Churchifying

Call it what you like – moral relativism or just plain old hypocrisy – we are steeped in a culture in which an alarming number of people are entirely comfortable ignoring one “sin” while actively condemning another.

Church marquees proclaim messages of piety and devotion, yet most devotees go to church once a week so they can tick off that obligation and promptly go back to raising hell.

That Trump chump lauds the return of the phrase “Merry Christmas” to our national lexicon while cozying up to Nazis and white supremacists in order to snag votes. I guess he figures Santa was good to him this year, since he’s reveling in a so-called tax reform bill that will deprive 20 million Americans of health care and load another trillion or so to the next generation’s fiscal burden.

And the preachers and politicians are the worst of the lot. In order to be elected, politicians must profess that they will uphold “traditional Christian values.” Given their propensity to lie, cheat, steal, take bribes, harass women and have scandals follow in their wake like Jacob Marley’s chain, the traditional Christian values to which they’re pleading fealty must include those favorites on the Christian hit parade, chattel slavery (both of the stolen people and the female variety), genocide and colonialism.

The purveyors of this toxic religiosity are even lower than politicians, if it’s possible to slither beneath the belly of a snake. Preachers hawk everything from prayer cloths to miracle spring water as the sheeple’s ticket to nirvana.

Lest they feel left out, let’s not forget the leeches in the criminal injustice system – practicing a degree of thuggery they have the nerve to decry as punishable behavior in others. Propping up the largest prison system in the world, they march to the beat of “law and order” while locking up as many poor Black and brown people as their gulags will hold.

At least the grasping corporatists have stopped clothing their actions in human-helping homilies about providing products to improve our lives, and instead just chant a mantra of “shareholder value” a.k.a. mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money -- for money and power’s sake.

Hypocrites of all stripes run this country and are deserving of Dante’s sixth circle of hell where they walk around wearing golden robes lined in lead, weighing them down for all eternity.

So in this holiday season as we celebrate the birth of the Christ, remember that he was a revolutionary who destroyed the shops set up in temples and excoriated those who would pimp the world in the name of religion.

Merry Christmas America.