While John MacArthur and Jimmy Swaggart welcome James Dobson to hell, their bigoted legacy on Earth lives on

Over the weekend, I watched the documentary Bad Faith. It’s a revolting, gut-punch of a film that pulls the proverbial “Veronica’s Veil” off two-faced, right-wing preachers who have twisted Christianity into a pulverizing political force that is destroying democracy in America.

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The Jesus that these heathens preach is not remotely close to the humility and kindness exhibited by someone like the late Pope Francis, who is the Catholic Church’s God’s designate on Earth. Instead, Jesus is depicted as Donald Trump-like, surrounded by riches, sin, hate, lies, and contempt for the marginalized.

These warped “preachers” really do think that Trump is akin to the second coming.

What the documentary reveals is staggering. These amoral white men who claim to follow Christ, instead mirror Satan, or Trump. They sneer at the Ten Commandments, they discard compassion for cruelty, and they use their pulpits not to preach love or salvation, but to consolidate power, wealth, and dominion.

These men drape themselves in so-called scripture and condescendingly drip with greed and hate. They are not disciples of Christ. They are each the devil incarnate..

And last week, hell gained another one when James Dobson, once one of the most powerful evangelicals in America, died. For decades, he wrapped his Focus on the Family empire in the language of “values,” but the actual gospel he espoused was detestation.

He peddled conversion therapy, a grotesque form of psychological torture that has left countless LGBTQ+ people scarred for life. I’ve talked to several people who went through this process. Each one contemplated killing themselves. I think that’s why Dobson endorsed it so fervently. At the end of the day, he wanted our community wiped off the planet.

Well, we’re still here, James, and you’re not.

Dobson wasn’t about hate the sin, love the sinner. No, he was the reverse, and much more overt. He loved the sin and hated the sinner. His theological premise was all about bigotry, misogyny, and homophobia, with the icing on the cake being white patriarchal dominance.

He turned the language of “family” into a vicious weapon. He didn’t unite families. He divided and destroyed families who dared not conform to his vision of inflexible heterosexual, patriarchal control, subservient women who only bore children, nothing more.

His death followed the passing earlier this summer of another despot in the name of Jesus, John MacArthur, who was a ferocious enemy of the LGBTQ+ community.

He was a man who spent his long career spitting venom at anyone who didn’t fit his dark, joyless doctrine. MacArthur was the poster child of authoritarian theology, which made him a logical Trump supporter.

His sermons centered on exclusion. Like Dobson, he wrapped himself in the mantle of Christianity but lived as an unabashed hypocrite, obsessed with power and control rather than love and justice.

And before MacArthur, hell gained another soulless creature when the ramshackled Jimmy Swaggart died. His hefty heap of hypocrisy was legendary as his crocodile tears.

Swaggart preached sexual purity while paying sex workers. He railed against sin while bathing in money, and turned television into a spectacle of his phony tears, his demonic-like rage, and Trump-like grift. I always wondered how anyone who looked so awfully evil, like he did, could have people who worshipped him.

Swaggart was far more than a Saturday Night Live punchline. Alongside his barbaric brethren, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, Swaggart corroded the soul of American religion and politics beginning in the 1980s. They taught millions that Jesus was less a savior and more a rabidly partisan Republican conservative.

Today, three devils of the pulpit are gone during one hot, steamy, hell-like summer; however, their deaths are not the end of anything. The rot they helped plant here on Earth has taken deep root. The machines they built are still churning.

Trump has surrounded himself with a new generation of pastors who are cut from the same poisonous cloth. These clergy for Trump stand beside him, and disgustingly behind him, willfully blind to his indictments, his marriages, his lies, his liability for sexual abuse, his naked greed, his gilded gold Oval Office, and the grift within.

They bless his cruelty. They baptize his harmful executive orders. They preach prosperity, but only for the wealthy. Because anyone who is poor and marginalized is not fit for God’s love, in their eyes.

In 2022, Rolling Stone magazine did an excellent piece about “Pastors for Trump,” who are still as relevant today as they were three years ago. These desecrators flaunt their private jets, their real estate empires, their golden thrones, all while insisting Jesus is A-OK with their unconcealed grift.

And, now more than ever, the political landscape that is the Republican Party, welcomes them. The ultra-conservative Supreme Court has been like a group of lay deacons to them, obliterating barriers between church and state.

Trump is their bishop. He has rewarded clergy with tax breaks even when they endorse candidates from the pulpit. And Speaker Mike Johnson, their monsignor, a Christian nationalist zealot, who is running Congress like an obedient church choir.

That is what is so depressing about Dobson, MacArthur, and Swaggart, and it has nothing to do with their deaths. Many of us who suffered under their wickedness rejoice to see them gone, knowing they are finally burning in the hell they so eagerly consigned others to.

No, what depresses us is that the noxious project they devoted their lives to is stronger than ever. And as Bad Faith documentary demonstrates, the movement these three helped lead was never just about preachers. It was about power.

So yes, Dobson is gone. MacArthur is gone. Swaggart is gone. But their legacies are not. They are alive and thriving in megachurches, in state legislatures, in Congress, in the White House, and in the Supreme Court. The most dangerous lie is to believe their deaths signal the end of anything.

The next generation of false prophets is already way ahead of them, armed with social media, millions in dark money, and the full blessing of Donald Trump’s authoritarian regime.

The devils are dead, but their hell lives on.

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