How Not to Talk to a Trumpist Evangelical
Know the Bible well enough to hold it against them…
“That it is as great a fault to judge ill as to write ill, and a more dangerous one to the public.” — Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism
Judge not, lest ye be judged -
But by judging first, and oft, false creeds will budge
Just as Ananias and Sapphira fudged
The purchase price of a pseudo-sacred faith
So too, today, too many seem to do the same.
American Christians are so very quick to misplace blame.
Hostile takeovers of corporate Protestant sects
Transformed “love one another” into deviance.
One cannot lift the scales from their eyes
Unless one uses words they love, yet oft despise.
- Tom Tordillo, © 2022
In 2017, Occupy Democrats distributed a meme similar to the following:
It’s circulating again after the FBI raided Trump’s ‘home’ at Mar-a-Largo this week.
Christopher Wray, the FBI director Trump personally handpicked and appointed has now investigated Trump personally. Trump nominated him on June 7, 2017. The Senate confirmed him, 92–5.
Senators facing difficult races in 2022, like Marco Rubio (R-Florida) and Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin) will try to ensure nobody remembers they backed the guy who authorized the raid.
The previous section consists of about 80 words, as many as in the graphic. A Trumpist Evangelical will read none of them.
During the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, Trump/Pence gained 11 million new votes, going from 63 million votes to 74.2 million. Tens of billions of graphics, memes, jokes, and, well, evidence calling Trump/Pence hypocrites (or worse). And yet his hold on his base grew.
Attacks generate clicks, and followers following Occupy Democrats or fellow travelers may reward them. But 11 million new voters voted for Trump in 2020. These sorts of memes didn’t work on them, and may even have been counterproductive.
Maybe this works better, since it uses language familiar to many of the Evangelical Christian voters:
There’s probably better ways to phrase it so it bites. Still, any professional opponent of Trump will be reluctant to use explicitly religious messaging — not because they aren’t smart enough to do so, but because they need to preserve support from whoever pays their bills.
Same goes for memes launched on the other side, which invoke Biblical passages routinely, but present them through a sort of bizarre lens — which nobody actually questions.
Most memes preach to their own choir. Safer that way.
Frederick Douglass knew his Bible well enough to challenge any religious defender of slavery. So did Martin Luther King, Jr, and the Senator Raphael Warnock. Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew his Bible well enough to focus on ‘love they neighbor’ — and interpret that as “make sure your neighbor doesn’t starve to death.”
Some books hold power, at least for those willing to read them.
Many Evangelical Trumpists accept only a few ‘credible sources’ — FoxNews, right-wing propaganda, a Facebook/Twitter echo chamber, their Bible. For the paid platforms, unless one owns the platform, there’s no real way to reach them.
But nobody owns the Bible. It’s there for anyone to use. Whether one believes the words or not is irrelevant: some claim to believe those words, but are unfamiliar with what they say, and are aware that they may misinterpret or misapply the passages. Some do believe in good faith. Best to woo them, not to mock them, ignore them, or dismiss them.
