I won’t buy his ‘truth’ or his Bible

One presidential candidate is now selling an American-flag-draped, Constitution-including Bible for $60!

If certain American evangelicals, certain Republicans and perhaps all people who still intend to vote for him know their history — especially the history of the Reformation — then that news should raise red flags and sound loud alarms.

This man has, twice now, been fined in civil court, both for sexually assaulting a victim and then defaming her twice. He settled in court after his sham and grift of a “university” was found to be a fraud. He has been fined in New York City half a billion dollars for committing multiple frauds via his businesses. The grace he has received from the New York Court of Appeals that has significantly reduced the fine — American grace apparently reserved for only rich white males — and true grace, about which the Bible speaks, are graces this man never has been known to offer anybody.

During his time in the White House, fact checkers estimated this man told about 30,000 lies — including lies that most certainly caused gross mismanagement of a pandemic and caused more Americans to die than should have. There is no disputing that fact. Those 30,000 lies do not include those he told prior to his time there, or since. “Truth Social” is a cruel joke about truth.

Now this man is selling Bibles. When this man does that, he is literally — as the very Bible itself says — exchanging “the truth of God for a lie,” a sin that itself is only one among a list as long as your arm. Anyone looking would know this man has repeatedly committed several of the sins we are admonished against in the Bible and still does so shamelessly to this day, while saying he has nothing for which to ask God for forgiveness.

Just in case you can’t be bothered to pause reading here to go read Romans, here are only a few of the sins people do while exchanging the truth of God for a lie: sexual immorality, envy, strife, malice, slander, deceit, insolence, arrogance, boastfulness, and “they invent ways of doing evil, … they have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy.”

Has so-called evangelist Franklin Graham, who asks people to pray the words, “Lord Jesus, I am sorry for my sins,” ever heard this man confess these sins which the whole world, including Graham, has seen him repeatedly commit? Has he not heard this man say he has nothing to confess? So why does Graham still support, yea, revere, this man for president knowing this man remains unrepentant?

How do Robert Jeffress, Al Mohler and other prominent Southern Baptists sleep at night, justifying this decrepit man as eligible for leading the nation? It is ironic that the very Bible this fraudster is now hawking condemns him. And it is highly appropriate that this very Bible condemns the preachers and evangelists who conveniently ignore it, as they justify not just voting for, but endorsing, whether in words or in their uncanny silence, this candidate.

But, back to the Reformation. If the idea and sight of this person hawking Bibles with the slogan “Make America Pray Again” does not jolt to memory the selling of indulgences — that act that symbolized and demonstrated the total corruption of the church in the 16th century and led to the Reformation — then I don’t know what will.

On Reformation Day last October, some anonymous folks wrote up 95 theses (some from my denomination, BNG reported, were more creative and wrote up 9.5 theses) and nailed or mailed them to churches in their neighborhoods, or placed them on a website, suggesting they consider parts of the American church to be corrupt. It is no secret that their intent was to aim at churches of the progressive and liberal slant.

I wonder if those people are moved today to think of Reformation as they behold this man’s hands holding a Bible, albeit draped in an American flag — hands, by his own declaration, that grabbed women by their crotches; hands, by the judgment of the courts, that signed off on several frauds; hands “Pilate-washed” of the crimes that committed to prison Michael Cohen and Allen Weisselberg, who acted on this man’s orders, not to mention the crimes committed by many on January 6.

If certain American evangelicals don’t wake up today and say, “That’s it!” and totally repudiate this man as any kind of leader for government or for good, then they never will. But, I wonder, how many American Christians know the history of the Reformation? I never learned that in church; I learned it in public school. And there’s the rub.

“This all smacks of cult-leader behavior.”

Something else rings the alarm bells. This all smacks of cult-leader behavior. One of the signature acts of cult leaders is to create an artificial crisis, based on a lie that everybody else is wrong and they are right and are the lone means to salvation.

Hear the words of this candidate as he launches the sale of this Bible: “Christians are under siege.” No, that is not true, not in America; in fact, Christian nationalists in America are actively seeking to place everyone else in America under siege, unfairly using the legislature and the judiciary to do it, while jettisoning a perfectly competent candidate for the U.S. Court of Appeals simply because he is Muslim.

Everybody else is wrong, but only the cult is right. When that reaches government, we are toast.

Something else this veritable cult leader said as he peddled his Bible: “We must protect content that is pro-God.” Was this simply another of his nonsensical comments, or are we to understand that as he waved his product while saying these words he was suggesting that any other Bible we may have is not pro-God? That sounds ludicrous; but I have learned when ludicrous-sounding things come out of the mouth of that man, the ludicrous is reliably what he truly meant.

As well, we should all be very sure that this is a product, not a “Bible” and this man is interested in money and royalties, not the word of God.

And speaking of money, Acts 8:5-24 records the intriguing story of a sorcerer named Simon who witnessed the spiritual energy believers received and displayed when Peter and John laid their hands on them in the name of Jesus. Immediately, Simon craved that power and offered the apostles money, that he too might receive the power.

First, there is the problem of a man demanding, during Holy Week, sixty pieces of silver for what’s largely accepted as “God’s Word.” Let that sink in. However, no English translation renders with blunt accuracy what Peter might have said today to Simon, in today’s culture, with today’s language, idioms and nuances.

“May your money perish with you” does not cut it. However, “You and your money go to hell” is much more like it. From within the American-flag-draped cover of the Bible, clutched in the hands of the smiling grifter, fraudster, sexual molester, former “university” owner, and James Dobson’s “Baby Christian,” I can hear the muffled voice of Peter saying sternly to that man, from his own Bible, “You and your money go to hell.”

 

Michael Friday serves as executive minister of the American Baptist Churches of Greater Indianapolis and is author of the book And Lead Us Not Into Dysfunction: the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, of Church institutions and Their Leaders. He has served Baptists in Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and the United States.

 

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