Jesus Is On the Ballot

By Joni Halpern

You might have thought Donald J. Trump was on the ballot as the Republican candidate for President in the upcoming presidential election.  You would be wrong.

Mr. Trump does inhabit the physical presence of candidacy, and it is his name on the ballot.  But he is not running for President.  Jesus is.

Donald Trump plans to eke out an election victory by duct-taping his base to the notion that he is Jesus’ choice for President.  Apparently, there are some among the White Christian Right who believe Jesus wants the whole of America, regardless of the dictates of personal conscience, to fall into lockstep with Mr. Trump, to whom completely loyalty must be given, just as Jesus asked of his followers.

Of course, there are some big differences between the conduct of Mr. Trump and the conduct of Jesus:

Jesus believed in free will.  Coercion was not the instrument he promoted in building his relationship with mankind.  Each person’s dialogue with conscience was the cornerstone of that relationship.  Political and religious leaders might institute rules of intolerance, injustice, and exclusion, but a personal dialogue with God would inform individual decisions about what God expects of each of us.

The freedom to pursue the dictates of individual conscience are supposed to be protected in the U.S. Constitution, but little by little over the years, some adherents of Christianity have sought a union with government power that would allow them to commandeer personal conscience and force it to be expressed in ways that validate their particular religious beliefs.  It is not enough that they are free to choose or not choose their own path at moral intersections.  They want all of us to choose as they would.  In other words, personal conscience born of free will is out.  Under the regime promised by Mr. Trump, we will all be obligated to express conscience in ways approved by his base.

Mr. Trump cloaks his candidacy as a stand-in for Jesus.  Never mind that Jesus never bragged about being so famous he could touch women’s private parts whenever he wanted to.  Never mind that Jesus’ call to “suffer the little children to come unto me,” was not a prelude to incarcerating them in private prisons run by his corporate supporters.  Never mind that Jesus urged his listeners to care for one another, even if it meant expending resources and going out of one’s way to tend mercifully to the stranger who lay by the side of the road.

These are not Mr. Trump’s moral imperatives.  He wants us to leave the suffering strangers, close our doors, shutter our windows, poke our guns out of the cracks and warn everyone not to dare come one step closer.

Jesus was said to oppose “selling in the temple.”  But in the temple of our President, everything is for sale.  In fact, our White House has become quite the center of personal commerce and wealth creation for our President and his family.  He has enriched himself, his family, and his already-wealthy friends overtly and in many ways yet to be discovered.

Despite every evidence that he answers not to the Force of Goodness, whatever you conceive this to be, his White Christian Right base believes God anointed him as leader.

If Mr. Trump wins in November, he promises to feed more and more public school taxpayer dollars to religiously operated schools.  He promises to subjugate unions, especially teachers’ unions, but not law-enforcement unions.  He promises to be the scourge of anyone exercising freedom of expression or personal conscience by protesting peacefully in the public plazas and streets of our nation.  A Sermon on the Mount would be out of the question, unless it sings his praises as a Great Leader, the likes of whom has never been seen on the planet.  He promises to shut the nation’s door to every person who seeks refuge from violence, starvation and tyranny, except for the 2-A visa holders whom ICE quietly allows to pick our produce in the fields. Those who pray for an end to the pandemic will have to be satisfied with a cessation of testing, for that is the only way Mr. Trump can obtain a report saying there is no evidence of new cases.

How Mr. Trump became the stand-in for Jesus is a mystery.  Three wives, avaricious children, a business career making deals through treachery and lies, a viciously hostile campaign strategy that invokes the life of the most renowned peacemaker in history, and a presidency that has cost the lives of at least 175,000 people and probably more.  If that is an example of moral rectitude, we are all bound for heaven.

The White Christian Right thinks Mr. Trump occupies the seat of power with the hand of Jesus upon him.  In exchange for their support, he has promised to force us to set aside our personal conscience and free will.  We will all be made over in Mr. Trump’s image.  We will believe lies are good if they are useful,  greed is good if you are the one enriched, that the rest of the suffering world can go to hell if it means you keep an extra tax dollar in your pocket, that the military budget will never be big enough, and that the rich will always protect us if we keep on making them richer.

Once Mr. Trump is elected, we won’t need Jesus.  He wouldn’t be welcome where we’re going anyway.