Justifying

EVANGELICAL SUPPORT for President Trump can be, and is, rationalized and justified according to three general principles. 1) the vessel of God paradigm. 2) compartmentalization 3) the lesser of two evils argument. First, the first. According to the bible, the inerrant word of God, God by granting free will to humanity, permitted a world in which all human beings are flawed, fallen. he has a purpose for everyone, including the most egregious sinners, and that purpose if often to use the fallen for good purposes. The bible is replete with examples: Noah, King David, King Cyrus of Persia, John the baptist, to name but a few. And thus it is with Donald Trump; a severely sinful man whom the lord has raised for the purpose of doing His will. Compartmentalization, the process by which most people separate their own actions and beliefs into separate categories to avoid the inconvenience of cognitive dissonance, allows evangelical Christians to proclaim: "we did not elect a preacher, we elected a president, and in the words of one evangelical minister: "I want the meanest S.O.B. can find to serve as president, that the kingdom of God can be brought to America, by brute force if necessary. The president of the United States need not and should not behave according to the precepts articulated in the Sermon On the Mount, he should speak and act as viciously as necessary to ensure that the rest of us do, or have the freedom to. The lesser of two evils theory, perhaps the method containing the most truth, a shard of it, holds that when confronted with two choices, one's only recourse is to select the better one. Accordingly, Hillary Clinton, whose alleged crime are mere unsubstantiated accusation and whose behavior fare more closely exemplifies the teaching of Christ, is opposed at any price. Her tax scheme would have us rendering too much unto Caesar, and her tolerance of homosexuals and transgender people is not biblical. Never mind that the Bible is full of admonitions which by today's standards seem overly harsh. Mathew 15:4 comes to mind. Never mind that the normal compassion of Christ is punctuated by brutality, and that the biblical god is "harsh" to say the least, not only in the Old testament, but in the New Testament as well. Never mind that the Bible endorses male subjugation of women, slavery, murder, and genocide. And, never mind that Jesus himself never mentions homosexuality. It must be sinful, because other parts of the Bible say so. The remark often falsely attributed to Thomas Jefferson: "When law becomes injustice, resistance becomes duty" seems applicable to opposition to evangelicals gaining political power. The remark accurately attributed to Goethe: "Confronted with great merit, the only resistance is admiration (love), seems applicable to those who oppose evangelicals gaining political power. Much of the bible seems to render another Goethe quote appropo: "Only by errors (in dogma) which really irk us do we advance. Accordingly, we will advance only be relegating all evangelical incursion into politics a thing of the past.