From The Life and Times of Bruce Gerencser:
Evangelicals love it when well-known unbelievers/atheists die. This gives them an opportunity to pass judgment on their lives and consign them to eternal punishment in the Lake of Fire. While Johnson lets his mythical God and errant, fallible Bible do the talking, make no mistake about it, he thinks Justice Ginsburg is presently being tormented by God in Hell. According to Johnson — err, I mean God — Ginsburg was a vile, evil person who was an enemy of True Christianity®. Instead of seeing her as a defender of the First Amendment, Johnson sees Justice Ginsburg as a threat to attempts to promote Christian nationalism (and she was).
As is always the case with Evangelical zealots, the important issues of our day are banning abortion and make it illegal, and turning back attempts to give LGBTQ people equal rights and protections under the law. I have no doubt that Johnson, a resolute Bible thumper, believes abortion and homosexual are capital crimes worthy of death.
Johnson’s latest screed is yet another example of why Evangelical Christianity is the most hated religion in America, right up there with Islamic suicide bombers.
It doesn’t surprise me in the least that evanglicals are quick to dance on the grave of truly good people, even if the dance contradicts the supposed underpinnnings of their religion. It’s how the religion causes them to behave, not what it says, that matters.
Religion is a pervasive social virus that from the early days of human society has been used by the powerful, and submitted to by the powerless for countless reasons. The negative effects of religion persist because it is (or has been) exceedingly good at “community spread” and resistant to development of “herd immunity”. I do hope that those strengths are now diminishing, or will be countered more effectively by the spread of real understanding, compassion, and commitment to the type of social goods that it would seem underly many religions, however clouded and twisted they have been by myth and dogma. Maybe those better trends will end up being adopted by religions as they mutate for survival, and the negative strains will go extinct. One can hope I suppose.
It seems to me though that the behavior of people in the face of seeming contradictions with their religion parallels how a commitment to a democratic society with “liberty and justice for all” bends as they succumb to the gravity of the conservative ideology which anchors religions like Christianity. Something has to be sacrificed, and there is some comfort I guess in knowing your place in this life, as you wait for your mansion in the hereafter.