Today I was arguing on Facebook with an Evangelical Christian about his support for Trump. He said his church did great work, and challenged me as to when I last fed the hungry or clothed the poor. I said I do, though not enough. It was why I supported Democrats. He said that his church did it better than the government does. Here was my reply:

Your church may do those things. Good for you. But there’s a string attached. You proselytize. The recipient of your good deed has to claim to be touched by the light of Jesus. (It’s also fly-by good deeds, with no support to the “saved” once they’re removed from the sinful work).

The problem is, if you find a starving man and offer him food, but say he needs to come to Jesus, that’s coercion. He’ll say yes to Jesus just to get the sandwich. If it was a Muslim offering the sandwich, the starving man would say yes to Mohammad.

The US government, for all its flaws, has programs meant to help everyone equally — no strings of conscience attached. Clothing the needy, housing the homeless, feeding the hungry. But more and more “Christian” voters have opposed those programs as being a waste of money. Over the past 40 years, “Christians” have blamed the poor, the sick, the hungry, the homeless, for their own condition. God doesn’t favor them, and it must be their fault.

That is the grossest misrepresentation of Christian belief imaginable.

This has only amplified under Trump. While other religious groups have abandoned Trump in the last four years, he has lost zero support among Evangelicals. That is an incredible indictment of the Evangelical Church. Because, whatever good your church does individually, the moneylenders are in the majority of churches today, profiting off of people’s faith. Mammon is God, the golden calf is being worshipped, Moses is smashing the tablets, and, yes, Jesus would whip the greedy bastards out of his church.

Jesus wouldn’t blame the poor for their troubles, the sick for being ill, the homeless for having no place to sleep. But he would beat the living shit out of the rich profiting off the suffering of others.

The Democratic Party attempts to do what you say your church does — feed the hungry, clothe the poor, tend to the sick, house the homeless. The Republican Party, especially under Trump, says the poor are lazy, the hungry should shut up, the sick should die and decrease the surplus population, and the homeless should pull themselves up by their bootstraps, despite not owning boots.

In the last hundred years, Democrats created Social Security to take care of the elderly. Democrats created Welfare and Unemployment Insurance to take care of the poor. Democrats created Medicare and Medicaid and the ACA to help the sick and needy. Democrats passed Civil Rights and Voting Rights to promote equality.

Republicans opposed every single one of these things. Which party, then, is more Christian?

So maybe ease up on the self-righteousness. It’s a bad look, unearned — and un-Christian.