The Bible and the Bamboozled

“Too unreflective ever to know himself, too incapable of thought ever to be really a hypocrite, Elmer is honored and beloved of those with whom he comes in contact because he is made of the same coarse clay as they, because no learning, no integrity and no spirituality sets him apart from those to whom he is paid to minister. He is the type most fit to occupy the pulpits supported by materialists like himself to whom the church is half the defender of petty privileges against subversive forces and half the instrument through which a nominal respect may be paid to virtues inconvenient to practice; and to Elmer himself the pulpit is quite as useful as he is to it since … he is enabled not only to taste the intoxication of an orator’s power but to enjoy an income and a position which the mediocrity of his will, the fundamental meanness of his character and the shallowness of his brain could not have earned him by any other means.”

— Joseph Wood Krutch, describing Sinclair Lewis’s Elmer Gantry.

And if you ever wondered where in hell the Christians who support Trump came from, here you go. This is the location in hell where they feel right at home.