I’m fascinated by this whole case of Kentucky Clerk Kim Davis refusing to marry anyone because she’s against same sex marriage. For one thing, this is all so Christian: looking for a loophole. According to her, she isn’t being prejudice as she would be if she simply wouldn’t marry LGBT people. But it is ridiculous. I think as a nation we have to stand with the evidence. She would marry people when same sex marriage was illegal and she won’t now. Of course, she isn’t even being that sly. She says she won’t issue marriage licenses “under God’s authority.” Of course, she isn’t working for a church. But that’s another matter.

It seems clear to me that she should simply be fired. She isn’t willing to do her job. Imagine that I was a member of the Church of Lazy People, and I took at a job at the US Postal Service. But I refused to work the counter or deliver mail, because it was against my religion, I would be fired and that would be that. Because Christianity is a popular church and there are many bigots similiar to Kim Davis, she’s treated as though her demands were valid. Of course, no reasonable person seems to be defending her.

What I expect to happen is that Davis will have a “Go Fund Me” campaign set up for her and walk away with a million bucks and retire. At worst, some church will hire her for her “brave” stand against Satan. But if she ends up poor and living in a homeless shelter, I’m fine with that. To be honest, I’m tired to hearing conservative Christians whine and complain about all their oppression without actually experiencing any harms. These people aren’t being fed to lions, after all. In fact, in the case of Kim Davis, she hasn’t even been fired, even though if she worked (for far less money) at Walmart, she would have been fired days ago.

The Republican candidate for governor in Kentucky, Matt Bevin, supports Davis’ right not to do her job, “I absolutely support her willingness to stand on her First Amendment rights.” As Scott Lemieux responded sarcastically, “I’m sure he would feel the same way if state officials started withholding their services to him on the grounds that his economic views were inconsistent with the Sermon on the Mount.” That’s right. Bevin only supports Davis because he supports the effect. Even he must know that such a broad reading of the First Amendment would make society ungovernable. Even Justice Scalia understands this priciple.

But here is what I really don’t understand: if this is all about religion, why not just say, “Sure the government can ‘marry’ whomever they want, but God doesn’t accept those marriages”? I mean, from the government’s standpoint, marriage is primarily about tax policy, and Jesus was very clear about that. There’s my good friend Mark. In 12:14-15, he wrote, “They came and said to Him…. ‘Is it lawful to pay a poll-tax to Caesar, or not? Shall we pay or shall we not pay?'” Jesus knew that they were just trying to trick him, so he had them bring him a coin and show that it was Caesar’s image on the coin. Jesus then said, “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

I know that Kim Davis would respond that marriage is God’s. But clearly not in this case. The “marriage” of the United States of America is not the “marriage” of the Bible. So what’s the big deal? Well, we know what the big deal is. As I say: Christianity is, for most people, a cultural signifier. They don’t care about God. They just want to stop the flow of history. They want to say that their tribe is right and other tribes are wrong. And most of all, they want to continue on oppressing those they’ve oppressed in the past.

So for those who have some sympathy for Kim Davis as a pawn in a political game she probably doesn’t even know she’s part of, I say unto you, “Render her unto God.” Fire her and let her powerful God take care of her. If he really cares so much about the sanctity of marriage, he will reward her — maybe by killing her so she can go up to heaven. Regardless, if doing God’s work is easy, it is meaningless. Let her be a good Christian and suffer for her religion.

Update

It turns out that Davis is elected and so can’t be fired. Thus, she should be thrown in jail.

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig asks a good question, Why Is Donald Trump Winning Over Evangelical Voters? The truth is that evangelicals are not actually more interested in Trump than other Republicans. Still, it is telling. And they have other good choices. They have Ben Carson, a man who got through college and medical school while still believing the universe is only 6,000 years old. They have a minister (who is friends with the writer of “Cat Scratch Fever”). They have the guy who said, “And it’s only by the blood of Jesus Christ that I’ve been redeemed from my sins.” She noted, “And yet, with all of these perfectly serviceable choices, evangelicals still appear curiously interested in Trump, whose Christian bona fides add up to exactly nothing…” Yet it is Trump they prefer.

