President Donald Trump is not a liar. A liar is someone who occasionally tells mistruths. President Trump is a broken fire hose of lies. He’s a broken slot machine of lies. He’s a lie conveyor belt.
On Monday, the president lied again, this time in tweet-form, claiming that America was “starting to make a turn back” to a time when Bible study was big in public schools.
The Washington Post’s Mark Chancy noted, there was no such time in American history.
But besides that, Trump, who has routinely portrayed himself as a man of God, had to deal with a competing tweet from an actual man of God.
According to HuffPost, Pastor David Lewicki took to Twitter Tuesday to state that not only was he pastor of New York City’s Marble Collegiate Church for about five years where Trump was on the member rolls, he’d never seen Trump at the church. Not at Bible study, not a service. Never.
“The pastor then followed up with a pointed quote attributed to Irish political figure Edmund Burke: ‘Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing,’” HuffPost reports.
But as with most things Trump-related, it was Trump’s father who had a special relationship with the church. During the 1960s when Marble was pastored by Rev. Norman Vincent Peale, whom Trump’s father was a fan of, the Trump family did attend the church. (Peale’s son, though, is no fan of Trump.)
Trump often spoke about his religious upbringing on the campaign trail, but the church pulled a full Mariah Carey and issued a statement noting that Trump was not an active member, HuffPost reports.
Lewicki told HuffPost he was just trying to clear up the president’s church track record.
“He was not an active and visible member of the church, no,” the pastor confirmed.
From HuffPost:
The president’s relationship with Christian faith is seen by many as insincere. Although he won support among evangelicals, Trump has an odd history of bungling his Bible references, once calling the New Testament book 2 Corinthians — usually referred to as “Second Corinthians” — as “Two Corinthians.” Students at the evangelical Liberty University reportedly snickered.
The president’s strong public support of Bible study legislation ― an apparent reaction to a “Fox and Friends” segment ― raised eyebrows elsewhere on Twitter too. A number of people on the president’s favorite social media platform pointed to specific Trump administration policies that seem to violate basic teachings of the Bible.
Earlier on Monday, the conservative morning show reported that at least six states recently introduced Bible literacy legislation, some of which would promote the teaching of the Bible’s influence on history.
The American Civil Liberties Union has labeled similar legislation a technically legal but very difficult thing to implement.