It is a curious thing, the way a man can read a book of peace on Sunday and vote for a firestorm on Monday, all while wearing the same Sunday-best suit and a look of profound piety. I have long observed that the more a politician mentions the Almighty, the more likely he is to be looking for a way to use the Lord’s good name as a shield for a piece of devilry he’s cooked up in the back room.
We find ourselves today in a bit of a “slap-fight” on the global stage, though it’s a slap-fight with multi-million dollar missiles. Our Commander-in-Chief, a man who once found his feet too tender for the marches of Vietnam but finds his trigger finger quite limber in the Oval Office, has decided we are at war. Or perhaps it is a “kinetic event.” The name changes as often as the justification.
One day, we are told Iran is a nuclear hive that must be smoked out. The next, we are informed the hive was already empty and the honey long gone, so we are now fighting because our friends in the neighborhood goaded us into it. It reminds me of a boy I knew in Monterey who started a fight because he said the other boy looked at him “sideways,” then later claimed it was because the other boy’s dog was planning to bite him in three weeks’ time.
The Mathematics of Modern Sacrifice
Now, there is a certain “Christian” flavor to the support for this mess. You’ll hear it in the pews and on the news: that this is a “Holy War,” a “divine mandate.” I must have missed the chapter where Jesus suggested that the best way to love thy neighbor was to turn his electrical grid into a colander.
It is a peculiar brand of Christianity that identifies more with the money changers in the temple than the man who flipped their tables. We are told we must protect the oil, the 20% that flows through the Straits of Hormuz, as if the “Blood of the Lamb” were actually 10W-30. The greed and selfishness of it all is dressed up in the robes of righteousness, but the seams are splitting.
Consider the economics:
- The “Enemy”: Builds a drone for the price of a used bicycle.
- The “Chosen”: Shoots it down with a missile that costs more than a small-town library.
We are told this is “strength.”
Back home, if a man spent five dollars to save a nickel, we didn’t call him a leader; we called him “disturbed” and kept him away from the communal accounts.
A Theology of Convenience
The MAGA movement has done something truly remarkable: they have turned the Cross into a branding iron. They use the imagery of the Prince of Peace to justify the whims of a man who wouldn’t know a beatitude if it bit him on his “spray-tanned” nose.
They speak of “End Times” and “Divine Plans” with a certain “unrestricted euphoria,” as if a global conflagration were a grand fireworks show put on for their personal benefit. It is the height of vanity to believe that the Creator of the Universe is taking tactical advice from a man who can’t keep his own story straight for forty-eight hours.
True faith, as I understand it from the common folk who actually live it, is about sacrifice, humility, and the widow’s mite. It isn’t about the silver-spooned commander sending other people’s children to die for a plan that hasn’t been written yet. If this is the “new Christianity,” then I suspect the original Founder would find Himself a stranger at the rally.
We are marching into a fog, led by a man who thinks the fog is a cloud of glory. As the old saying goes: “Lord, save us from the men who mean well, and double-save us from the ones who say they’re doing it for You.”