Will America Celebrate July 4, 2025?

Of course we will. But it might be a profoundly different kind of celebration.

Donald Trump consistently refuses to recognize the legitimacy of ANY election that does not go in favor of Him or His Chosen Followers. He says any election (or court case) that He loses is fraud. And His Christian devotees agree with Him totally on this point.

Whether Trump wins or loses in the November election, He will declare Himself the legitimate ruler of America. If He loses the popular and electoral votes, He will urge His devotees to take swift and decisive action against the American government, as He did in 2021. Only this time His followers can inflict much more damage. If He wins, He may not permit any more free elections. The reason is simple. If He considers all elections that do not confirm Him to be the winner to be frauds, He will have to establish a system (such as they have in places such as Russia) in which it is impossible for Him to lose. This will be, of course, against the constitution. So He will not proclaim Himself permanent president. Instead, He will proclaim Himself permanent Steward—that is, taking care of America during the time in which an election that He recognizes as legitimate can take place. This would be a temporary situation, but “temporary” could mean many years.

It is possible that on July 4, 2025, Americans will know that there is no real choice in what they will continue to call democracy. But most Americans, believing Trump to be the Chosen of God, will be just fine with it. But most other countries in the world will recognize that America will no longer be a democracy.

Meanwhile, where I live in France, many people are upset about the strong showing of the political right wing in French elections, happening this week. Mainstream and liberal French fear what will happen if Marine LePen’s National Rally party gains control. But Marine LePen would be considered a moderate Republican in America. She more closely resembles Liz Cheney or Nikki Haley than Donald Trump, in terms of policy and attitude. She resembles John McCain, whose very memory Trump detests and will not tolerate, more than she resembles Him.

By Their Fruits

Jesus famously said that “by their fruits you shall know them.” He made it clear that what he meant was that good people do good things, bad people do bad things, and that is how you tell them apart. You cannot be good by just saying good and doctrinally correct things; you have to actually do them. Nothing in religion could seem more fundamental than this.

But right-wing American Christians do not believe this. They reject what Jesus said. The most obvious place to see this is in politics.

Right-wing fundamentalist Christians are almost all Republicans. Many Republican politicians do evil things. The most prominent example is Donald Trump, who has had repeated, well-documented scandals, both sexual and financial, in addition to encouraging a revolt against the United States government. He has publicly called on Putin to “do whatever the hell he wants” to NATO countries.

But it is not just Trump. Many Republican politicians have had scandals, such as Mark Sanford, who disappeared from the state of which he was governor, claiming to be hiking on the Appalachian Trail but actually in Argentina visiting his mistress; and George Santos, who was ousted from Congress after multiple financial scandals and misrepresentations.

Nor is it just Republican politicians. Jerry Falwell, Jr., then president of Liberty University, which his father founded, was spectacularly scandalous in arranging not for an actual affair but for arranging to watch someone else have sex with his (Falwell’s) wife. He resigned after a ten million dollar severance was offered to him. Ted Haggard, a megachurch pastor, had scandals related to sexual acts and to misrepresenting his book as a best-seller when actually his church had bought most of the copies. Both Falwell’s and Haggard’s churches proclaimed openly that the Republican Party, and specifically Donald Trump, were God’s choices for moral leadership in America.

And it just keeps going on. As I write, Liberty University has been fined $14 million for its failure to report, and sometimes to even acknowledge, incidents of sexual violence toward female students and staff. To Liberty University, as to the Southern Baptist church, a woman’s proper place is to let men do what they want with them and keep silence. And Steve Garvey, former baseball star with a history of sexual and financial scandal, was the Republican winner in the Super Tuesday election in 2024, running for a California U.S. Senate seat.

Of course, Democrats have scandals also. Some of us are old enough to remember the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewensky affair. I’ll let you look for other examples. But it appears to me that neither Republicans nor Democrats have a moral high ground over the other party.

And there is one outstanding example of truly good Democrats: Barack and Michelle Obama. For eight years, Republicans searched desperately for any scandal with the Obamas, and they didn’t find a single one. I read Michelle’s autobiography, Becoming, and I was astonished that such good people could actually rise to positions of leadership in our society.

Most evangelical Christians believe everything Trump says, approves of everything He has ever done, and appear to adore Him with religious fervor. They refuse to even consider that He might be wrong. To them, He is no mere human being. Sarah Posner wrote a book about it in 2020 (Unholy: Why White Evangelicals Worship at the Altar of Donald Trump; Random House) and the white evangelical devotion to Trump has only gotten stronger each year since then.

