Evangelicals And The Deification Of Trump
Evangelicals And The Deification Of Trump
So, are we going to ignore that people are now worshipping the orange bastard?
Does anyone else remember being in school and hearing about how Egyptian pharaohs were considered to be gods by their people? Back in the day, it made me giggle.
I thought, how could people think a person is a god? Especially when they had cooler gods like Bast and Thoth? It seemed so foreign and bizarre, like a tale from a faraway land where nothing made sense. It didn’t seem like it would ever happen again.
I’m starting to eat my words, and I’m beginning to think that a lot of people in America are starting to feel the same way. 2016 was a year when we saw a sizable portion of the population stop voting like a normal person, and start siding with a politician like he’s a god among men.
Trump’s rise to power started off with most of us, including Republicans, laughing him off as a joke. And then one day, he got elected. And things somehow kept getting weirder and weirder.
Somewhere along the way, Trump stopped becoming a “larger than life” politician and started to be viewed as a literal god by some of his followers. If you’re like me, you’ve begun to wonder how we ended up in this situation.
I think we all noticed a palpable rise in people believing Trump can do no wrong.
It started out with people who just started to side with Trump when he said things that were off-color or controversial. Then, it turned to people siding with him even when evidence piled up that he was an awful person.
Then, it turned into talk of Trump being Jesus. It was an evolution that we all saw happen, but at the same time, it was too bizarre to truly behold.
Q-Anon started off as an online LARP, but quickly got hijacked.
Around 2015, people started to hear about rumors of extremists who believed a conspiracy involving an agent named Q who claimed that Donald Trump would save trafficked children from lizard people. It became known as Q-Anon.
Originally, Q-Anon was a creepypasta roleplay group on sites like 4Chan and 8Chan. It quickly got hijacked by Russian trolls, which effectively gamified it into an addictive, paranoia-inducing form of propaganda.
No, really, they managed to make Q-Anon addictive. There are studies on this.
The more addicted people got, the more insane they got.
We started to hear people parroting crazy rumors, like ones about Bill Gates killing off people with vaccines, and people carrying kids in cabinets. And the more the rumors swirled, the more Trump became their savior.
The funny thing about propaganda is that it does affect how your mind works. Propaganda is a lot like cocaine or pills in that sense. A one-time hit will not mess you up, but repeated “hits” will start to change the way you think.
What I’m saying is that people stopped being able to tell the game from the reality.
Q-Anon has become inextricably linked to Trump.
Russia wanted Donald Trump to win the presidential election, and it’s now common knowledge that they used trolls to bolster his popularity. That’s why one of the core beliefs of Q is that Trump really did win 2020’s election.
It didn’t stop there. If you’ve ever seen Q artwork, you know that Trump has become a deity figure to them. Some of these people legitimately see him as a savior and pray to him.
I remembered seeing paintings of Trump walking with Jesus—who is supposedly the total opposite of Trump. That was when I realized that Trump was being deified by Q-Anon followers. To them, Trump is their god.
Though Q-Anon is the most extreme sect to worship Trump, I started to notice similar behavior in Evangelical circles.
American Evangelical Christianity is its own special, shocking level of strangeness. When you’re talking about the Mormon Church or similar sects, you will likely find video after video on YouTube discussing the cult-like behavior of Evangelical church leaders.
I mean, it’s no secret that Evangelical Christianity has been jockeying for political power in America. In fact, there’s even a full voter block known as “the Christian right” which is primarily focused on removing the separation between church and state.