Song of the Day 1/26: Daniel Deitrich, “Hymn for the 81%”
Most people outside the evangelical community, believers and unbelievers alike, are struck by the hypocrisy of these Bible thumpers who claim to follow the teachings of Jesus the Nazarene while failing spectacularly to follow his example in real life.
Some people inside the evangelical community have noticed it, too. Daniel Deitrich, an ex-evangelical young minister and songwriter in South Bend, Ind., grew so disgusted with the evangelical embrace of Trump that he wrote a song criticizing them for it. He put it on YouTube a couple of weeks ago, and surfing the webs yesterday I came across two references to it having gone viral, which is how I found it.
Unlike most condemnations of hypocrites, Deitrich’s is not bitter. He still thinks these folks can find salvation, and his message is simple: You raised me better than this. In an interview last week with the Religion News Service, Deitrich said,
In 2016, 81% of white evangelical Christians voted for Donald Trump after, among other things, hearing an audio recording of him bragging about sexually assaulting women. Even after enacting deliberately cruel policies to rip families apart and put children in cages at the southern border, evangelical support is as fervent as ever.
I was raised in the evangelical world and was taught to take the words of Jesus seriously: Love God, love your neighbor, feed the hungry, fight against injustice. I was taught that things like love, peace, kindness, gentleness and self-control matter. That’s why I have been so confused and deeply saddened by the unflinching loyalty to a man who so clearly embodies the opposite of these values.
So this song is a lament and a rebuke, but I hope people hear that it comes from a deep well of love.
Great song. It should land a devastating blow on the conscience of “believers”, but won’t. For obvious reasons.
I did a few years in an evangelical church. Some very nice people, mostly petty, pinched-off, loudly pious frauds. I never understood how the few genuine Christians could stomach all the hypocrisy. Naturally, I wasn’t surprised when Trump was embraced as a Christian Übermensch.
Thinking about all of this, it just occurred to me that if you swap out “christians” for “primitive people” it really scans. As in…
Primitive people believed that if you lived a life of immorality, you would be punished in a literal after life in a place called hell where literal demons would torture you under the direction of a chief demon called Satan.