End Times
I write this to my former brothers and sisters in the faith. As a former evangelical I both understand and have sympathy for much of what motivates you. I can also say sincerely that most of you are good people, though I believe you have nevertheless been exploited by monsters. I separated from you philosophically in my 20s and physically from you in my early 30s. Even so I never lost my compassion for the innocents among you.
But there comes a point when blindness becomes voluntary. When your faith aligns you with overtly evil people, you cannot continue to support those evil people and occupy anything like a moral high ground. If you find yourselves needing to constantly make excuses for the horrific and hateful conduct of the people you voted for, perhaps it’s time you stay entirely out of politics. After all, if you need political power then perhaps your faith isn’t what it pretends to be.
In any case the world is now in the grips of two major crises, one of which is an extinction level event and the other just might be. I’m talking about global warming — certainly an imminent threat to our existence — and the worldwide pandemic. These twin crises are intimately entwined with what you refer to as the End Times. It grieves me to say this but many otherwise decent people who are evangelicals find the idea of the End Times — the destruction of the earth — desirable.
And yet there is no contradiction between fighting the forces of self-destruction and believing that destruction might be preordained. If you cannot understand why this should be so then you need to have the humility and responsibility to recuse yourself from any further participation in the world of earthly politics. Otherwise you may as well be the one to deliver the Judas kiss personally.
Abraham Lincoln said, “If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide.” Therefore there cannot be any conceivable justification for a faith that asserts that “to love thy neighbor” as one of its highest goals joining forces with a political party that hates all of its neighbors, particularly when the objective of that party is headlong greed — even at the expense of our continued earthly existence.
There is nothing in the faith that you profess and I remember that suggests that joining forces with evil in the name of suicide is a good thing. I therefore implore you, brothers and sisters, to carefully reconsider what you are doing. Just think about it, think long and hard. Think about the monsters you are exalting right now and ask yourselves if you cannot see in that alliance a remnant of the people who once worshipped, long ago, a golden calf in the shadow of Mount Sinai. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.