Trump and Hegseth Take Their Cruelty From Their Christianity
Jesus supported authoritarianism, not democracy.
In passages like Psalm 18, the Bible heartily endorses deadly violence without mercy.
Yes, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth are Christians, and they get their cruelty from Christianity.
Full Transcript:
Welcome to Stop Christian Nationalism.
The more insane the fascists who now control Washington, DC, get, the more they turn to Christianity, and to Jesus.
I want you to listen to an example of that, coming from Donald Trump this week.
Donald Trump is pushing for a bill to go through Congress. This bill, this proposed legislation, will take away the right to vote from anybody who does not have an original birth certificate or a passport.
It's a poll tax. It's a disenfranchisement of anybody who cannot afford to pay for those documents, anybody who happens to have lost them. It's also an effort to discourage women from voting, because the name has to match what's on the birth certificate, and if you have taken your husband's name in marriage, that's not your legal name anymore. So, you're going to have trouble voting.
Above all else, it is making it difficult for everyone to know what the rules are going to be when we try to vote, because Donald Trump doesn't want us to vote.
Donald Trump is insisting that no other legislation gets passed until that gets passed, and it's in this context that he made the following statement, pushing for this anti-voting bill.
“So I'm tying Homeland Security into voter identification with picture and proof of citizen, citizenship in order to vote, and those two items are the most important thing, having to do with Homeland Security. So it's part, it should be part of the homeland security bill, and I'm requesting that the Republican senators do that immediately. You don't have to take a fast vote. Don't worry about Easter going home. In fact, make this one for Jesus, okay? Make this one for Jesus. That's what I tell them. That would be a damn good thing.”
Do this one for Jesus. What the heck does this have to do with Jesus, you might be asking? That's crazy - Jesus would never support something like this.
Well, actually, if you take a look at the Bible, there's absolutely nothing in there that supports democracy, that supports the right of the people to influence their government.
In fact, the New Testament is full of statements from Christian leaders telling people to just obey their leaders. Just follow along and do what you are told, not to influence the government.
Some people are going to try to tell you, well, you know, they hadn't invented democracy yet. That is simply not true. If you believe that Jesus was a real person, a historical figure, you have to accept that that person was living within the Roman Empire, and the Roman Empire came after the Roman Republic was destroyed. Everywhere that the Roman Empire was, people knew about the Republic, and they knew about the Greek democracy that had come before. They knew about these principles, that you could have a society, and a very effective one that was structured around people, influencing their own government.
Now, of course, the Roman Republic was not a perfect democracy, and neither was the Greek democracy, but these concepts were out there, and they were known to anybody who was living around there. Jesus very specifically proposed another model, which is him being Lord, and king, and being obeyed, and the Christian leaders who wrote the rest of the New Testament, all of those Christians who wrote that New Testament, in the name of Jesus or in the name of somebody else, they supported the model of monarchy and of absolute power, of the ruler over the world.
We're shocked when Donald Trump has this terrible bill and says that people should do it in the name of Jesus. The fact is that Jesus supported authoritarianism, not democracy, and you have to keep that in mind when you hear so many American Christians who are now in power, saying terrible, terrible things, and doing it in the name of religion.
A lot of liberal Christians will say: That's not our religion, that's not Christianity, that's nowhere in the Bible.
Well, I want you to listen to now, the Secretary of War, and I know a lot of people don't want to call him that because legally he's the Secretary of Defense, but what's going on with these attacks from Pete Hegseth and the military, it has nothing to do with defense. It has to do with offensive war. So, let's call him the Secretary of War.
Pete Hegseth has just released a video that is going to be put onto national television, using taxpayer money, and taxpayer money produced this video for the Pentagon, to proselytize Christianity, to the American people, and to soldiers in the military, and you'll hear that right away from the 1st line. Listen to this:
“Dear gracious God, I need you. Now, more than ever before, I need you, for I realize how great is my task, and how meager are my resources. Give me wisdom, I pray…”
It goes on and on like that, Pete Hegseth, praying to his Christian god for the military to be strong and for wisdom, always for wisdom, because so meager are his resources.