Bruenig has a curious answer to the question. She thinks evangelicals have spent so much time getting lip service from the Republican Party, that they are revolting. They like the fact that Donald Trump isn’t offering them anything, because they know that nothing is what they are going to get regardless. I love this theory, but I think it has a huge problem: it depends upon the idea that the Republican Party has used evangelicals and given them nothing in return. That just isn’t true. In fact, it isn’t close to true.

On the federal level, conservative Christians got the Defense of Marriage Age and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The entire country has turned against the Christian conservatives on LGBT issues, but that is hardly the fault of the Republican Party. And the Republicans have done everything they can to counter Obergefell v Hodges — which would now require a Constitutional amendment. And on the Supreme Court, Republicans have put on four extreme social conservatives. On the state level, abortion has been effectively made illegal in many places — all thanks for the Republican Party.

I think the answer to Bruenig’s question is much simpler: there isn’t anything different between evangelical and non-evangelical conservatives. The evangelicals may whine about the gays and about abortion, but they primarily care about one thing: those people. They want to “get” those people because those people are the reason that their lives are so bad. It’s a great irony, of course, that what has most hurt the lives of these conservative voters are the policies of the party that gets them to vote for it by promising to get “those people.”

For years, I’ve been writing about the fact that for the vast majority of people religion is nothing more than a cultural signifier. I know that Bruenig takes religion very seriously herself. And so she doesn’t want to think that for most Christians, their religion is just a reflection of them being the right kind of people. But it’s true. And there is another irony, because Mexico (and when conservatives talk about immigrants, they always mean Mexicans) is more religious than the United States. Meanwhile, Canada is much less religious than we are. But they are okay. I wonder why that is? I don’t mean to suggest that it is racism; I mean to say it right out: it’s racism.

So it doesn’t even make much sense to ask why evangelicals like Donald Trump. They may be evangelicals, but that doesn’t mean that they are religious in the way that the early Christians would have understood the word. But that’s okay, because the evangelicals would have hated the early Christians as much as they hate the Mexicans today, even though some, I assume, were good people.

See also: Why Donald Trump Appeals to Evangelicals.

Some time ago, I wrote a glowing review of the videographer Logicked, Idiosyncratic Art From Logicked. He recently discovered the article and was well pleased with it. But he was less pleased with some of my comments, and we got into a discussion about what appears to be a big divide in the atheist community: the status of Islam as a particularly vile religion. I don’t want to put myself in the position of speaking for Logicked. You can see his comments at the link above. Here, I simply want to lay out some of my thoughts on the broader issue.

Let me start by noting that I have always felt like an outsider in the atheist movement. This is ironic since I have always been an atheist. But maybe it makes sense. I used to be a libertarian, so I’m ruthless with those poeple. I know religion only from the outside where it just seems silly — and mostly harmless. But I realize that them’s fightin’ words in the atheist community.

The most dangerous aspect of modern Christianity is its position on abortion. Yet there is not a word in the Bible about abortion. Thomas Aquinas didn’t think that fertilized eggs had souls. Protestants didn’t care at all about abortion until church leaders began to worry that they would have to integrate their schools. In other words, Christians use their religion to justify that they want to do anyway.

Are Muslims any different? I have yet to see any proof that they are. And everything I know about human nature indicates that they aren’t. People do all kinds of vile things and they have all kinds of reasons for doing them. In fact, they often have various justifications over time. Look at Ted Bundy, who found God and determined that it was pornography that caused him to murder three dozen women.

I’m more than willing to take people at their word. If they say they are Christians, they are Christians for all that means. One thing it doesn’t mean that they follow every word in their holy books or that they follow the teachings of the leaders of their churches. As I write about all the time, for the vast majority of people, religion is a cultural signifier. This is why we see the teachings of religions change over time and why we see them sliced and diced. Rare is the fundamentalist Christian who has a problem with eating shell fish, even though it is every bit as much against the “literal word of God” as having sex with people of the same gender.

