Bryan Zepp Jamieson
September 8th 2025
I could write a hundred essays about the incompetence, cruelty, corruption and sheer stupidity of Trump and his fascist minions, and the main reason I haven’t is simply because thousands of other people are all writing about it, and a lot of them are doing a better job of it than I could. I’m not going to make a difference of any sort if my content boils down to “What Thom Hartmann, Robert Reich, Paul Krugman and Lev Parnas all said.” It’s all I can do to avoid writing in the same cadence with which Rachel Maddow speaks!
It doesn’t mean I’ve nothing to say; I just don’t want to be a “me too” voice in the crowd.
So I watch for something that may not get a lot of attention normally, but which I think is important and could really matter.
Senator Tim Kaine (D-VA) gave me that opportunity yesterday when I found he responded to Christian Nationalist footpad Marco Rubio’s honks about how “’our rights come from our creator…” Kaine, who actually went to school and studied history, called Little Marco’s remarks “extremely troubling.”
If it had ended there, it would have been dismissed as a sincere but utterly ineffectual complaint from a member of a Congress completely neutered by Republican corruption and cowardice.
But then Dim Donald, that exemplar of Christian Nationalism, the figure who Adolf Jesus looks up to from his swastika-shaped cross, decided to jump in with both swollen feet.
He wrote. “Under the Trump administration, we’re defending our rights and restoring our identity as a nation under God, we are one nation under God and we always will be. The need for this commission has never been more clear than it was last week when the ineffectual senator from Virginia, a man named Tim Kaine, stated that the notion ‘our rights come from our creator’ is ‘extremely troubling’ to him. Isn’t that terrible, how he would say something like that? The senator from Virginia should be ashamed of himself, for many things! For many things, for things even beyond that, but in its own way, nothing is more important than those words, they were terrible words. We have to bring back religion in America, bring it back stronger than ever before.”
Donald has captured perfectly the essence of the philosophy of Christian Nationalism: the arrogance, the intellectual and moral dishonesty, and the towering hypocrisy. He IS the face of Christian Nationalism, right down to the child raping and wanton murder for political convenience.
For any Christians reading this, I’m not talking about your religion. I know a lot of Christians who are good, kind people who respect themselves and respect others. I’m talking about Christianity’s dark cousin, the vicious mean-spirited fundamentalists who in this incarnation call themselves Christian Nationalists. Christian Nationalism bears the same relationship to Christianity that National Socialism does to Democratic Socialism: that is to say, it’s nearly the exact opposite.
They love to claim a God that is responsible for the very rights they are trying to destroy: the right to chose representation; the right to freedom from religion; the right to personal bodily autonomy; the right to fair and equal justice. The “god-given rights” was a rhetorical flourish added to the Declaration of Independence over Thomas Jefferson’s strident objection, Ever since, they’ve done what religion always does and stolen credit for the good & ethical things humanity has come up with.
Want proof? Take a look at the list of rights Jefferson had in mind, and find anywhere in the bible where such rights are mentioned, let alone supported. You can find long lists of offenses for which people should be executed, such as eating shellfish or getting tattoos, and cheerful advice on how a woman should be forced to get an abortion if her husband claims she has been unfaithful, or advice on tearing children apart for making fun of a prophet, but not much about secret voting or freedom of speech. About the only ‘god-given’ right the Constitution had was the right to own slaves, and the Constitution got over that.
I’ve often stated that theocracy is the worst form of government humanity has ever invented. It demands obedience and blind belief to begin with, but unlike regular tyrannies, there is no Leader who must eventually take responsibility for his autocratic cruelty, but instead tyrants dressed as supplicants who can foist any accountability off on an invisible and silent god (and all gods are silent and invisible for the same reason unicorns are), making them much less accountable.
And since most holy texts are utterly horrifying, it’s assumed that any nearby deity will rubber stamp various and assorted atrocities.
Most fundamentalist leaders are utter phonies, and nobody with an inkling of history should be surprised that Donald Trump would be quick to seize the opportunities of being a Christian Nationalist leader. No belief required. Or ethics. Or honesty. Or even humanity. If he does it in the name of God, he can get away with anything.
The only thing more dangerous than a sociopath as a religious leader is a sincere sociopath as a religious leader. The nut who wants to carry out his notion of the will of God is pure schizophrenia legitimized by religious fervor. Fortunately, Trump is just your garden-variety thuggish con artist. That makes it easier to limit the damage he’s doing.
Christians are going to have to stand up to Trump’s ecumenical bullying and take their religion back. They have to join everyone and rise up to bring Trump and his toxic crowd down.
