The newspaper brings news of a new phase in Ivy-leaguer Josh Hawley’s senatorial campaign. A while back he tried out “Small Town Values.” The cynicism of this prep-school, Ivy-league, affluent phony’s affirming small town values of which he knows nothing was obvious and so this sales pitch was shut down pretty quick. His new slogan is “religious liberty” which, he says, “is under attack in this country.”

Now it seems to me that the opposite is the case. Our society’s freedom from the coercion and duplicity of the pseudo-evangelicals has been under attack and very near destroyed. What Hawley means by religious freedom is the social and political dominance of the “chosen people,” the “real Christians,” just like it was in the good ole days, when brand-x Protestantism was the established church, when we kept Catholics and Jews in their place, when we persecuted foreigners and, at God’s command, slaughtered the Canaanites, sc., the native American.

He thinks preachers ought to be able to pitch politics from the pulpit without losing their church’s tax exemption. I think, rather, that churches should have no tax exemption at all, for this tax exemption amounts to a union of church and state. Moreover, the tax exemption is hardly needed. The mega-churches and tele-churches are awash in cash. The so-called Christian churches are an instrument of the political right and the political right will make sure they are well financed.

I wish Hawley would say what he feels without camouflage: “I am a disciple of Donald Trump. I am exploiting the anti-intellectual and reactionary elements in Missouri in order to gain power.”