Right there I'm thinking, what the hell is he talking about? Pete Hegseth has, at his command, the largest, most wealthy military ever to exist in the history of humanity, and Pete Hegseth has burned through that military budget.
He's got nuclear weapons. He's got aircraft carriers. He's got rockets and bombs and bullets and so many weapons and huge numbers of people who are out there ready to obey his orders. How meager are his resources?
Then, because he's burned through all those resources, he's coming to the American people and saying he needs two hundred billion dollars more to fight this stupid war. How meager are his resources, he says when he’s praying to his god, the god who is supposed to be, by the way, the omnipotent ruler of the entire universe.
If Christians really believe they have meager resources and that the all powerful god of the entire universe is on their side, I don't get it.
No, Pete Hegseth, your resources are not meager. No, Pete Hegseth, you are not the underdog. You are the bully.
But he's praying for wisdom.
Right around the same time that this video got released, it was just around this morning, Pete Hegseth went to his monthly Christian, exclusively Christian, only Christians allowed, no other religions allowed, his Christian pentagon military U.S. Federal government-paid-for prayer service.
He gave a specific prayer there, and then he cited a particular Bible passage. I want to read that to you.
Here's what he prayed. He said, “Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation.”
“Let every round find its mark.” When he's talking about there, he's talking about bullets. That's every round of ammunition. Pete Hegseth is praying that every single bullet that is fired kills somebody.
You may be thinking, that's not what Christianity is about.
Pete Hegseth is actually not a complete idiot. He has a very warped morality, and that morality has been shaped by his Christian upbringing, and the association that he's had his entire adult life, being saved over and over again every time he does something that's embarrassing, but he's been Christian his entire life.
He's got that warped morality from the Christian Bible, Old Testament, and New Testament.
I want to point out the Bible verse that he chose to read after that prayer that he gave that every bullet that the American military fires, every round of ammunition kills somebody, in the name of Jesus.
He read a psalm. Oh, the Psalms, you might think, they're so comforting, the Psalms. We love to open the Bible and read the Psalms.
Let's listen to the Psalm that Pete Hegseth chose to read. It said:
“I pursued my enemies and overtook them, and did not turn back till they were consumed.”
Consumed, that means dead.
Let me read more of that psalm, so that you get a context of the kind of comfort and the spiritual wisdom that Pete Hegseth is expecting our soldiers to take from that.
This is Psalm 18. I'm starting it around verse 37, which is where Pete Hegseth started.
“I pursued my enemies and overtook them. I did not turn back till they were destroyed.”
This is another translation. Pete Hegseth said “consumed, this one says “destroyed”. You get the idea, but it goes on.
“I crushed them so that they could not rise.
They fell beneath my feet.
You armed me with strength for battle.
You humbled my adversaries before me.
You made my enemies turn their backs in flight, and I destroyed my foes.
They cried for help, but there was no one to save them to the lord, but he did not answer.
I beat them as fine as wind blown dust.
I trampled them like mud in the streets, you have delivered me from the attacks of the people, you have made me the head of nations, people, I did not know, now serve me, foreigners, cower before me, as soon as they hear of me, they obey me, they lose all heart, they come trembling from their strongholds.”
The comforting psalms, the compassionate Bible, the love of the Lord, and the wisdom of the Bible: This is what Christian nationalists tell you that they're going to teach the entire nation, that it's just all wonderful morality, when, in fact, Pete Hegseth, and Donald Trump, and their fellow Christian nationalists, who now control all three branches of the U.S. Federal government, the Bible passages that they cite, the prayers that they make in the name of Jesus, Show us a very different side of Christianity, a brutal, cruel, violent, totalitarian, fascist Christianity.
It's time that we face that.
These people are not ignoring the teachings of the Bible, they are fulfilling them, and that is why they are so nasty.