Fresh off persuading a staggering 81 percent of white evangelicals to vote for Donald Trump, the nut jobs on the religious right are already priming their followers to follow him like lemmings over the cliff. The latest evidence of this comes from one of the nuttiest preachers of them all, Jim Bakker. He has his flock convinced that Satan isn’t at all pleased at the prospect of a Trump presidency, and is already pulling out all the stops against him.
On Thursday, Bakker began a series of special broadcasts to close out 2016. The discussion quickly turned to Trump’s pending inauguration. People for the American Way’s Right Wing Watch got a clip.
Bakker told his wife, Lori, and co-hosts Sasha Volz and Zach Drew that God had called him to help bring America back to him. As part of that effort, Bakker said, God told him to throw his weight behind the candidate “who would stand for Bible reading in the schools”–while peddling the religious right shibboleth that the Supreme Court had taken prayer and Bible reading out of the schools.
Now in full hellfire-and-brimstone mode, Bakker claimed that “the great giant called the family of God” propelled Trump into the White House–and as a result, “all hell is against this presidency!” Why?
“Because of righteousness … good and evil. Good and evil.”
Now why does that have the devil in a conniption fit? Well, Bakker said, Trump stands for something that runs counter to the style of this generation.
“This generation wants to sin, mock God, kill babies, a million of them a year, and just do anything we want. They’ve decided to change marriage, the whole definition of marriage. I’ve got news for you–it still takes a man and a woman to make a baby.”
Uh huh. So in order to reverse all of that, we had to put someone in the White House who finds it acceptable to plaster a private cell phone number on social media, mock the disabled, condone violence at his rallies, blow anti-Semitic dog whistles, and revel in degrading women. Not only that, but we had to ignore all of these outrages just because Trump made the right clucking noises on social issues. These are the kinds of mental contortions and distortions that religious right nut jobs like Bakker want their followers to make in the voting booth.
Later, Bakker claimed that with Trump’s election, the religious right had a chance to “put Christ back in the United States of America.” He argued that the fact Trump was openly saying “merry Christmas” was evidence of this turnaround. Bakker added that Trump has also vowed to “put the Bible back in school.” As Bakker saw it, he was repeating history. Back in 1980, he openly threw his support to Ronald Reagan, in part because Reagan made the same clucking noises that Trump did 36 years later.
He then warned his audience that all of the talk about Russian hackers influencing the election was manufactured by “God haters” who wanted to stop Trump from taking office. We already know what Bakker thinks of these “God haters.” Last month, he warned that any county who voted for Hillary Clinton had gone against the will of God, and should be on the lookout for the proverbial lightning bolt. So is Bakker saying that the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community are working for the devil?
We already knew that Bakker and other religious right nut jobs have bowed before the golden calf–or rather, the orange calf–that is Trump. It’s even more reason why when Trump goes down, we must ensure that Bakker and the rest of the religious right goes down with him.
(featured image courtesy Bakker’s Facebook)
