faithful people with eyes to see this ugliness. You’ve lost any moral high ground or spiritual authority with a generation. You’ve lost any semblance of Christlikeness. You’ve lost the plot. And most of all you’ve lost your soul.

I know it’s likely you’ll dismiss these words. The fact that you’ve even made your bed with such malevolence, shows how far gone you are and how insulated you are from the reality in front of you. But I had to at least try to reach you.

It’s what Jesus would do.

An addendum to this should be how for the following four years, white evangelicals threw their complete, whole-hearted support behind a person who: has a 50-year history of racism, from his violation of the Fair Housing Act in the ’70s, until today, has been thrice married, cheated with multiple women on each one of those wives, and has 25 sexual assault allegations against him, has called women the following: “Horse face” (Stormy Daniels), “Dog” (Omarosa Manigault-Newman), “Bimbo” (Megyn Kelly), “Big, fat, ugly pig” (Rosie O’Donnell), etc., encouraged the spectacle of a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, was guilty of abysmal malfeasance during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the litany of election-related lies, has run afoul of the emoluments clause, the general services administration, the U.N. Human Rights Council, the Justice Department, etc. And he’s currently battling numerous lawsuits and multiple criminal charges, including espionage.

And is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused, has generally disreputable moral behavior, and is prideful, abrasive and arrogant, had a problem with adultery, uses his tweets as a direct pipeline to the public to slander and mischaracterize, to abuse others and outright lie, had misused his office for personal political gain, guilty of "profoundly immoral” actions that violate the Constitution, has lowered the standard for presidential decorum, openly admitted to unsavory interactions with women and has worked with a “number of people who are now convicted criminals”, had dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration, his Twitter feed alone—with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders—is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.

“We believe … that President Trump has abused his authority for personal gain and betrayed his constitutional oath. The impeachment hearings have illuminated the president’s moral deficiencies for all to see. This damages the institution of the presidency, damages the reputation of our country, and damages both the spirit and the future of our people.”

Frank Amedia, the founder of Touch Heaven Ministries and a fervent Trump admirer, takes this logic a step further, suggesting that Trump's moral flaws are a paradoxical sign of God's favor: Trump's success is "not because Donald Trump has heralded his faith or the name of God, but the Lord has put His favor upon him, and how amazing it is that the favor of God can overcome so many mistakes, so many bumbles, so many things that otherwise we would think would destroy somebody in business, destroy them in politics, destroy them in relationships." Note that unlike many of Trump's Christian supporters, Amedia doesn't here claim that Trump is a Christian — even a "baby Christian," as James Dobson of Focus on the Family called him. That Trump could be so indifferent to God, so inept, and so unethical, and nevertheless succeed should tell us that "it was the will of the Lord to do this." And so, Amedia concludes, "here we sit now."

At one recent Trump rally, held by a group called Evangelicals for Trump, the opening prayer included these words: “We declare that no weapon formed against him will be able to prosper and every demonic altar erected against him will be torn down” and that “he will rise high, and he is seated in the heavenly places.” In the Christian community, we call that idolatry.

It is no wonder that Trump-supporting evangelicals don’t comprehend the moral gravity of the lies and contempt that characterize Mr. Trump’s words, and that they excuse the manifold corruptions of his office. He’s a political messiah, after all; by definition, he can’t do wrong.

And yet... The most serious problem Christians face today is not idolatrous politics. That’s a mere symptom of a deeper disorder, one that transcends left and right, mainline and evangelical, Catholic and Protestant. What Alexander Solzhenitsyn said about America in his 1983 Templeton Prize address applies specifically to Christians in America today: They have forgotten God.

We rightly expect the religious to be consistent with their faith’s teaching — and to have the courage to speak up about serious moral issues, even if their words have to be directed at a party or leader we otherwise sympathize with.

To be sure, Christianity has much more to offer than this — for one, a life of transcendence shaped by Christ’s self-sacrificing love. But striving for integrity in word and deed in the public square — that’s the least they can do for the nation.

Trump has said that he does not ask God for forgiveness. That quite literally and unequivocally means that he is not a Christian. Donald Trump has no beliefs - political, religious, or otherwise. He only has interests.

