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What he had, suddenly, was an iron-hard belief in him beyond a con man’s wildest dreams: he had a flock to herd and guide and lead. And to sell things to—hats and flags and T-shirts and even NFTs—as tribal marks that they were his. By 2024, he was even selling $59.99 patriotic Bibles, shilling them throughout a trial in which he was accused of paying hush money to a sex worker to cover up an affair.
Inevitably, in the daily sordid grind of capitalism, the choices we make soil us. But some routes to a dollar are more befouling than others. We all sell something—our time, our bodies, our words—but it’s the choice to sell hatred and its associated products that really coats the soul in spray tan.
Religious faith can be a balm to the soul, a healer of the heart, a way to push back at the ever-present knowledge of mortality. It can also be a door through which con men slip if they speak the right language of belief, of war, of the unholiness of social change. And terror is a gap so wide that even the clumsiest of grifters can stroll right through it, carrying a hatful of promises, a sack of black seeds to plant in the fear-lush heart.
In seeking to hasten the end of the world, evangelicals often make it worse for others who do not anticipate being snatched up into the clouds to sit by Christ’s side as the seas boil and Satan takes possession of the earth. For those who are not perennially looking out for signs of Armageddon and awaiting it as a child waits for a father to return, the drama of Apocalypse looks merely like a collection of people who, in waiting for the world to end, are actively worsening life in the present.
Molding people like clay into preestablished gender roles—whether imbuing boys with macho swagger or girls with passivity and submissiveness—is in and of itself a violent process. People aren’t clay, bones aren’t malleable; children differ wildly from one another and change as they grow; if they don’t fit in, they can suffer for it along the way.
A nation bound by Christian authoritarianism whose mandate is cruelty in private and austerity in public—which claims to love you as it burns you alive—is not to be countenanced; not in our schools, our courts, our cops, our corners. It must be rooted out from the public square and left to rot in ignominy, robbed of its power to hurt and to shame.
I do not call myself a patriot; that word was taken from me a long time ago, and it’s too easily used by people who use it as a license to smite the unrighteous. I do believe that Earth should not be bitter, not be salted with the tears of the weakest among us, not be gashed by the rage of those who have grown strong on the pain of others. And that the piece of it I’m standing on, beside you, is worth fighting for.
