Hi, Delaney —

Thank you for this illuminating — and terrifying — piece. After all my years of teaching at Hampton U and TCC, I am quite familiar with the syndrome your friend exhibits: African Americans who are as politically progressive on social issues as any of us, fighting against poverty, racism, police brutality, etc. — yet who are devout evangelical Christians, sharing fully in their “faith community’s” immovable and impassioned views on such issues as evolution, gay marriage, and (above all) abortion. But it was news to me, and even scarier, that fundamentalists are now embracing Putin as well as Trump, as divinely appointed leaders restoring the Kingdom of God to fallen and sinful nations of His Chosen People (i.e. white, Christian people)…by force if necessary.

Wow! Have the liberal ideals of the European Enlightenment, Tom Paine’s Age of Reason, been so completely eclipsed by a brutal, toxic, narrow-minded,self-righteous Puritan ideology (that rationalized the extermination of Native Americans, slavery, and the colonial subjugation of indigenous peoples by Britain and other European powers)?

Poor Jesus! Imagine what he must be thinking, as he views from his numinous perch on “the right hand of God” (like Charley McCarthy) the delusional and corrupt behavior and attitudes of “His people.” The Jesus I am referring to, of course, is not the mouthpiece of Paul of Tarsus we see in the book of John and at various points throughout the three earlier gospels, but the one who peeks out now and then in the Sermon on the Mount and in such recurrent parables as the Good Samaritan, the Parable of the Mustard Seed, and his time-tested litmus test for distinguishing authentic from spurious prophets: “By their fruits shall ye know them…”