Let’s turn our attention to Muslims. The fact that we have to use modifiers like “radical” to describe Muslim terrorists highlights this point. Most Muslims in the west are culturally Muslim in the same way that most Jews are culturally Jewish. In pre-1948 Israel, were the Jews committing acts of terrorism doing so because of their religion beliefs? That seems unlikely. But the same arguments made today about terrorism from the Muslim community could have been applied then to the Jewish community.

We also have the situation where the vast majority of Muslim violence is perpetrated against other Muslims. Who is the Islamic State killing? Almost exclusively other Muslims. So it isn’t “the book” that is the basis of the violence. There are Muslims who use their religion to justify violence, and others who use it to justify peace. It’s like in the antebellum era where there were Christians who used “the book” to justify slavery, and others who used it to justify abolition.

I’m interested in the old religious texts for what they say about the people they were written for. The Iliad and the Odyssey were stories that told the accident Greeks who they were. The same is true of the holy books of the Abrahamic religions, although hilariously, they are still believed. But again, it isn’t a question of the books defining the behavior.

I thought we would take a moment to consider the worst question at last Thursday’s Republican presidential debate. It was from a Facebook user, so that Fox News could deflect blame as if this is the kind of thing that the people just really care about, “I want to know if any of them have received a word from God on what they should do and take care of first.” It actually sounds kind of snarky. I wonder if the questioner was really just posing it to see how many of the candidates would claim that God told them he wanted them to be president. But most likely, it was a thoroughly genuine question.

I hate this kind of thing, because even though I’m an atheist, I take religion seriously. I admire people who are religious. One of the reasons I admire them is that they are incredibly rare in this country. Most religious people I talk to have no sense of theology. They are religious in the same way that others are Giants fans because they grew up in San Francisco and were forced to watch games while they grew up. But at least the Giants fans understand the game of baseball. They don’t just pretend while having little idea what’s actually going on in the field.

On the plus side, no one claimed that God wanted them to run for president. That is apparently so 2012! Ted Cruz instead said, “I am blessed to receive a word from God every day in receiving the scriptures and reading the scriptures. And God speaks through the Bible.” He then went on to talk about how God cured his father of alcoholism, but apparently not of being a hateful bigot. And then he got down to the meat of it, “You shall know them by their fruit.” And that means that the Republicans must nominate “someone who has been a fiscal conservative, a social conservative, a national security conservative.” Because Jesus.

John Kasich said he believed in miracles because his father was a mailman and his maternal grandmother could “barely speak English.” Then he went on with some boilerplate about community and opportunity. And then he said what all American Christians seem to believe, “[God] wants America to be strong. He wants America to succeed. And he wants America to lead.” Because Jesus? I don’t know. The truth is that Kasich is the only one up there on that stage that shows any sign of what is termed “God’s love.” But he too seems to be stuck in the religion as signifier nonsense.

Scott Walker got real Christian, “I’m certainly an imperfect man. And it’s only by the blood of Jesus Christ that I’ve been redeemed from my sins.” He then went on to talk about the protesters in his state and how he was able to do what he thought was God’s will. So cutting union rights is something that God cares about?! God the micro-manager — I love it! I think that Walker may be confused between the Christian God and the Koch brothers. And let’s be clear: he’s doing the Koch brothers’ bidding, not God’s. He might want to check that book he claims to love so much. But he won’t. Because Koch money.

Megyn Kelly has a reputation for being smart, but I think that is just the result of low expectations: “in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” So for Marco Rubio, she wanted to combine God and veterans. A real debate moderator would have asked these fools to combine their belief in God and their knee-jerk support for war. But we couldn’t have that. So Rubio was allowed to waffle away. He used the word “bless” six times in his first 58 words — “we” are blessed, the Republican Party is blessed, and most of all America is blessed. Also: Obama has destroyed the VA. Because Jesus.

