Just Like Pilate Did

This, my friends, is how a present-day Trump-supporting Christian absolves himself/herself of all responsibility:

• Does Trump gut the EPA's policies and rules, thereby helping destroy God's great creation?
• Does Trump abandon Kurdish Christians to be slaughtered by their enemies? 
• Does Trump himself stay publicly silent when a vile video supporting and encouraging violence towards non-Trumpists is played at one of his own resorts?
• Does Trump use his powers to personally enrich himself? 
• Does Trump regularly create policies that hurt the poor and disenfranchised?
• Does Trump bully and name-call anyone who does not agree with him?
• Does Trump regularly spew both racism and misogyny for his core base to feast upon? 

No matter!  If you are a "Christian" (especially if you are an evangelical who has supported Trump in the past), you don't have to concern yourself with such trivial, meaningless, trite social matters! You simply wash your hands of it all and quote some scripture out of context that "proves" God wants things this way; then, you are thoroughly exonerated for your utter lack of social activism against a man who daily tramples upon the spirit of Christian love.

This kind of political apathy in which many evangelical Christians have now enveloped themselves displays two important traits of these "Christians": (1) a growing understanding and an implicit concession that Trump is an awful human being who neither knows nor cares anything about the spirit of the Christ, and (2) a thorough lack of empathy that is born from their privileged lifestyle, one in which Trump's policies and vitriol have not touched them personally, thereby making those policies and vitriol easy to ignore and even, at times, excuse.  The first is a step in the right direction (a baby step, certainly, but a step nonetheless); the second, however, is two steps backwards, thereby completely negating the first step.

I will admit, however, that I do agree with one thing that this person said in the original post; that is, professed Christians "need to let God influence [their] politics."  In fact, that single statement completely invalidates everything else s/he said in the rest of his/her post.  If Christians were to start doing just that (i.e., becoming more politically aware and more socially active in this world based on their Christian principles), then two things would happen in our nation's civil milieu: (1) Trump would be out.  Period.  Either he would be impeached and removed from office, or he would be soundly voted out in 2020.  But either way, this blasphemous, irreverent facade of a "Christian" would be recognized for who he truly is, and he would be gone.  And (2) the Republican party would have to remove its stranglehold on the Christian religion.  I'm not saying that the Democratic party should then be allowed to grab the title of the "Party of Christianity," for that would be nothing more than swinging the idolatry pendulum the other way.  What I am saying, however, is that Christians would stop automatically voting just for candidates with an 'R' next to their names AND would push for all candidates to start displaying more Christ-like behavior and creating more Christian (i.e., empathetic, compassionate, and loving) policies.

And we would all, Christian and non-Christian alike, be better for it.