MAGA Christians are Mocking God

"God will not be mocked."

Growing up a Christian, I heard that phrase more times than I can count, often punctuating the finger-wagging sermons of sweaty, red-faced evangelists in their daily, thunderous AM radio diatribes against the evildoers assailing the world; or the slick sermons of megachurch minsters, returning to a tried-and-true playbook for one more Sunday morning congregational guilt trip.

The words were often the closing salvo of coming condemnation: the dire warning uttered by self-identified righteous people, claiming to have knowledge of the Almighty's searing anger and coming wrath—against the gays and the abortionists and the socialists and the immigrants, and whomever else they needed to manufacture fierce false urgency about in order to manipulate their faithful flockninto terrorizing and bullying and eradicating them… as Jesus would.

"God will not be mocked."

It was a molotov cocktail of damnation wrapped in a paper-thin facade of religiosity.

In other words, "The 'Man Upstairs' is paying attention, sinner—and you're gonna get what's coming to you!"

Now, I no longer imagine God to be male or residing some place above me, but I still pray the last part is somewhat binding.

The phrase, "God will not be mocked" actually comes from a New Testament book called Galatians, a letter to a growing local house church community from their absentee pastoral leader. The writer speaks to a supposed truth that we will one day be accountable for our actions, imploring the hearers and readers as followers of Jesus, to be steadfast in doing good because goodness is the whole point—because that goodness is their calling, and because to claim faith while doing harm is the height of hypocrisy.

Now, I don't know how all of this shakes out in the hereafter and just what kind of accounting we all have to make after we exhale one final time here, but I confess that lately I'm hoping the Conservative preachers’ warnings about evil people getting theirs are well-founded.

Because right now, I look around and I see them everywhere in this country, these ridiculous red-hatted clowns of an upside-down Christianity of cruelty.

We are in a golden age of God-mockers here in America.

They have ascended to the highest places in this nation, collecting all the earthly spoils of phony righteousness, leveraging every bit of counterfeit religious fervor, wielding all manner of perverted power, reaping a rotten harvest of irrational fear of the other.

And these professed believers are the very arrogant pretenders of piety they’ve been warning us about this whole time, and they can’t see it because they have learned to seek sin everywhere but in the mirror.

Seriously, a Christian thumbs-up to Donald Trump is a strident middle finger to Jesus Christ:

It's a mockery of God to demonize dark-skinned human beings.
It’s a mockery of God to support a sexual predator.
It's a mockery of God to deport those seeking refuge from tyranny.
It's a mockery of God to strip a woman of her God-given free will.
It's a mockery of God to separate children from their families.
It’s a mockery of God to prey upon the poor and vulnerable.
It is a mockery of God to deny healthcare to the sick.
It's a mockery of God to be infatuated with guns.
It's a mockery of God to applaud violent acts of domestic terrorism.
It's a mockery of God to perpetuate racial inequity.
It's a mockery of God to worship whiteness.

And it is a mockery of God to be guilty of all of these transgressions—while professing faith to be their genesis.

Today, while these self-righteous charlatans wildly parade their fake white American gospel in front of a world and a people they are unrelentingly predatory toward, seemingly without consequence or penalty—I hold out a bit of hope that one day they will face the justice that seems to be absent here, that there will be a final reckoning to make up for their prolific violence.

I pray that the brimstone, fiery warnings I was weaned on by pastors and priests were indeed true, even if the recipients were misidentified.

And I pray that people of deep faith will not grow weary in doing good while watching the bad people prosper while wearing a costume of religion; that whether or not justice evades them hereafter, that we do not allow them to injure humanity unabated here and now.

Even if God will be mocked by MAGA Christians, let us not be guilty of the collective sin of abiding it on our watch.