Jeremiah Johnson, a pastor and leader of Behold the Man Ministries, wrote in July 2015 that God had spoken to him and said, "Just as I raised up Cyrus to fulfill My purposes and plans, so have I raised up Trump to fulfill my purposes and plans prior to the 2016 election."

Again, the unlikelihood of Donald Trump as God's "trumpet" — Johnson does not hesitate to employ this image — is, paradoxically, a reason for taking the possibility seriously. After all, Christians believe in the God who, as Jesus says in Luke 10:21, has "hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and revealed them to infants."

But Johnson goes further than this, and indeed returns us to the question of character through, as it were, the back door. For Johnson says that God in speaking to him revealed certain virtues possessed by Trump: "Though many see the outward pride and arrogance, I have given him the tender heart of a father that wants to lend a helping hand to the poor and the needy, to the foreigner and the stranger." The rest of us have to go by what we see, the "outward pride and arrogance," but to Johnson God has revealed the hidden depths — and we may see those depths too, if we but seek them.

Trump's bad behavior and rough language are a kind of test of our commitment, our willingness to persevere in finding hidden truth: "[Y]ou must listen through the bantering to discover the truth that I will speak through him." Johnson is effectively saying to Christians skeptical of Trump's character, "Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?"

By now it should be clear that the people listening to Trump don’t care about facts, or even about policy or politics. They enjoy the show, and they want it back on TV for another four years. And this is a problem not with Trump but with the voters.

It is long past time to admit that support for Trump, after all that we now know, is a moral failing.Hillary Clinton once called Trump voters “deplorables.” Her description wasn’t off the mark, and goes a long way towards explaining why so many of them wore that label proudly, like a badge of honor. People with no moral compass and a lack of any civic character cannot be insulted, because they cannot fathom why their behavior could possibly be criticized. To the extent they have “beliefs,” those beliefs are wholly centered on resentments against those they feel are undeserving, compared to themselves. They simply want the show to go on, fed by a malevolent personality who they have effectively deified. Where all of this ultimately ends up—at least in their minds—isn’t that hard to predict, either.

Admittedly that reality may be hard to square with your smiling neighbor, the Trump supporter down the street who waves to you as he mows his lawn, the friendly Trump-supporting couple with the “Let’s Go Brandon” bumper sticker on their SUV, or the old friend turned Trump supporter from high school who sends his heartfelt condolences on the death of your father. All of these folks manage to display some moral sense, at the micro level of ordinary human interaction.

But what’s really inside their heads when it comes to politics is a cipher that we don’t have the tools or the time to unlock. We don’t attend the rallies, we don’t converse across their kitchen tables or in their social media bubbles, we don’t see them glowering at the TV while Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson feed them the hate-ridden propaganda that sustains them. We just see the little clues they occasionally wear on their sleeve, hear the talk radio station they listen to in their driveway as we pass by, notice the off-the-cuff remark or the knowing sneer or occasional glares directed at you or someone else.

“I am your retribution,” Trump intoned to the delight of his CPAC audience, capturing in a single phrase everything we need to know about that swath of Americans who continue to support him. But the fact that so many people in this country just want to watch it all burn down doesn’t obligate the rest of us to condone or continue tolerating them, treating them as something special that needs to be “understood” while they proceed to poison our democracy and its institutions.

No more tolerance for the moral failures and bad citizens. Democrats already understand enough, and we have for a very long time.

Sadly, the answer is there are many values "evangelicals" share with Trump, they're just not Christian ones. Fear of "the other", stirring up dissent and discord, disrespect of authority, lack of love, greed, personal aggrandizement, disdain for the poor, powerless, and disenfranchised, etc....the list is long.

What none of them seem to realize is that many of them are the goats to whom Jesus will ultimately say, "Depart from me...I never knew you!" (Matthew 25:31-46). Note that Jesus will have to separate the sheep from the goats; up to this time, they have been together, like the wheat and the tares (Matthew 13:24-30). In both cases, they will be people who always claimed to be Christians, but they were merely "church people", "convenience Christians", "Chinos": Christians in name only.

They are a black eye to the Body of Christ.