Many Americans with religious faith spend their Sunday mornings attending services at the church of their choice.
President Trump is not much of church-goer. He instead worships not at the mirror — as some might suspect given his notorious narcissism — but at the screen of his mobile phone where he sends his offerings as tweets sent through the heavens to Trump adulators throughout the country.
Today, in lieu of actually attending a worship service, President Trump retweeted a pair of tweets featuring his surrogate, the comic book icon of pretend-piousness, Vice President Mike Pence visiting the three black churches in Louisiana that were destroyed by an arsonist recently,
Joined the pastors of Mt Pleasant Baptist Church, St. Mary Baptist Church, & Greater Union Baptist Church at what remains of Mt Pleasant after an arsonist set fire to these 3 churches. What happened here was evil, but these communities of faith overcame evil with good. pic.twitter.com/koWAtd3usE
— Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) May 3, 2019
Honored to be with these congregations. @POTUS & I are with you. Our prayers are with you. Your resilience, your faith, and your courage in the wake of this unspeakable evil is an inspiration. Hate has no place in a house of worship. pic.twitter.com/5VPMk9x5DA
— Vice President Mike Pence (@VP) May 3, 2019
Ever since Pence’s selection as Trump’s running mate — a decision undoubtedly made because the vice president’s close ties to the evangelical community would help offset Trump’s libertine image and retain the votes of this normally Republican voting bloc — the president has trotted Pence out when he needs a veneer of religiosity to shroud his most dastardly of policies.
With Trump’s rhetoric of hate directly contradicting the core message of Jesus’ teachings and his angry intolerance inspiring anti-Semitic and anti-muslim violence across the country, the president apparently felt he needed to electronically display what passes for his Christian bona fides on this Sunday morning, even if only once removed through Pence.
The phenomenon of this most profane and irreligious of presidents being supported by evangelical Christians — who must gyrate their morals into extraordinarily contorted hypocritical positions to justify backing this pustule of spiritual vacuity — is one of the mysteries of the modern age.
You can be assured, however, that though some people of faith may be fooled temporarily by Trump’s charade of spirituality, any omniscient higher power knows that the calculating manipulativeness that actually underlies the president’s actions does not equal faith.