Is there salvation for the orangeman and his followers, the American heretics? According to David Bentely Hart there is not, he writes:

For instance, if impoverished and terrified refugees arrive by the thousands at our southern borders, bearing their children with them, driven from their homes in El Salvador and Guatemala and Honduras by monstrous violence and hopeless poverty, much of it the long-unfolding consequence of our own barbaric policies in Central America, and our foul, degenerate, vicious, contemptible, worthless, brutishly stupid sociopath and dropsical orange goblin of a president and the little horde of oleaginous fascists who slithered out of the spiritual sewer by his side react by imprisoning the adult asylum seekers and abducting and caging their children, subjecting all of them to the most abominable psychological torture, degradation, and despair in order to terrify other refugees who might also come seeking shelter here, we need no doubt for a moment that these monsters have thereby truly revealed themselves as damnable and, in fact, already damned. And if a good number of our fellow citizens are aware of these atrocities and continue to lend their support to the fiends who have committed them, we can say with perfect certitude that those citizens have thereby revealed themselves to be—even if they are so deluded and blasphemous as to call themselves Christians—children of the devil, who have chosen the side of the goats rather than the sheep. Of this, Christ has given us firm and delightful assurances.[1]

The irony of the self-proclaimed democractic socialist’s take is too hard to ignore. In his usual pugilistic antics Hart cannot contain himself. While this book was just released, he clearly penned it while Trump was still in office. The irony is that, indeed, Hart’s political antidote to the “fascists” is socialism. The quirk of Hart’s indolence is his inability to take enough self-assessment to recognize that, just maybe, the very atrocities he is noticing have taken shape not just under the supposed orangeman’s reign, but under the combine of all American presidents and leaderships. Indeed, for all of Hart’s ostensible critical intellectual range he often, and easily, falls prey to the indulgences of the flesh when it comes to his own self-political dainties. The most glaring irony of the whole is that Hart is an ardent [Christian] universalist, so even the orangeman and his heretics will eventually be cozied up to Hart’s castle in the heavenly kingdom.

I am no defender of Trump. I think Trump might well be all those things that Hart identifies, except for the fact that Hart seems to get the facts on the ground wrong in regard to the treatment of the massa of humanity fleeing to the land of opportunity. These things are a complex, in regard to the politics. I dare not mention how things are on the ground currently at the border, and under whose watchful eye. But to the point: I simply wanted to note how a theologian of some renown can fall prey to the indulgences of his own sense of “godness,” in regard to the anathematization, damnation of a whole swath of varied (from him) political others. I suppose he is only illustrating the major premise of his book, You Are Gods (unless you’re an orange heretic).

[1] David Bentley Hart, You Are Gods: On Nature And Supernature (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University Press, 2022), 45-6.