Finally. After years of (not so) patiently waiting, the house of cards is coming down fast, fast, fast.
While the next chunk of time definitely won’t be pretty (as we watch the diehards go down with the ship in a defiant blaze of pride and jaw-dropping stupidity), I’m less interested in the specifics of Donald’s well-deserved downfall, and more in what happens to American Christianity once the dust settles.
After all, despite all of the damage done, one positive outcome of the otherwise grim Trump era was that he forced a great deal of partially-submerged ignorance and ugliness to float right to the surface, and illustrated just how damaging many of evangelical Christianity’s default positions and current scriptural interpretations really are.
American churches are no strangers to periods of self-reflection and reform, and man will it ever be needed now, with evangelicalism so deeply linked with conservative politics, ignorance and un-Christ-like hatred and gatekeeping.
So all that said, and with a hat tip to inspirational personalities like Greta Thunberg, along with empowering movements like Me Too, here’s a list of topics that I hope will shoot right to the top of the sermon/study group priority list as soon as the orange menace and his crew of ghouls are yanked from the stage:
- A deep dive on how Christianity and the Republican party became dangerously tangled up in America over the past 30+ years (in other words, a full post-mortem of how this happened)
- Honest, ongoing conversations about institutional racism in the church
- A no-holds-barred talk on the effects that aggressive gun culture, law enforcement hagiography, climate change denial and patriotism porn have had on members
- An open-hearted, loving invitation to those in the LGBTQ community that are seeking God, along with the elevation of women to equal roles in church leadership
- The death of damaging purity culture
It was decades of moral rot that ultimately led us to Trumpism. Now that we’ll thankfully have a chance to rebuild, let’s make sure it’s on a foundation of humility and open-minded love.
House of Kyle 