If Christians obeyed Jesus’ command to evaluate people on the basis of what they do, rather than what they say, the result would be clear. Neither Democrats nor Republicans consistently have the moral high ground. One should judge candidates individually, not on the basis of their devotion to Donald Trump, and Trump must be subject to the same laws as the rest of us.

In some cases, the blasphemy is open. One Georgia billboard had a photo of Trump and a quote from the Bible: “and the government shall be upon his shoulders,” an Old Testament reference always attributed to Jesus. I would show you, but the image cannot be copied. You can, however, find it at the Ministry Watch wehsite. I also saw a billboard in Missouri, as I drove on I44, in 2023, which said that Trump, like Jesus, was being crucified; the poster showed a cross on a hill. The billboard was on a side road which I could not find. Christian responses to these billboards ranged from support to disturbance, but few if any evangelical Christians declared it to be blasphemy.

But most evangelical Christians totally reject Jesus’ authority in this matter. They worship Donald Trump.

Fiction that Makes You Think

I have just finished reading my third science fiction novel by the twentieth-century French writer René Barjavel. I have written previously about his novel Le Voyageur Imprudent. A time traveler accidentally kills his own grandfather in the past and thus finds that he does not exist and has never existed. This novel also included a glimpse into a very distant nightmare utopia.

Other Barjavel novels dealt straight on with the main issue of the writer’s time, nuclear disaster. In La Nuit de Temps he wrote about a previous utopian world that destroyed itself by nuclear war, but also the explosions pushed the Earth to its present tilt. Modern scientists discovered this ancient temperate utopia underneath Antarctic ice.

Un Rose au Paradis also raises disturbing questions about nuclear war which, we can only hope, we do not need to worry about anymore. The richest man in the world, Mr. G, is richer than most rich nations. He sells cheap nuclear weapons. This draws our attention to the fact that one reason nuclear weapons are relatively rare is that they are expensive. What if they were so cheap that every little country, state, or even corporations could buy them from Mr. G? You would have a world thickly implanted with weapons.

The next thing to which the novel draws our attention is that once a crucial density of nuclear weapons is reached, the use of even a single one of them could cause the others to explode just from the heat. At the beginning of the novel, this density had been reached. The next day, another country was going to activate its weapons. If a war got started at that point, it would be big enough to permanently sterilize the surface of the Earth. But if the war started before that point, all organisms would be killed but the Earth would still have a solid surface, the atmosphere would still have oxygen (something I doubt), and life could be seeded anew. Mr. G pulls a console out of his pocket, presses a button, and destroys the world a little early so that it can be resurrected. This raises the question, would it ever be right to start a nuclear holocaust?

Mr. G had prepared a survival pod for animals and seeds in suspended animation, and with just two human survivors: a man and his pregnant wife who gave birth to twins, one male and one female. From this, Mr. G could start the world over in twenty years. The twins, of course, would have to produce children. Barjavel apparently did not understand the genetics of inbreeding very well. But was this any different from a world population started by Adam and Eve, which grew from brother-sister matings in a literalistic interpretation of Genesis?

The little family had all their needs taken care of. Every day, meals of roast chicken appeared. The family had no contact with the outside world, and had nothing to do. The family had slipped in a copy of a big French dictionary, from which he learned everything about a world he had never seen. He ate chicken but had never seen a chicken. He was impatient to see the world. His sister was even more bored. This raises the question, would you be happy without work? Even if it is just mental work like what I am doing by writing this essay.

But Mr. G, who lived with them, had made a mistake. He had not counted on the boy getting his twin sister pregnant before the end of the twenty years. With six people instead of five, they would run out of oxygen. Mr. G insisted the girl abort her fetus; she could always get pregnant again. But the mother would not permit this. She had another idea of how to reduce the population. She pushed Mr. G into the food recycler. This, however, messed everything up, the animals left suspended animation and began breathing, and the little biological restart pod almost asphyxiated. This brings up the point that no one, not even Mr. G, is smart enough to plan a perfect future.

Some parts of this novel were silly. When things were falling apart, the food synthesizer produced, instead of roast chicken, a big live rooster who chased the people around until he knocked himself out against a glass pane, but in so doing he cracked the pane and started the process of animal resuscitation, before the twenty years was up. Whether this was sillier than the four-headed robot I cannot say. And the ending was too nice. The family and all the animals figured out how to emerge from the pod, and they not only found a fertile Earth waiting for them, where the cinders of lost civilization fertilized the soil, but also Mr. G wasn’t actually dead but was awaiting them.

I like to read fiction that makes me think, even when I am disappointed by some parts of it. The novels of Barjavel had proven to be a good place for me to think.