I’ve seen this movie before. It doesn’t end well.

As a Christian for most of my life and a pastor for nearly three decades, I’m quite familiar with the Old Testament story: supposedly faithful people fashioning an idol made of gold and cravenly bowing before it, in complete contempt for the God they claimed to believe in because they had lost their collective minds and souls.

This new American reboot is a little on the nose.It’s also far more tragic.We’ve had a few thousand years to get it right.We shouldn’t be here.

Watching the collective soul-selling of my fellow Christians here in America over the past ten years has been something that has grieved me more than I can measure or accurately describe. Particularly disheartening has been watching ancient religious history repeating, and worse: to realize that nearly every national sickness here in America is coming from professed Christians:

The silencing of tens of millions of black and brown votes, the violent persecution of immigrants, the shielding from accountability for a cadre of sexual predators, the incessant legislative assaults on women's and trans people’s body autonomy, and the brazen parade of white nationalism in churches throughout this nation.

If Jesus’ feet were on the planet, this God-mocking death cult of white supremacy would be the first table he’d flip.

As someone still aspiring to a life of faith and still trying to speak into my religious tradition, it’s sobering to admit that we’re not here as a nation in this brutal battle for the elemental rights of all human beings, if not for people claiming to be devoted to the same Jesus I’ve grown up trying to emulate.

As they both literally and figuratively pledge their undying adoration to some golden-veneered, bastardized counterfeit idol of their pigmentation, I’m left to wonder what I’m to do now:

Do I attempt to redeem this thing I have found such meaning and beauty in, or do I resign myself to the fact that these phobic cultists have commandeered it for good, and it is beyond repair in the eyes of those outside of it?

Do I make an exodus from my homeland of origin and begin down a new spiritual journey, while knowing it will be nearly impossible to differentiate myself from the sycophantic idol worshippers because they have permanently co-opted the trappings of my tradition?

And how can I show the world an alternative spirituality that is supposed to leave more compassion, more diversity, and more justice in its wake, while these delusional power-mad hypocrites eat up market share, because otherwise decent, loving human beings are walking away from organized religion for good, because they are fully exhausted?

The questions far outnumber any helpful answers, and my prayers seem to slip into the ether without reply.

Having read, studied, and preached the story doesn’t make watching it repeat itself any easier.

I know that in the Bible, religious people ended up abandoning God and mindlessly worshiping a golden calf, so it shouldn’t be surprising that so many today are now bowing down to this orange jack*ss. It’s just more terrifying seeing it this close.

It was a lot easier to view the tragic story in the distant rear-view mirror of history in a land thousands of miles away, and not in the windshield of the present here in the country I call home, with the sycophantic cultists so close and prevalent.

While they whirl around the gleaming, empty shell, celebrating themselves and their imagined righteousness, shouting ‘God bless America,’ I’ll be here, sitting with a mournful truth that makes me sick to my stomach:

God didn’t bless America; God wrecked America, or at least these self-identified White Republican God-followers and their spray-tanned messiah are doing their best to wreck it, and I’m not sure how we fix it.

One thing I know for certain: I will not join them in their mindless, fevered dancing around the graven image of a racist, morally-bankrupt, Bible-defiling, felon-rapist.

I will not bow to this empty, shimmering monstrosity of white Christian nationalism nor comply with its efforts to mandate its perverse cruelty onto the rest of us.

I’ll stand with every person in this country who rejects a religion of coercion that seeks to harm and exclude.

Together, with our work and our lives and our votes, we will tear down this homegrown golden idol of whiteness, throw it into the fire, name it as the vile blasphemy it is, and drive this hateful blight back into the hell it came from once and for all.

That will truly bless America.

That will make it great.

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