Hello, Donald, what are we upset about today?

Ohhhhhhhh. That's rough. And also full of lies, of course.

We speak fluent evangelical -- we have been saved more times than your mom's favorite peach cobbler recipes on Pinterest -- so let's tick off the lies.

• Christianity Today is anything but "far-left" or "progressive." It is also not "far-right." It's extremely mainstream for evangelicals. It's also huge. CT editor-in-chief Mark Galli addressed this on CNN this morning, just after Dipshit hit "send" on that tweet.
• Considering that CT is staffed by people presumably more literate than the president, we imagine they are perfectly equipped to read a "perfect transcript" and identify the impeachable crimes Trump committed against Ukraine.
• Trump says he will not be reading ... "ET" ... again. OK sure fine maybe, but that would suggest he was "reading" it before, which would suggest he "reads things," and we all know that's not true. LOL, like Trump goes to bed each night and grabs his secret copy of Christianity Today from underneath his book of Hitler speeches and devours it until he falls into the Lord's slumber. HE READS IT FOR THE ARTICLES, DAMMIT!

So yeah, Christianity Today, one of the most widely read evangelical magazines in the world, which doesn't really talk about politics that much, did an editorial on how Donald Trump should absolutely be removed from office, whether by a trial in the Senate or by the voters. It broke the internet last night. And Trump is MAD.

For editor-in-chief Mark Galli, it was clearly the Ukraine scandal -- the clear-cut, simple, and undisputed (by all honest people) fact that Donald Trump hit up a foreign country in need of our assistance and protection in order to help him cheat his way to re-election, for which Trump has now been impeached -- that made him and CT speak up:

That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.

The rhetoric of the editorial is stirring, especially if you speak fluent evangelical, and CT's readers do:

We have reserved judgment on Mr. Trump for years now. Some have criticized us for our reserve. But when it comes to condemning the behavior of another, patient charity must come first. So we have done our best to give evangelical Trump supporters their due, to try to understand their point of view, to see the prudential nature of so many political decisions they have made regarding Mr. Trump. To use an old cliché, it's time to call a spade a spade, to say that no matter how many hands we win in this political poker game, we are playing with a stacked deck of gross immorality and ethical incompetence. And just when we think it's time to push all our chips to the center of the table, that's when the whole game will come crashing down. It will crash down on the reputation of evangelical religion and on the world's understanding of the gospel. And it will come crashing down on a nation of men and women whose welfare is also our concern.

Galli clearly knows the audience to whom he's speaking, because he jabs right to the heart of evangelicals who of course hate Trump's potty words and of course hate his Twitter and of course hate it when he grabs them all by the pussy, but who have a fucked Queen Esther complex about how sometimes God uses the truly wicked to carry out His divine plans. For many evangelicals, that of course means abortion, and Trump has obviously delivered unto them approximately one million 24-year-old bigot judges who are rock-hard for taking away women's bodily autonomy:

To the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record, we might say this: Remember who you are and whom you serve. Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior. Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump's immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency. If we don't reverse course now, will anyone take anything we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come? Can we say with a straight face that abortion is a great evil that cannot be tolerated and, with the same straight face, say that the bent and broken character of our nation's leader doesn't really matter in the end?

Evangelicals care a lot about their "witness," or at least they all claim to. (Your mileage may vary.) Galli has written a version of the verse about those who gain the whole world yet lose their entire souls, and his readers will recognize it as such. Whether they are persuaded is another question entirely.

He's not wrong, though. The Church is dying in America. Evangelicals like to pretend it's only happening in mainstream Protestant churches, and it's true that much of the bleeding has happened in mainline denominations that don't lift their hands in the air while they sing 25 choruses of "Lord I Lift Your Name On High," and whose theology runs a little bit deeper than "I am saved in the blood, and the abortionists and homosexualists ARE NOT."

But it's also happening to those very evangelicals and their mega-churches. Anecdotally, from our own personal life experience as a former evangelical, we can attest to the fact that some of the "growth" those churches have experienced the past couple of decades has been from so-called "true believers" abandoning mainline churches they view as having gone apostate, in favor of more conservative, evangelical congregations. (Something something "shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic.")

