For all the damage Donald Trump has done, he achieved something no one else has. He exposed for all time what many strongly suspected but had limited evidence of—the deep, cynical depravity of theism, especially of the right-wing flavor.

For millennia, theists have claimed (without verification) that worshipping a righteous deity is necessary to give humans the steady, principled morals and decency they need to run sound, virtuous societies. Never mind that the sociological research I and others have conducted shows that the most atheistic democracies enjoy the best socioeconomic conditions in history, while the exceptionally theistic United States suffers exceptional levels of dysfunction.¹

That unprincipled perversion of the modern Christian Right began with Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority,” which denounced divorce as a big sin. And who was the first divorcée president? Theoconservative hero Ronald Reagan—who rarely went to church and never claimed to be “born again.” Reagan was made POTUS by the same theocons who turned out the very deeply devout, churchgoing, never-close-to-divorced, born-again Jimmy Carter. It was the beginning of the—very effective—right-wing strategy of “Don’t look at how conservative politicians live, look at whether they promote theoconservative ‘moral’ policies.”

Theocons renounce the coarsening of virtuous society via the verbal profanity that those potty-mouth seculars such as Bill Maher regularly deploy on Hell’s Box Office in the tradition of Lenny Bruce and George Carlin’s Seven Dirty Words. Of course, when a conservative pol is caught being foul-mouthed, they are immediately censored by the right-wing media, right? Ha, just kidding. When POTUS candidate George W. Bush was caught using the a—hole word, the Right loved it, including Fox News where suddenly it was sometimes necessary to use choice words. Same when it came out that Veep Dick Cheney said a Democratic senator could go f— himself. The relativism continued to creep in.

President Bill Clinton was a good-ol’-boy liberal-Christian sinner who looked to Jesus for forgiveness for his serious issues concerning his relationships with women. In the wake of the Monica Lewinsky affair, Pat Robertson said Clinton had “hollowed out the moral soul of the country,” and James Dobson observed how it is “foolish to believe that a person who lacks honesty and moral integrity is qualified to lead a nation” just because the economy was doing so well. Reasonable points.

Meanwhile, the Right was reveling in the political potency of culture warrior and serial adulterer Newt Gingrich who dumped aging wives in favor of new ones. Never-been-married darling of the Right Ann Coulter openly acknowledges being sexually active.

But Trump has done the most to prove to what degree the great majority of conservatives lack moral principles. A sociopathic performance artist of deep cynicism who sees those on the Right as his willing and equally cynical marks, Trump himself noted the lack of basic ethics in his base in early 2016 when he boasted that he could openly shoot people and his followers would be okay with it. Trump has been pretty much everything those of self-proclaimed traditional virtue pretend to oppose: rude, vulgar, profane, hyper-arrogant, a constant liar, sexually promiscuous, a chronic adulterer, a serial wife-dumper, and effectively irreligious—he almost never attends church and does not seek the forgiveness of God. (He may be a prosperity Christian after the model of Norman Vincent Peale, who conducted Trump’s first wedding.) By all the criteria that conservatives have demanded be applied to politicians of the center-left lest the nation sink into deep depravity, Trump should have been excluded from high office with prejudice.

Instead, theocons loved (or at least tolerated) Trump because he pushed a conservative vision of religious liberty at the expense of everyone who’s not Christian. At the same time, he championed the gun industry, banned abortion, and promoted fossil fuels and the free-wheeling capitalist way in general. It is vital to understand that in doing so, the Right is not out of line with biblical Christianity or with the presumed nature of a creator of the planet. The god of scripture (including Jesus) is a thuggish dictator who is fine with the conquest, slaughter, and enslavement of humans en masse (including kids, even when they are not specifically guilty of a serious offense), favors an armed citizenry (the entourage of Jesus enters Jerusalem bearing swords), and sociopolitical violence (Jesus fashions a whip and commits a hate-crime assault at a religious site). And, oh yes, he accepts the Old Testament principle that women are property. As for our planet they say he created, it is so loaded with diseases that it has killed off tens of billions of children.²

By being such a convenient boost for the power of the Right, loutish Trump gave an enormous chunk of theoconservative Americana an excuse to show how low its moral standards truly are. Theocons do not want virtue, morality, or majority rule in the context of liberal democracy; they crave sheer power.

Never again can those on the religious Right who backed The Donald claim to be moral. It is the gift to secularism that will never stop giving. Be ready to use it whenever it is of use, for decades to come. The next time a theocon starts to promote his or her “moral,” “family values” agenda in your presence, ask if he or she voted for Trump. If the answer is yes, then feel entirely free to explain that he or she has no moral standing to claim to be ethical about anything. By going with Trump, conservatives—including religious ones—leave no doubt that they are unhinged moral relativists and compromisers of the highest order, and their protests against profanity, divorce, adultery, alternative sexuality, or whatever anyone else does that they do not like possesses not the slightest authority. Ask, “How can you favor family values when Trump ripped desperate families apart on the border?” If he or she prattles on about how the wise Lord works through flawed humans such as King David or Cyrus, reply it just shows that his or her idiot creator is a base moral relativist—throw in the crimes of the biblical God and how half the kids on his planet have died for good measure.

Hit those who claim to be “prolife” with how Trump literally committed premeditated homicide by holding rallies he knew were COVID-19 super-spreader events certain to kill attendees and others in their various orbits. The murderous psychopath did what he said he could: kill fellow Americans and get away with it. Use this for when most “pro-life” Trumpites wave away the pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands.

Tell Trump theocons how their amorality has forever proven they do not possess basic common decency in their search for boons from their defective deity, and there is nothing they can say to change that. They blew it.

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