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Spirituality and Donald Trump

By Arlon Staywell
RICHMOND    May 2025 — It can be important to recognize the four main false gods in order to avoid being misdirected by them.  Those are, in no particular order, money, physical attractiveness, military prowess, and science.  It can be difficult, especially these days, for some people to understand how "science" could be a false god.  Is science not a good thing?  Yes, science in its place is a very good and wonderful thing.  In their proper place all those things are good.  There is nothing wrong per se with money, good looks, or military prowess either.  It is only when those things take the place of god in your life that they can lead to ruin.  Yes, they do lead to ruin as gods.

The "spirituality" of Donald Trump, as some people perceive it, is founded on wealth, good looks (in his youth anyway), and the military prowess evident in his "nationalism."  The only false god not especially evident in Trump followers is science.  It is rather the Democrats who have the inordinate faith in science.  Their bad science is a leading false god in the world today.  The Trumpers have nationalism (military prowess) instead.

Neither political party then represents much true spirituality.  Both parties are chasing after rather carnal goals.  Part of the problem might be that in the United States anyway people had been watching "science" fiction in prime time television for about three decades.  Many had lost the art of spirituality.

When people complain that "church and state" must be separated they often fail to understand that religious people can and should "guide" public policy.  They should not "dictate" public policy.  That can get terribly messy.  The founders of the United States did understand though that such human "rights" as exist come from a god.  Without that god people will be guided money, physical attractiveness, military prowess, and absurd notions of science, to their ruin.

The Republican Party never fully recovered from the conflict in Vietnam.  During that conflict it was a simple matter to be considered the political "right."  For inexplicable reasons anyone who didn't like Beatles' haircuts was on the political right.  It did not require understanding economics generally, tariffs, public restroom privacy, women in sports, photo opportunities with porn stars, bad marriages, or "reality" television.  Those would become problems later.

After the conflict in Vietnam the Republican Party had to struggle for an identity.  Remember the Tea Party.  To this day the Republican Party has failed to establish itself and turned instead to a blind nationalism led by Trump.