Let us begin with:
I love cartoonist Wiley Miller and his Non Sequitur offerings. It led me to seek out some related comments from some far distant pre-internet sources.
Shakespeare wrote, “God has given you one face and you make yourself another.”
Socrates had a couple: “Be as you wish to seem,” and “The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.”
Nineteenth Century social commentator and author Ambrose Bierce called Hypocrisy “prejudice with a halo.’
So we arrive at a post popular on Facebook that originated on Linked In written by “digital circuit rider” Dr. Cliff Kelly, Professor of Digital Media & Communication Arts at Liberty University in Virginia for the past twenty years.
Liberty U was founded by Jerry Fallwell Jr. and describes itself as “a private evangelical Christian University rooted in Southern Baptist Traditions” that is “deeply committed to evangelical Christian Principles.”
Kelly’s writing raised the eyebrows, given his connection to Liberty and its mission. It begins:
You can’t spend Sunday morning in church praising Jesus, talking about love, compassion, mercy, humility, honesty, and caring for the vulnerable, then spend Sunday afternoon defending an administration that does the exact opposite.
Well, that seems to fly in the face of the familiar photographs of evangelical leaders, including Baptists, placing their hands on Trump as a kind of blessing.
How, then, could Kelly write something so strongly attacking what seems to many of us to be a theological double standard that also seems to be against the moral basis of his university? Let’s find out.
When Kelly was on the Chicago City Council (1973-1988) he sponsored the first ordinance proposed in the city to ban sexual orientation discrimination. His proposal is now part of Chicago’s Human Rights Ordinance. But Liberty hired him.
Adding to the chemistry of this situation is the Southern Baptist Convention’s election of Florida Pastor Willy Rice as its president. One of his strongest supporters was identified by Newsweek’s Shane Croucher as “a former official’s staffer in the Trump administration.” His election was considered “an ideological shift to the right in the nation’s largest Protestant denomination” that already was pretty conservative and has been criticized by Rice for being too “Woke.”
One of his influential supporters was the Center for Baptist Leadership headed by a former Trump administration employee William Wolfe who once said, “I want my boys to grow up in a country where they don’t look like they’re the foreigners here.” Think of Bierce’s comment.
But Croucher says Rice does not seem attached at the hip to Trump. He’s not a Trump opponent in any way but he hasn’t minded differing with him—-such as Trump’s post showing him as a Christ-like figure healing the sick, which Rice said was “wrong and should be removed,” while also saying, “I continue to be thankful for many things our President has done.”
He firmly condemned the 2021 attack on the Capitol fomented by Trump. Although saying there were “defensible reasons” for evangelicals to support Trump in his rise to power, “but there are grave concerns about what unhealthy political passions in this recent season have revealed about the state of the church in America.” Additionally, he has warned of an “unhealthy and dangerous co-mingling of religion and politics,” observing, “We don’t need Donald Trump to save us. I know this will sound hard to some, but God never called us to Make America Great Again.”
“That people who claim to follow Christ have embraced conspiracy theories like Q-Anon is to our shame. Some of the same people, who hear about other cults and conclude that they would never fall for such nonsense, are the same ones posting and sharing utter falsehoods about orphans trapped beneath cities who are being rescued by President Trump, liberals practicing cannibalism, and the mysterious Q, This is garbage!”
Now it seems a little easier to understand how Kelly was able to write his piece. Here’s the whole thing:
You can’t spend Sunday morning in church praising Jesus, talking about love, compassion, mercy, humility, honesty, and caring for the vulnerable, then spend Sunday afternoon defending an administration that does the exact opposite.
And before someone says, “But I’m a Republican,” let me remind you of something: God doesn’t serve political parties. Jesus didn’t die for Democrats. Jesus didn’t die for Republicans. He didn’t wear a red hat or a blue one. He didn’t tell people to pick a team and hate the other side. He called people to love their neighbor, care for the poor, welcome the stranger, seek truth, show mercy, and hold the powerful accountable. You can’t praise the Good Samaritan while cheering policies that target immigrants and asylum seekers.
You can’t celebrate “love thy neighbor” while mocking the poor, cutting assistance for struggling families, and treating human suffering like a political talking point. You can’t talk about protecting children while separating families, demonizing entire communities, and creating fear as a governing strategy.
Jesus fed the hungry. He didn’t ask for their paperwork first. Jesus healed the sick. He didn’t check their political party. Jesus stood with the marginalized. He didn’t use them as campaign props. Jesus challenged the powerful. He didn’t worship them. This administration has normalized cruelty, retaliation, greed, vengeance, dishonesty, scapegoating, and the constant division of Americans against one another. It attacks journalists, demonizes opponents, mocks compassion as weakness, treats empathy as a flaw, and encourages people to view fellow Americans as enemies rather than neighbors.
The fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Ask yourself honestly: are those the values being demonstrated? Or are we seeing anger, fear, revenge, hostility, insults, loyalty tests, culture wars, and endless outrage? You don’t have to be a Democrat to see it. You don’t have to be liberal to see it. You just have to compare what Jesus taught with what this administration celebrates.
If your politics require you to ignore cruelty, excuse corruption, justify lies, or abandon compassion, then politics has become your religion and your politician has become your idol. God doesn’t have a political team. Jesus doesn’t wear a campaign hat.
And no politician is important enough to place above the values you claim to believe in every Sunday morning,
Sounds pretty Socratic and pretty Wiley-ish to us.