Yes, you read that correctly.

Last year, Donald Trump was indicted for having paid over a hundred thousand dollars to the porn star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about their sexual encounter shortly after his wife Melania gave birth to their son Barron. Trump’s former lawyer Michael Cohen admitted to the crime, calling it a “sex scandal of biblical proportions” and admitting that it was done on Trump’s orders.

Trump also accidentally admitted to the crime in 2018, but has since denied it. He is really bad at playing innocent – he threatened “death and destruction” if he was charged, which he was. Several of his supporters call it persecution and communism that he is being charged – they do not care that Trump himself has already admitted to it.

While he was in court, Trump shared on social media an image comparing himself to Jesus Christ. As people who have read the Bible might recall, Jesus was in fact never on trial for being accused of paying hush money illegally to a porn star. Sure, Trump’s point was that he was as innocent as Jesus was when Jesus was falsely accused of blasphemy and was put to death by the Romans. But again, Trump had actually admitted that he made the payment to the porn star – thus, he was not innocent.

Lo and behold, Trump was found guilty on 34 charges and became the first former president to be a convicted felon. What happened next, you ask? Trump started to sell Bibles. The “God bless the USA Bible”, which mixed the Holy Words of Scripture with secular, political writings—almost as if the separation of church and state doesn’t mean much to him. These Bibles cost 60 dollars each and while the organization that sells them isn’t owned by Trump it has a “paid licensing agreement” with one of his companies.

As of yet, Trump has made at least 300,000 dollars from these Bibles and as he can’t use those funds for his political campaigns, it is likely that he used them to pay his mounting legal fees after his failed court case with Stormy Daniels.

And here’s the really crazy part. Hardly any evangelical leader that normally supports Donald Trump has rebuked him for any of this. Their loyalty to Trump is clearly stronger than their loyalty to Christ and the Bible. Likewise, they mostly remained silent when he said that he was the most honest human being God ever created or when he was pleased when someone compared him to the second coming of God:

When will evangelicals finally abandon this guy?

Micael Grenholm is a Swedish church historian, author and an editor for PCPJ.

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