Nobody, and I do mean nobody, was any more glad to see the presidential election end than me.
Not because I believed that there would be some reprieve from oppression and marginalization.
I wasn’t under any impression that the end of the election would somehow magically unify the country.
And I had no delusions that the end of the election would mean one candidate or another would ride off into the sunset never to be heard from again.
It was the outrage. I had hoped the end of the presidential election would have given us a catharsis from outrage.
Every day during the election season, it seemed like there was a new and fresher outrage, each specifically designed to out-outrage the outrage of the day before.
Emails. Plagiarism allegations. Sexual assault and groping allegations. Racism and sexism allegations. There was so much outrage during the election, that we created a new ailment, “outrage fatigue.”
I didn’t have high hopes for the world after the election. I did, however, have hopes that we’d have less outrage.
But here we are, post-election with fresh outrage.
This time, the outrage is over remarks made by senior Trump adviser, Steve Bannon in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
Bannon told the Reporter that, “Darkness is good,” just before extolling the powerful virtues of Satan and his desire to align the administration with dark forces like Satan.
Well, naturally, the Christian fundamentalists and conservatives went crazy.
They called Trump’s advisor un-American and questioned whether he was actually a Christian.
They marched, protested and rallied against what they called an “evil and Satanic influence” overtaking the White House.
And they lamented, in unflinchingly shrill drone, on Fox News no doubt, that Christ and the Christian church was under attack.
Well, if this response to Bannon’s comments doesn’t sound at all familiar, that’s okay. It’s because it never happened.
The same groups that contrived a sanctimonious war against people who occasionally used the age-old holiday greeting, “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Christmas,” the same groups who decried ubiquitous sharia law; the same groups that scolded Starbucks for having red cups (which clearly meant they hated Jesus), were silent when Bannon aligned Trump’s administration with Satan.
Incidentally, this is the same group of people that led 25 percent of all Americans to believe that our current Christian president was a Muslim.
Now, after the campaign season, I had long abandoned the notion that there were moral boundaries Trump’s campaign could cross and invoke the ire of the religious right.
But, a governmental administration aligning itself with Satan isn’t a crossed boundary, it toggles the very principles of Christianity.
We promise to renounce Satan in baptisms, we affirm it in Sunday School and listening to sermons. It is almost as characteristic of Christian daily life as accepting Christ as the Lamb of God.
And here we are, post-campaign, post-election, with a senior advisor of a president-elect 81 percent of them endorsed and supported, aligning himself and the administration with Satan, and yet there has been no outrage of which to speak.
Perhaps, in the coming days, we’ll hear some apologist pedaling about how Bannon was only joking, or that his words were taken out of context.
But as Maya Angelou, Oprah Winfrey, and my mother has famously said, when someone shows you who they are, believe them.
I believe him.
