Boxing with God

"Religion was invented when the first con man met the first fool". - Mark Twain

Religious zealots tend to see providence in the most mundane of occurrences, and almost always in those incidents dramatic enough to have affected large groups of people. After a sniper’s bullet nicked the ear of Donald Trump, the believers were certain their god had intervened to save the convicted felon and adjudicated rapist. Who are we to doubt god’s choices? Their same deity apparently concluded there was no point in protecting the life of Corey Comperatore, a 50-year-old volunteer firefighter who was shielding his wife and daughter during the assassination attempt on Trump. While the former president is known for extramarital affairs, pathological lying, and failed businesses, Comperatore was described as a man who embodies quiet strength, courage, and selflessness.

Is that why their god wanted him to die and not Trump?

Oh, never mind that question. The TV pop psychologist Dr. Phil McGraw and the Lt. Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, have a better query of their deity. Patrick called up his buddy, Matt Crouch, the President of Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), and asked him to produce a roundtable discussion to “consider whether god spared the life of the president, as I believe, or was just a random act of incredible luck.” Patrick clearly had his answer before he made the call but wanted to spread illogical nonsense he claimed was drawn from the Bible and that speaks to god being involved in choosing our leaders and election outcomes. Patent horseshit, of course, unless you can see god guiding the conspirators who took down JFK that day in Dallas. Kennedy was probably just too liberal and lascivious for god.

This is hardly the place to launch into an epistemological deconstruct of religion, but, damnit, sometime the hypocrites and their idiocies cannot be ignored. The Christian Nationalists like Dan Patrick, who see wonders and signs even in candy bar wrappers and tortillas, want to push their belief systems into American public institutions. Their oily argument is that the U.S. was founded as a Christian nation, which is demonstrably untrue. There may be Christian values afoot in the land, but there is also an abundance of evidence they are treated more as aspirations than rules for daily living, and the percentage of Americans identifying as Christian has decreased significantly. About 90% of Americans considered themselves Christian in the 1990s but by 2021 that number had dropped to around 63%. Is god casting the skeptics out of his church?

The concept of religious freedom was important to the founders of this country and was addressed in the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, which was the initial step toward a doctrine separating church and state. "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." That language effectively prohibits the federal government from creating an official religion or unduly interfering with religious practice. This was further clarified in the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli and its explicit terms regarding the relationship between religion and the U.S. government. The measure was signed into law by John Adams, the second American president and a signatory of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

"As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion, as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims], and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan [Muslim] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries."

God did not, however, appear to have read the text of the treaty because here he is more than two centuries later guiding a bullet away from Donald Trump’s head, meddling in our politics with his religious goals. Patrick and Dr. Phil and their consorts could probably not imagine that there were congregants in some churches across this country that were asking the question, “Why, Lord, why? You came so close to giving him the peace that surpasseth understanding.” Trump is too vile and vengeful for even the god of the Old Testament, who misbehaved and treated people almost as badly as his orangeness. People like Dan Patrick, too, who have fewer convolutions in their gray matter than individuals of even modest intellect, believe magical assertions that give them comfort. Their god has a plan and it involves saving Trump and blowing off the head of a good and decent man protecting his family. What kind of deity do you worship, Danny boy?

Patrick might be trying to establish his own religious sect in the Texas Senate. Officeholders of the upper chamber have learned to politically genuflect before the Lt. Governor’s policy wishes. They are sometimes so compliant as to appear worshipful of their leader, whether he wants a verdict of innocent for a corrupt Texas Attorney General or is desirous of taking state tax money from public school children and giving it to fancy private schools, usually, of course, Christian. Patrick has learned forgiveness, though, and averts his eyes at the appropriate time when one of his Republican senators sends dick pics to a student intern with the tagline “proof of life.” The senator later claimed someone used his phone without permission. Okay, that explanation is good enough for Danny.

What better man then to lead a discussion of whether god saved Trump? Patrick was so excited about spreading the good news, he emailed his disciples in the upper chamber and “asked” them to send out a bulletin to their lists about the program. Surely, they were smart enough to realize that god’s love was manifest in the clipping of Trump’s ear and the destruction of another man’s family. More likely they were certain to be asked questions about the TBN show to make certain they had watched and if they had dispatched the requested communique. When Patrick asks something of senators, it is actually taken as an explicit order, which is how it’s intended.

"Senator, would you consider sending this tweet out in an email to your email list in the morning. It's an interesting discussion," Patrick wrote to GOP senators. "Tonight at 7:00 p.m. on TBN, Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick will join Matt Crouch, Chairman of Trinity Broadcasting Network, and Dr. Phil for a thought-provoking discussion. They will discuss whether President Trump’s survival of the recent assassination attempt was a mere stroke of luck or divine intervention. I am looking forward to this conversation and invite you to tune in as well."

