Pious Sleight of Hand

MAGA antichrist religion has really gotten pious sleight of hand down to an art.

The archetypal example of this is, of course, the use of the unborn as human shields for every filthy thing the Cult wants to do. Oppose any disgusting crime the Cult supports from rape to mass deportation and the Cult will rub their Precious Feet pin and tell you that “We must not let ourselves get distracted by lesser moral issues! We have to focus on the most important thing: abortion!”–and then immediately devote all their energy to defending, not the unborn, but Donald Trump from his guilt for rape, sexual assault, and adultery; or Donald Trump’s sadistic plans to rob people of their citizenship and deport them for the crime of citizening while brown.

But that is, of course, not the only sleight of hand the Righteous deploy in order to defend grave, selfish evil. Like their patron saint, Judas Iscariot, they also love the “Why are we wasting money on these useless parasite refugees when we should be spending it on homeless veterans” trick:

Like Judas, the leaders of the MAGA Cult fakes compassion on the homeless vet for exactly as long as it takes to rob the money bag for themselves. The instant the need to lie so they can deny refugees help is over, the Cult moves from pretending to care about the homeless to stigmatizing them and mocking them:

and then imprisoning them and enslaving them to fatten MAGA Judas’ moneybag:

Then, there is the Obedience vs. Worship Sleight of Hand. This consists of greeting any praise for forms of obedience to Jesus that make selfish sociopathic conservatives feel uncomfortable with appeals to Performative Piety. So, for instance, over on the Book of Face, a friend posted this common sense observation:

Normals in his Christian readership did the sensible thing and nodded. These are some of the works a disciple of Jesus does. But a Reactionary Catholic, like the Teacher of the Law who sought to “justify himself” (Luke 10:29) rejoined instead,

“Above all those things, it worships Christ.”

Note the sleight of hand. It is the mark of the MAGA cult that it pits obedience to Christ against the worship of Christ rather than relating it to the worship of Christ, just as it pits the unborn against, rather than relating them to, all the other forms of human life the Cult wants to rob, harm, oppress, exploit, deport, rape, hate, and kill. There is not a word in this meme to suggest that Christians should not worship Christ. The person who posted the meme is a believing Catholic who does worship Christ. But the Pious Reactionary’s response aimed to suggest that those who affirm these good works care only about Social Justice and not about Christ.

Jesus’ response to those who elevated showy piety over obedience to him was, “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord!’ and not do what I say?” and to warn that he would say to those who practice this on That Day, “I never knew you.” The performative piety of the MAGA Cult, at open war with obedience to Christ on any point that offends GOP predators, is a stench in the nostrils of God.

A variation on this strategy is when the Pious pit some mystical aspect of the revelation of Christ against obvious corollaries and consequences of that revelation (again, as ever, because those corollaries and consequences threaten the bigotry, spite, cruelty, selfishness, or greed of the MAGA Cult). Case in point, this perfectly true item that a Catholic posted during the holidays:

All of these observations are clear and obvious corollaries of the story of the Incarnation in the gospels.

But, of course, these corollaries threaten those who worship a greedy, Mammon-worshiping, misogynist rapist and racist bent on victimizing refugees and enriching himself and his cronies. So the Pious MAGA Cultist deploy another Sleight of Hand trick to again pit one aspect of the gospel against the corollaries and consequences of the Incarnation of the Son of God:

Gee, I thought Christmas was about God taking on human flesh and becoming one of us.

What is particularly nauseating about such kneejerk reactions from the Pious is their blithe assumption that a) a Catholic who acknowledges the corollaries of the Incarnation in the meme ipso facto does not believe in the Incarnation itself and b) that the Pious MAGA Cultist himself, fighting tooth and nail to downplay the things in the meme, truly does worship Christ and is appointed by God to instruct the untermenschen on what real reverence for Christ is. For the reality is, of course, that the one and only person who suggested that doing the good things in the first meme or acknowledging the corollaries of the Incarnation in the second is somehow to oppose worship of Christ or reject the Incarnation was the Pious MAGA cultist. Nobody but he so much as suggested the opposition.

Because he needed there to be an imagined opposition in order to shout down those aspects of the gospel the MAGA Cult hates and fears.