Megyn Kelly also mixed the question up for Ben Carson; he was supposed to combine God with race relations. Carson used it as an opportunity to make old white people know that even though he is a black man, he is not one of those demanding ones. He is the kind that will tell them that racism is over — except for the occasional person who still uses the n-word or goes on a murder rampage at a Black church. We must never divide the nation by not pretending that everything is just fine. Because Jesus was big on ignoring problems. “And again I say unto you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man… Wait! Forget that. The rich are cool. No problem with the rich. No injustice in this world. No, not a bit. Don’t want to divide anyone.”

And then it was time for the closing statements where only Huckabee mentioned God, and just in passing.

A month and a half ago, The Journal Gazette reported about a disturbing story out of God’s country in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Religion Focus of Suit vs Teacher. Last February, a second grade boy, called AB, was at school on recess. A little girl asked him where he went to church. He said that he didn’t and that he didn’t believe in God. The little girl claimed that this hurt her feelings. The playground supervisor then reported it to his teacher, Michelle Meyer. Meyer then asked him about his religious beliefs, and told him she was going to contact his mother. She never did that, although she did force little AB to eat his lunch alone and not talk to any other kids for the next three days. That was when his mother became involved and had it stopped.

Let’s be clear where the teacher is coming from, because I don’t want to unfairly vilify her. According to her, she was just punishing AB for being mean to other children (even though his interaction was really only with a single other child). I’m sure in her mind that AB was a bully. Think about it in this context: imagine if a child was going around the school yard telling Jewish children that the Holocaust never happened. Clearly, that’s not what’s going on, but that’s the way that a true believing Christian would see it: AB was spreading lies designed only to cause pain.

The teacher is totally wrong. And the whole thing shows the way that religious communities poison minds. I doubt it occurred to Meyer that AB was anything but some bizarre Satanic outlier. It wouldn’t have occurred to her that she had it completely backwards: that AB didn’t need to be told of the healing power of Jesus but that Meyer was totally ignorant of the actual variety of spiritual (and non-spiritual) belief. And her actions do not show any Christian love to me. They demonstrate the very worst aspects of Christianity. If it weren’t for our secular state, who knows what she would have felt okay doing to this little boy in the name of the One True Way™.

But I’m more interested in the little girl. How fragile she is! Her parents are raising her in the perfect cloistered way to create another Michelle Meyer. It hurt her feelings that someone else didn’t share her beliefs. This has bullying backwards. Long before Meyer got involved and started her course of bullying on AB, this little girl was bullying him. In the lawsuit against the teacher it says, “He also stated that it was fine with him if his inquiring classmate believed in God.” Yet the little girl was pandered to for days — including by other members of the school staff.

This is, of course, special pleading. This is what makes Christians come unglued when department stores use the inclusive “Happy Holidays!” That just isn’t acceptable to some Christians, because it doesn’t hold their religion up as something more than a belief rather than what they claim it to be: The Truth. And that is, at base, just like it was for the little girl. Such faith is so weak that they can’t be allowed to hear any idea that conflicts with it. This is not only bad for society generally, it’s terrible for the religion. But Christianity has been stagnant for hundreds of years, so I doubt that matters.

It would be nice to think that this lawsuit will change things. But I seriously doubt that. What the little girl and Michelle Meyer did was not an indication of viciousness. It was an indication of the inbred nature of American Christianity. To most Christians, atheists are people who exist “out there,” who dance naked with goats by moonlight. And it is going to remain that way as long as Christians in this country can delude themselves into thinking that “all good people” are Christians.

Last week at Job’s Anger, Ted McLaughlin wrote, Jewish-Americans Think Iran Deal Should Be Approved. He presented data from a recent Jewish Journal poll of almost 500 American Jews. The results are stark. Approval for the Iran nuclear deal is 53%-35%. The only subcategory that doesn’t approve of the deal is people without college degrees, who disapprove 39%-48%. I commented that it made me think of old line about some people being, “Holier than the Pope.” In this case, we have conservative Christians who are more reflexively pro-Israel than Jews themselves. In fact, I suspect they are more reflexively pro-Israel than Israelis themselves.

