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An hour before former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney’s concession speech, my phone—and, likely, your phone—started blowing up with calls from elated and deeply relieved friends and family expressing great joy that our long national nightmare was finally over. Or, is it? The overwhelming message of the 2012 presidential race, as universally expressed to me, was that the irrational hatred of President Obama by white conservatives in this country is so great that it radiates a deeply troubling level of ignorance and bigotry which virtually all of these conservatives refuse to acknowledge. They have a laundry list of justifications for their blatant racism, but self-deception is the essential nature of racism. Racists always look outward, blaming and pointing fingers, and rarely submit themselves to any kind of honest self-examination of what drives their outsized and impassioned loathing of an individual or group. And this is what I expect moving forward: more excuses, more rationalizing of what the world can see is simple racism, the major evidence of which is now obvious. The hatred these conservatives have for this president pushed them to abandon their core values by backing an obvious, disingenuous liar for leader of the free world. These people want Obama out so badly they’ll back anybody, as if the presidency of this great nation is something we should simply hand over to anybody, as if anybody could do it. This reduces the Office of the President to the role of a functionary which no longer requires greatness as a job skill. The sheer irrationality of so diverse a demographic group—from hardline Tea Party conservatives to a shocking 90% of white Christian evangelicals to presumably reasonable housewives and blue-collar workers—abandoning their core principles and flagrantly excusing behavior in Governor Romney that they openly and irrationally accuse the president of (the secret religion, routinely abandoning his core constituents) creates a global picture of a collective irrationality that has at its foundation but one unifying common denominator: the president’s race. Any reasonably objective observer could see that: Obama’s blackness was the unifying factor of these disparate groups. We must, therefore, look to the extremely encouraging and hopeful testimony of the tens of millions of White Americans who made the president’s reelect both meaningful and possible.

Did We Not Prophesy

Most disappointing of all were the Christian conservatives who threw not only their values but Jesus Christ Himself under the wheels of the bus, revealing a deeply troubling and overwhelming vein of blatant racism which will continue to widen the divide between actual Christians and whatever it is these people are. I believe these “Christians” would have supported a High Druid of The Church of Satan (which, because of Mormon cult’s code of secrecy, Mitt Romney may well be) if it achieved their political goal. Which resounds to the point that actual Christians (as opposed to whatever it is these people are) should have no political goals, no political agenda.

A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.19Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them. "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, 'Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?' Then I will tell them plainly, 'I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!' —Matthew 7 (NIV)

Most shocking of all is the pure hatred displayed by powerful white Christian conservative leaders like Franklin Graham, a caricature of perverse antichristian intolerance and hatred. These pompous, self-serving ignorant hypocritical liars running around asserting—as fact, which their equally ignorant followers readily accept with absolutely no proof whatsoever—that the president is a Muslim, makes plain that These People Do Not Know God. These People Are Not Christians. Such hatred is merely ignorance and fear manifesting itself. As Christians, we are not besieged by the spirit of fear [2 Timothy 1:7] but of power, of love, and of a sound mind. These hateful liars, and all who follow them, have no love and, from what I can tell, no rationality—“sound mind.” The evidence before us, therefore, is that they are not being led by the Spirit of God but by whatever spirit shrouds and reinforces their self-delusion that they are, in fact, Christians when their choices reveal them to be obviously not. They are religious people—Church Folk. They do not know Jesus Christ, and their self-serving abandonment of Jesus has widened the racial divide in this country and exposed them for the religious phonies they are.