Donald Trump’s “pathological lying and malignant personality” is a key reason why he appeals to Christian fundamentalists, Matthew Sheffield writes in a tweet thread Wednesday.
“Big Lies are incredibly powerful but they’re also incredibly fragile. They crumble at the slightest challenge,” Sheffield writes. Neither Trump’s political thralls nor his base can abide that. “If Jesus was the Word made flesh, Trump is fundamentalists’ will to power made flesh.” The righteous submit to that power. To resist is apostasy.
That in part explains Rep. Liz Cheney’s expulsion from Republican House leadership Wednesday. Not because she disagrees with Trump, but because she does so publicly.
But it is more than that for fundamentalists, Sheffield believes. Not only are they desperate to maintain cultural control over the U.S., but to contain the threat to one of their core doctrines: biblical inerrancy.
Sheffield writes at Flux:
Seventy years after Buckley penned God and Man at Yale, the conservative project of “standing athwart history yelling stop” has been a dismal failure. Despite millions of dollars spent on “creation science” museums and “intelligent design” propaganda, 97 percent of scientists interviewed by the Pew Research Center say humans evolved from animals. Likewise, contrary to the predictions of fundamentalists, scholars of the ancient world keep finding evidence that the Hebrews were never in Egypt, that Yahweh was the member of a Canaanite pantheon as was his wife Asherah, and that the global flood portrayed in the Noah story never happened and was actually lifted from an earlier Mesopotamian myth.
Most conservative activists have never heard of such scholarly developments, however, because the American right essentially closed its intellectual canon decades ago, content with the belief that anything worth knowing about religion, history, and government could be learned from the Bible—with a little assistance from the “Founding Fathers,” who supposedly made a covenant with God to make the future United States become a nation for Christians. The dual fundamentalisms of politics and faith had a beguiling symmetry, one that only circular reasoning can engender.
Big Lies may be powerful, but so is science. Technological advancement is its own press agent. Even fundamentalists have on some level accepted science as a powerful tool for sussing out fact, if not capital-T truth. But faith and science are different cognitive domains. Rather than acknowledge that, fundamentalists bought into the notion that science somehow challenges their belief system and, particularly, the folk belief that the Bible is authoritative history. So much wasted evangelical energy over the last century and a half has gone into erecting a bulwark against science. Especially against the theory of evolution. Instead of insisting that faith is trans-rational, they attempted to prove that the Bible was not only good history but good science.
“Instead of returning to traditional metaphorical heuristics in which scripture is not literally true, Christian fundamentalists have instead begun attacking the very idea of secular knowledge at all,” Sheffield tweets. This trend points to what makes Trump their cultural hero (emphasis mine) :
They would rather implode their entire epistemology than admit it was faulty.
The urgency of their errand has been greatly hastened by the growing sense of loss fundamentalists feel daily as they see their sons leave religion, their daughters come out as bi, and Muslims move in down the street.
In this suffocating intellectual climate, truth is not what you can prove, but that which you can force others to accept.
This mentality is why Trump’s pathological lying and malignant personality has been so deeply embraced by fundamentalist conservatives.
Donald says it. They believe it. That settles it. Believers submit. Heretics resist.
Truth is whatever you can force others to accept. Trump and his cult want to force others to accept theirs.