This is all in the context of Mike Huckabee’s comments about how this deal will “take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven.” But what’s with that anyway? The vast majority of Americans are pro-Israel because of the Holocaust. But there is a special ferocity among the conservative Christians when it comes to Israel. And that is because they are Christian Zionists: they believe that the Jews must be in charge of Israel before the second coming of Jesus can occur. So the Jews are just a tool for the Christians. If I were an Israeli, I would not consider these people my friends.

It is more than just seeing the Jews as a tool. When Jesus comes back, he’s planning to kill everyone who didn’t believe in him. Apparently he is like Tinker Bell and requires that people “believe” so that he can exist. Historically, Christians have hated the Jews. They are, of course, the people who Jesus specifically came to save and what did they do: deny him. So if the Christians are right, the Jews are screwed. And the Christians think they are right, of course; that’s why they are Christians!

A little less than two years ago, a Pew Research Center poll asked Americans, “Was Israel given to the Jewish people by God?” Only 40% of American Jews said yes. Yet 82% of white evangelical Christians said yes. The only subgroup of Jews who were more in agreement were Modern Orthodox. Even the Ultra-Orthodox were less keen on that idea. Needless to say, this is not a selfless viewpoint. This is what Christians think because it will bring on the party at the end of time — a party that most conservative Christians think will be unsoiled by the presence of Jews.

Also last week, Sarah Posner wrote, Will Huckabee’s Ovens Comment Be the End of His Candidacy? There are those who argue that some evangelicals are getting tired of extremist talk. But Posner is correct, “[I]f you have 20 percent or so of evangelicals supporting Donald Trump, it’s hard to see why they’d be mightily offended by Huckabee’s outrageous comments…” More fundamentally, I’ve been around enough Christians to know that the best you will ever get on the question of whether the Jews are going to hell is, “Who knows?!” It isn’t their place to judge. Except when it is.

But to give you some idea of where Huckabee is coming from, consider what he said after visiting Auschwitz, “If you felt something incredibly powerful at Auschwitz and Birkenau over the 11 million killed worldwide and the 1.5 million killed on those grounds, cannot we feel something extraordinary about 55 million murdered in our own country in the wombs of their mothers?” That sums up where the American conservative Christians are coming from. Whether it is pushing for their policies against abortion or hurrying along Armageddon, the Jews are just tools and props. It’s offensive to non-Jews. It ought to be terrifying to Jews themselves.

Last weekend, I learned that Pope Francis’ approval rating in the United States has gone way done. I guess like all his predecessors, he will be a one term pope. The big fall in his numbers comes from conservatives. Last year, 72% of them liked the pope. But now that number is just 45%. Compare this to Donald Trump who has a 49% approval rating among conservatives. But that makes sense: Trump demonstrates the values that conservatives Christians hold dear: bigotry, selfishness, hubris, vindictiveness — all the things that Jesus preached about during his Sermon on the Mount. (“Blessed are the rich, for they are not losers…”)

I have ranted quite a lot around hear about liberals and their reactions to the pope. It isn’t really their constant whining about how disappointed they are that the pope hasn’t come out and said, “I’m not really religious, but I’m spiritual.” The problem is not understanding what the pope and the Catholic Church are. All Pope Francis has done is shift the focus of what he talks about. There is no doubt that he — like his predecessors — is against contraception, homosexual relations, and divorce. And equally, there is no doubt that his predecessors — like Pope Francis — were in favor of helping the poor, managing the environment, and showing mercy even to murderers.

Now the conservatives can get a little of my ire. The fact that they claimed to widely approve of Pope Francis last year but don’t so much this year just goes to show that their opinions are meaningless. At least the liberals have an honest complaint: Pope Francis is indeed not revolutionizing the Catholic Church in the way they want. (He is however doing so as a practical matter in terms of making it less corrupt and dealing with the decades — or centuries — of child rape.) The conservatives are unhappy because they think that Francis is revolutionizing the Church in a liberal way. And that just isn’t true.

