Thom Nickels: Church and state — avoiding the political minefield at coffee hour
One of the most unsympathetic responses to the attempted Trump assassination occurred in my own Russian Orthodox parish church in Philadelphia one day after it happened.
The lady responsible for the comments has a long history of Trump Derangement Syndrome. This is the reason I knew I had to avoid her at all costs at coffee hour on Sunday. July 14. She was looking forward to holding court and letting her Trump hatred fly.
In one sense, it seems quite an anomaly: a Russian Orthodox Christian who believes that Trump is a demon and that Biden represents angelic forces. It’s quite illogical and disturbing no matter how you spin but there it is.
To be sure, the lady in question has many nice qualities. For years we had a kind of kinship during coffee hour — except when it came to politics. What’s even stranger and harder to explain is the fact that the lady is a supreme sexual conservative: she will tell anyone within hearing range that homosexuals will go directly to hell if they don’t repent. She feels similarly about transgender activist and gender-fluid “cultists” who use pronouns. “All of this is from the devil,” she says.
While there may be a wide range of theological opinions regarding standard homosexuality — for Catholic and Orthodox gays it is often a private matter of confession — with the gender-fluid-transgender mania crowd who want biological men competing in women’s sports, here we have a truly artificial construct (Marxism, Foucault, etc.) that threatens the basic tenets of western civilization.
Yet when I would inform the lady for the hundredth time that the Biden administration is fully behind all of the sexual things that she condemns and actively promotes biological men in women’s sports with high visibility and money — in the form of White House lawn rallies, parties, and official government appointments — she goes silent and doesn’t make the connection to Biden.
Her hatred for Trump doesn’t allow her to make the connection.
“The candidate you hate with such un-Christian passion also sees the evil in gender ideology, but yet you call him a demon,” I’ve told her many times. (For the record, the 2024 GOP platform no longer contains the clause that marriage is between a man and a woman.)
The lady responds by saying something general, like the gender ideology and the LGBT movement have taken over the world. She also says she loathes abortion but gives Biden a pass when he calls for the reinstatement of Roe v. Wade, and ignores completely how the DOJ has been imprisoning pro-lifers for various anti-Planned Parenthood “crimes.”
Her obsession is Donald Trump’s personal life — the Stormy Daniels thing — despite the fact that Trump’s official policies are more in tune with traditional Christianity than Biden’s.
There may be other Orthodox Christians in my parish who feel as this woman does but they tend to be low key when it comes to expressing their views. The bigger question remains: When and how did this liberal left ideology creep into Orthodoxy when Orthodoxy is clearly pointed in the opposite direction?
American Orthodox priests, I’ve noticed, rarely if ever mention abortion from the altar. They also steer clear of moral issues that might have political roots. The liberalizing and woke trends in society have reduced many priests to trembling aunties — they stick to generalities when it comes to the Gospel but steer clear of social issues, such as abortion, for fear of upsetting one or two liberal parishioners.
Getting back to the lady — yes, I made the right decision in avoiding her on the Sunday after the assassination attempt, although three men sat with her but within 25 minutes two of them walked away as if they’d had enough.
“It was too much,” one of the men told me. “The lady would not stop saying how President Trump brought this on himself because he preaches hate. I told her, ‘How can you say this? He was almost killed?’ I had to leave the table. And then X — a fellow parishioner — left the table as well. Only one person stayed but he hates Trump too.”
One can look at George Stephanopoulos, a legacy media Democrat journalist, and the son of a Greek Orthodox priest, who pretty much says the same thing: Trump brought the assassination attempt on himself. Here again we have another example of an Orthodox Christian who should know better — but doesn’t because he’s sold half his brain to Leftism.
It’s not that one cannot be Orthodox and Democrat. One could before the Democratic Party changed into what it has become today. But this is no longer the struggling people’s party, the working class party of unions and civil rights and JFK but it has become the party of DEI, race, gender reinvention, abortion, migrant border invasions and biological men in women’s sports. It has become the party of madness.
Vice Presidential nominee J.D. Vance is right when he posted on X/Twitter:
“The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”
Trump-hatred has saturated mainstream news and media outlets since 2016. The New York Review of Books cannot let two months go by without a negative essay on MAGA; ditto for The New Yorker. Recently The New Republic pictured Trump on its cover as Hitler (with a mustache). MSNBC, and especially the partisan Trump-hating show, “Morning Joe,” pumps out hatred and Trump-fear on a regular basis. Even President Biden’s constant harping on how Trump is “a threat to democracy” and his recent comment, “Trump is now in the bullseye!” is a form of fear-mongering.
It’s as if the Democratic party and the Left had put a fatwa on Trump’s head.
As Victor David Hanson recently wrote in Frontpage:
“So since at least 2016 there has been a parlor game among Leftist celebrities and entertainers joking (one hopes), dreaming, imagining, and just talking about the various and graphic ways they would like to assassinate or seriously injure Trump:
“By slugging his face (Robert De Niro), by decapitation (Kathy Griffin, Marilyn Manson), by stabbing (Shakespeare in the Park), by clubbing (Mickey Rourke), by shooting (Snoop Dogg), by poisoning (Anthony Bourdain), by bounty killing (George Lopez), by carrion eating his corpse (Pearl Jam), by suffocating (Larry Whilmore), by blowing him up (Madonna, Moby), by throwing him over a cliff (Rosie O’Donnell), just by generic ‘killing’ him (Johnny Depp, Big Sean), or by martyring him (Reid Hoffman: ‘Yeah, I wish I had made him an actual martyr.’).”
