OPINION: Judgment Day is drawing nigh, ye voters. Choose thine next president carefully

Halloween is supposed to be the spookiest day of the year, but for many Americans, it isn’t even the spookiest day next week. Election Day is Tuesday and, as the pundits always say, this is the most consequential election in our lifetimes.

This year, those words ring true.

If there is a God above, the Republican candidate for president will be vanquished once and for all. Ideally, he will lose in a landslide, the MAGA fever will break, and the majority of GOP voters will wash their hands of this crass and corrupt huckster.

The Republican Party would do well to cast him out because he has cost them Congressional seats in every election since 2018. Serving in national office requires service to country, but the GOP’s presidential candidate sees it as a vanity project. In truth, his campaign slogan should be: “The White House – Come for the grifting, Stay for the immunity.”

This caricature of a conservative at the top of the GOP ticket is easy to understand. He is totally focused on himself, almost comically narcissistic, and bereft of empathy and civility. He’s as transparent as a spoiled child, but the animating spirit of his cult followers is more difficult to discern.

The GOP of yesteryear had coherent policies rooted in something recognizable as logic. Back in the day, the Republican platform championed limited government, lower taxes and the rights of individuals to do as they pleased so long as they didn’t infringe on the rights of others.

That was then, back before GOP politicians thrust Uncle Sam into the conversation between pregnant women and their doctors. That was before the last two Republican presidents became the greatest deficit spenders in U.S. history. Sadly, the GOP of yore has been reduced to an asterisk.

The upshot is today’s Republican voters goosestep, er, march behind a man who recognizes no higher authority than himself. Why? Because he is saying what they want to hear.

As a demographic, today’s GOP skews whiter, poorer and less-educated than the country as a whole. This pool of Republicans has become the well from which the Religious Right draws its holy water.

Call it what you will -- Christian nationalism is the term en vogue these days – the Religious Right is losing ground as Christianity continues to decline in America. Don’t take my word for it: In surveys conducted in 2018 and 2019, the Pew Research Center found “… 65% of American adults describe themselves as Christians when asked about their religion, down 12 percentage points over the past decade. Meanwhile, the religiously unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular,” now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009.”

Plenty of other research surveys corroborate the Pew findings and the trend is clear: Christianity is dimming in America. It may be thriving in the south and in isolated communities elsewhere – hello Moscow! – but it is in decline nationally.

Given their diminishing numbers, many of America’s Christians are eager to support an authoritarian, wannabe dictator intent on stripping “lesser” Americans of their rights. With God on their side, they see themselves as “better” Americans than the rest of us -- so they support a candidate who puts their agenda front and center. If he can stop non-Christians, non-whites, immigrants, queers, unmarried women and other undesirables from voting, then America’s true “patriots” will enjoy disproportionate influence over the national agenda.

Never mind their candidate has all the diplomatic skills of a kangaroo on a trampoline; shattered alliances are his specialty. With his insatiable appetite for graft, installing him in the White House would be like handing Dracula the keys to a blood bank. For a voting bloc that takes the Bible literally, concepts such as “cause and effect,” “truth,” and “consequences” don’t count for much.

Let’s close today with a Psalm, set to the tune of “The Itsy-Bitsy Spider.”

The itsy-bitsy voter,

Went out on Halloween.

Ghosts, and ghouls, and goblins,

All of these she’s seen.

But the scariest of all,

Was at the Presidential Ball.

A trash-talking con man,

Filled with rage and hate.

He raved of massive tax cuts,

And someone named Barack.

And homo-hating church groups,

And how to pay them back.

He said, “We’re in a culture war,

But God is on our side.

So if you worship money,

Then I’m your ticket to ride.”

Brock has been a Daily News columnist for more than 22 years. He has lived on the Palouse even longer.