Grab your 20-siders. We're going in.

We idealize the stuff we liked, gloss over and forget the stuff we didn’t, and glamorize in our minds what is more of an emotional state than actual events. And if we happened to be in our teens and young-adulthoods during a particular era, that’s the era where our nostalgia will be the strongest and most emotionally resonant. Well, for people in their late 30s and early 40s, that era is going to be the mid-to-late 1980s and early 1990s. That’s why the people who seem the most persuaded of Chick tracts’ effectiveness are older fundagelicals. These tracts came along at a very pivotal moment in their culture–a moment long gone, and a moment many of them dearly wish they could have back.

The other day I ran across this fascinating piece about Donald Trump and it lit a lightbulb over my head like I was in a cartoon. It was about the difference between bullshit and lies, and it perfectly illustrates what’s so adrift about modern American evangelicalism.

Today, we’ll look at how a dead German philosopher came into a resurgence of popularity–only to play an unexpected role in the Christian Right’s ongoing love affair with its own ego.

If you hang out on Twitter, you might have seen a peculiar decal making the rounds: a stylized rainbow man embracing a stylized man printed with the Confederate flag. Beneath the figures is the slogan “FORGIVENESS 2016.” Variants of the figures (some quite inventive) and comments on them have been making the rounds extensively, mostly in a mocking way. This mockery is well-deserved, because it’s not time for forgiveness yet.

Members of the Christian Right may not realize this, but objectification takes at least two forms. Donald Trump is expressing the most obvious and direct form of it. But his Christian critics are, themselves, expressing the other form of it without even realizing they’re doing it–or why.

Members of the Christian Right may not realize this, but objectification takes at least two forms. Donald Trump is expressing the most obvious and direct form of it. But his Christian critics are, themselves, expressing the other form of it without even realizing they’re doing it–or why.