Friends of mine whom I love and respect but who identify as Democrats still suffer the blowback from the Trump-hatred they hear 24/7.
A good friend recently voiced concerns about Project 2025, saying the project — that calls for radical cuts and changes to Medicare and Social Security — was supported by Trump. Where did she get this information? In an interview immediately before the Butler, Pennsylvania, rally where Trump was shot, the former president implicitly stated that Project 2025 was engineered by a small group of conservatives — the Heritage Foundation — that he has no connection with, and whose views do not represent his own. Abortion is one example. Project 2025 wants a nationwide ban on abortion but Trump pledges to fight that, saying it will never again be put on federal hands.
“Project 2025 goes way too far,” he said. “There are many things in it I don’t agree with. It was designed by a group of very, very conservative people and it has nothing to do with me.”
Of course, for someone who only watches MSNBC and CNN they would not know this because the aforementioned stations often overlook certain facts if those facts appear to benefit Trump. What they have always wanted was fear-mongering. Complicating matters, these people also tend to think that all conservatives think alike; that if the Heritage Foundation draws up a plan for the future of America, then Trump must be behind it.
Well now, guess what — the conservative world is much too large for that. There’s a wide diversity of views in conservatism, but if your only source of news is MSNBC, you will never know this. You will only know: Heritage Foundation = Trump.
And that’s what they call developmentally disabled thinking.
As for the lady, who knows whether I’ll ever sit with her at coffee hour again. Coffee with her is like Russian Roulette: a “bomb” could go off at any moment.
Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.
I can’t even begin to fathom Mr. Nickels hatred of the LBTQ community comes from given that he was a Contributing Writer for the Gay and Lesbian Review from 2004 to 2011 and was the Spiritual Editor for the Lambda Literary, formerly the Lambda Book Review.
Mr. Nickels complains about a woman at his Church who believes that Trump is a demon. So how does he feel about the many Trump supporters who believe that Trump was sent by God? That make them guilty of idolatry
He claims that Trump no connection to Project 2025, which does not represent Trump’s views, and was created by a small group of people from the Heritage Foundation that he does not know. The Project 2025 Group includes 125 former trump officials including 6 former Trump cabinet officials and Karoline Leavitt, the current Trump campaign national press secretary,
But not to worry, no matter what the actual facts are Mr. Nickels will stick his fingers in his ears and claim that anyone who disagrees with him is suffering from TDS. A very convenient way to avoid any kind of dialogue.
In addition to the claims that Trump has no connection to Project 20205. He works closely with groups that are art of 20205part of Project 2025. Including Turning Point USA, the Center for Renewing America, the Claremont Institute, the Family Policy Alliance, the Family Research Council, Moms for Liberty and America First Legal, as reported NBC News.
Trump Media & Technology Group’s (TMTG) stock which trades under the ticker symbol DJT, closed last Friday 7/12 at $30.88. It was valued at $50.14 per share at 4:11 a.m. ET ahead of markets opening on the first day of trading – Monday 7/15 – directly after Trump was shot at a rally in Pennsylvania on Saturday. At EOB this Wed., 7/17, it was valued at $36.44 per share. What significant shorts / puts would’ve made substantial money if Trump died… but failed spectacularly because Trump lived? What reporters are asking those questions? Is the SEC asking? Is the FBI asking?
Trump’s ear was split open by a bullet. Does anyone dispute that? If Trump didn’t turn his head at that very EXACT moment… Trump would be dead. Was the 20-year-old shooter just looking to be famous, trying to start a U.S. civil war, or a far-Left nut registered Republican to vote against Trump? Why did the FBI say he was acting alone before accessing his phone? Why was his social media wiped? There are so many questions. One question no one has to ask is why a Jacob Leon Rubenstein a.k.a. “Jack Ruby” character killed the assassin – because it seems the C.I.A. tightened up that part of their playbook. And the same people that lied about Ray Epps (former Oath Keeper President of Arizona’s chapter and an instigator caught on video during Jan 5th & 6th), and lied about Hunter Biden’s laptop, and lied about Covid mRNA shots and masks, and lied about “transitory inflation”, and lied about needing an air force and navy to defeat the U.S. military (reference Afghanistan retreat and Ukranian people being armed with machine guns), and lied about secret labs funded by U.S. taxpayers in Ukraine, and lied about mail-in ballot harvesting, and lied about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq… they are going to lie about this assassination attempt and the “help” that 20 year old received, too.
Thanks for a thoughtful article. As an Independent, I’ve be used to coming up with my own opinions on various topics without incident, until the Trump years where things seem to have gone really haywire with the left, and I still don’t understand it. I’m still trying to process all the venom and invective from just venturing my own thoughts about something that turned out to stray from official Democrat thought. Honestly, I think I might have PTSD. I certainly stopped feeling safe expressing my own thoughts. It’s been a depressing time and it’s hard to talk about. So thanks.