The only certain audience for the broadcast discussion was the Republican senators in the Texas legislature. Dr. Phil, who became a Remora fish on Oprah Winfrey’s reputation after she gave him an audience, had recently launched his new Merit Street Studios in Fort Worth and was transmitting his show on TBN. The promotional text distributed proclaimed, “Dr. Phil underscores the enduring importance of shared values in shaping a just and prosperous society.” Well, maybe, but he was not well-suited for talking about whether god had saved Trump. During his 19 year TV show, he had given serious consideration to a teenager who claimed to have been impregnated by Jesus. Was that evidence of what the messiah had been up to during his “missing years?” Let’s turn to Dr. Phil for his insights, or maybe we should ask the girl’s boyfriend whether he fancies himself a religious figure.

There is a good chance the discussion at TBN about Trump’s destiny ought to have considered Karma and not all that god-bothering nonsense. Less than a month after he took office in 2017, Trump signed a congressional resolution to end an Obama-era regulation that made it difficult for individuals being treated for mental illness to purchase firearms. The rule had required the Social Security Administration to notify the National Instant Criminal Background Check System of anyone receiving benefits for treatment of severe mental disabilities. The information was to be used to prevent them from buying firearms. Trump and MAGAt gun gods decided this was an infringement on Second Amendment rights, he ended the rule, and we were back to selling AR-15s to any tortured soul who showed up with a valid credit card.

Like the teenager who climbed onto a roof with a sniper’s rifle in Butler, Pennsylvania.

We need not worry, however, since Dr. Phil was at the roundtable to guide the discussion because he had built a lucrative career by positioning himself as America’s moral compass. He was doing more than dipping his toe into the faith business, though, and was dropping his conservative trousers further to increase his exposure to Trump’s crowd. Hard to imagine how he might have pandered more extravagantly to the former president after a recent sympathetic interview in which he suggested Democrats were prosecuting Trump for political reasons and without evidence. “They need to stop this,” he said. “They need to stop pursuing you.”

Dr. Phil’s moral hypocrisies were more subtly manifest in the studio the day he taped the show with the Texas Lt. Governor. A grand buffet was spread out for guests and executives to enjoy prior to going before the cameras to prove TBN and Dr. Phil’s Merit Media were an operation that lived up to its credo of “Where Values and Visions Meet.” Nope, that’s not the case, not even close. As the big dawgs noshed on culinary abundance, dozens of Merit Street employees were processing an earlier meeting where they had been fired. Many had moved from distant states just weeks earlier, signed one year leases on homes and apartments, and were suddenly unemployed. A realignment of resources was required at the network to keep the lights on. The doctor’s business skills might be as fragile as his psychological counseling capabilities. Merit Street is due several demerits.

“It was basically this split screen of everybody’s getting laid off, and all of the higher-ups are having this big, massive celebratory buffet for, like, the new direction of the network,” a fired employee told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “So I think that also rubs people the wrong way.”

The God Squad did not set out to prove the existence of their deity that day but they seem to have taken a large step in the direction of logical evidence there is no such being. The brand of Christianity professed by Dan Patrick and TBN’s personalities is built on the wings of an omnipotent creature who knows our every thought and guides us to the future he has planned for us. Their god, then, chose to destroy an innocent man and lead astray a teenager so he, too, might have his head exploded by rifle fire from the Secret Service defending an ex-president. Such a god made a few confounding bad choices that day in Butler.

By intervening to protect Trump, Dan Patrick’s and Dr. Phil’s god selected for favor a man who had sex with a porn star while his wife was at home nursing their newborn son and who had been found in a court of law to have raped a woman. That god likes a man who attempted to overthrow the government of a country he was leading, brags that he loves money but never pays his debts, lies pathologically, does not attend or donate to a church, ridicules handicapped journalists, is guilty of stealing $450 million from the state of New York with bookkeeping and accounting tricks, carries dozens of felony convictions, told a general that he did not want to be photographed around soldiers who were amputees because, “It’s not a good look for me,” called people who died in service to this country “suckers and losers,” and suggested to his nephew that disabled people should be “left to die.”

A god who would protect a practitioner of trickle-down cruelty while consigning good souls to death is not much of a god to believe in. That will not stop, however, the televangelists on TBN and the sanctimonious Lt. Governor of Texas from pushing their beliefs into American schools and culture because, of course, “We cannot know god’s plans.” Even more accurately, we cannot know if god even exists, unless ears grazed by bullets are treated as holy events, which they certainly are not. I suspect Ben Franklin had a grasp of deism and secular interests after he barely survived a shipwreck off the coast of England in 1757. The story might be apocryphal, but he was frequently asked if the experience had given him faith in god’s existence. In a letter home to his wife, though, he wrote of a different conclusion.

“Lighthouses are more useful than churches.”