It is amazing that conservatives could be so clueless about what Christianity has stood for all these years. It has always been a mixed bag of liberal and conservative ideas. And it doesn’t matter at all that most of the conservative Christians are protestants. The theology is still the same. But modern American Christianity really has lost its way. It would be more correct to call it a political party than a religion. I saw a little video of Mike Huckabee explaining how he didn’t believe the government should feed the poor, because that’s not what God wants. He apparently wants the church to do that. But somehow God does want the government to stop women from having abortions. He should just admit: he has political and cultural opinions which he wedges into his religion — not the other way around.

The main thing is that I want everyone to leave the pope alone. I was raised Catholic. But I managed to get through the whole thing knowing shockingly little. And I literally never believed — it just isn’t in me. But I’m familiar enough with the Catholic Church to know roughly what goes on inside. I know what real debates inside the Church look like. And there just aren’t major disagreements. So if liberals want to be disappointed, I think they are silly, but their disappointment is real. Conservatives, on the other hand, have nothing to be disappointed with. They’ve just fooled themselves into think that the Church was something that it never was. And they should really rethink just what their own religious beliefs mean to them.

David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network thinks he knows why Evangelicals are so keen on Donald Trump, Explaining the Evangelical Attraction to Donald Trump. It’s because “Trump operates in a world of absolutes” and so do they; what’s more, Trump gets “public ridicule” for the things he says and so do they. So they are like peas in a pod: the only thing they are more certain of than being right is that other people are oppressing them because of it. But really what Brody is arguing is that Evangelicals like Trump because they like Trump. They accept him because they think he is one of them.

The big problem here is that it shows what a sham the Evangelicals are. I’m not saying this is shocking news. For years, I’ve been writing about how Evangelicals don’t seem to be interested in theology. More recently, I wrote, American Christianity as Cultural Signifier. Because among the conservatives, Christianity doesn’t mean much other than that “good people” are Christians and “bad people” are not. Trump is an excellent example of this. He is not an Evangelical. In fact, he only seems to be a Christian in the most casual of ways.

This is how Brody looks at the issue:

So is he saying that these people would appreciate the honesty of any politician? Say an outspoken atheist politician? Of course not. This is just a little bit of apologetics — an excuse for why Evangelicals would like Trump despite the fact that he says things that should be offensive to them. It would be like explaining a groundswell of Mexican support for Trump as, “Now look: when Trump talks about how Mexicans are drug dealers and rapists, that obviously is not the Mexican textbook answer. But at least they appreciate his honesty and with politicians nowadays that is a valued commodity.” I don’t think so.

Sarah Posner noted a bit of a contradiction in what Brody had to say. He is still upset that Bush operative Ken Mehlman got the Evangelicals to come out and vote for Bush by pushing the anti-LGBT Federal Marriage Amendment, only to find out later that “Mehlman was a homosexual who really didn’t believe in the whole effort…” But somehow, the Evangelicals are now happy with Trump’s being “honest about [his] views about God”? But it was only a few years ago that Trump was pro-choice and pro-LGBT. So Evangelicals — and Brody most of all — think that Trump is saying what he really thinks now? He was lying before?

Let’s just be clear here: the Evangelical community is very homogeneous. It doesn’t like outsiders. It sees itself as embattled. Donald Trump tells the Evangelical community exactly what it wants to hear: it is great and all its problems come from those “other” people: immigrants, liberals, and (unstated, but only because it is toxic to talk about it) blacks. People think of identity politics as something that has to do with minority groups. But there is no greater — and more bizarre — identity than the Evangelicals. And Trump now, and Reagan before him, knew that it isn’t Christianity that binds them together. And so it doesn’t matter that neither man was religious. They both “endorsed” that particular kind of Evangelical bigotry. So Evangelicals are very happy to support Donald Trump.