Bird's-eye view, though, every week we see headlines about how the fastest-growing religious group in the United States is those who are of no religion at all -- now equal in number to the portions who are evangelical and Catholic, respectively -- and you'll be shocked (not shocked) to learn that many if not most of those come out of the Christian church in all its incarnations.

Galli writes to evangelicals, "Remember who you are. Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior." Let us paraphrase what he is really saying about the effect of Trump on the Christian's witness for your heathen consumption, in case you heathens are missing it:

You think your kids were going off to college and never returning to church or the faith of their families BEFORE? Oh boy! Watch what they do now that they REALLY can make an airtight argument that their parents and their churches have zero fucking moral compass. They were already leaving the Church because they have LGBT friends, or they're LGBT themselves, and they just don't see any value, much less eternal truth, in a belief system that condemns good and kind and loving people to Hell because of who they are. And you want to add a servile devotion to Donald Goddamned (Literally) Trump on top of that? Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

There's also a kind of evangelical who considers it an absolute command of their faith to share the Gospel with everyone they meet, to "win souls for Christ," to get people saved. These are people who go on mission trips to far-off lands, to bring the Word to those who otherwise might not ever hear the message of Christ. These are people who strike up casual conversations about the thickness of the melons at Kroger and somehow unexpectedly use that as a stepping off point for sharing the girthiness of God's love. This is "witness" as a verb. To them Galli is saying:

You think people are slamming the door in your face and saying they don't want to buy any Girl Scout cookies NOW? Pretty sure it doesn't matter whether you're doing your soul-winning in Boston or Botswana, they're gonna to tell you to eat a giant bag of FUCK OFF if they think you're spreading the "good news" of a saving faith in Jesus out of one side of your mouth, while defending that puss-grabbing authoritarian shitheel criminal out of the other. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

So ... this'll start some conversations in some churches, probably, maybe. Pastors might preach on it this Sunday, as it will be pretty fuckin' easy to shoehorn into an Advent sermon the Sunday before Christmas.

As for the greater impact it will have, or whether it will move the needle of voters? We don't know.

The usual suspects -- like the fire-breathing mouth-breathing bigot Franklin Graham, whose father Billy founded Christianity Today -- are weighing in with the humble, "Blessed are the meek" spirit you'd expect, assuming you're expecting "none":

That's some hot garbage right there.

Some evangelicals think Franklin Graham is just the bee's boobies. Others don't know who the fuck he is, really, besides some vague notion that he is what happened when Billy Graham's dumbest sperm found purchase in a human egg. If you look at Graham's arguments, though, note just how Fox News-y and Trump-y they are: None of the Republicans even voted for the Democrat impeachment! Democrat Democrat Democrat! For a large and unthinking segment of evangelical America, Graham's retort will be enough, and they'll probably cancel their subscriptions to Christianity Today and then they'll try to cancel their subscriptions to Google, for refusing to delete the article from the internet.

Then they'll go back to hosanna-ing about their newfound freedom to say "Merry Christmas," which was banned during the Obama presidency, or writing letters to the editor about Drag Queen Story Hour.

However, we're not sure that matters, as we don't think Galli is so ignorant of his audience that he or the magazine really thought they'd be able to change the hearts and minds of those readers without ears to hear and eyes to see. Rather, we think Galli and CT wanted to put a marker down, to finally say an unequivocal "NO."

And if some readers who quietly wrestle and pray over how to approach Donald Trump as evangelical believers end up doing some more wrestling and praying over it, and maybe start to speak up a bit more in their congregations, then that's mission accomplished for Christianity Today, we think.

In summary and in conclusion, Jesus hates Donald Trump, just kidding Jesus doesn't hate anybody, and that's why He's Jesus and you aren't.

UPDATE: He's still going.

LOL "GUARDIAN OF THE RELIGIONS!"

This one really stung him, obviously.

[Christianity Today]

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