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“All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify, and we become president, and you are the happiest people,” former President Donald Trump said to a cheering crowd.

Ah, the sound of happy Americans – cheering for the betrayal of their Constitution. And if you believe the polling, about 75% of those cheers were coming from conservative Christians.

— Who had decided that Christianity is a big-tent religion with plenty of room for a President who was openly breaking his oath to uphold the Constitution.

That’s my frustration with Christians. When it comes to politics, we can’t decide whether character really matters.

Yesterday’s hearing focused on the most prominent Christian in the Trump Administration – Mike Pence. Who for four years was mostly silent about the lies, the threats, the corruption – but in the end took his oath seriously and disobeyed his boss when it counted.

At yesterday’s hearing of the January 6th committee, democrats played clips from the testimony of Greg Jacob, Pence’s legal counsel, also a Christian, who was with his boss in a safe room during the attack. And who took out his Bible and turned to the Book of Daniel:

“Daniel six was where I went. Daniel has become the second in command of Babylon, a pagan nation, but he completely faithfully serves. He refuses an order from the king that he cannot follow. And he does his duty in consistent with his oath to God, and I felt that that’s what had played out that day,” Greg Jacob said.

The Secret Service wanted to evacuate Pence and his staff – and for good reason. But Jacob said Pence refused to leave:

“The vice president did not want to take any chance that the world would see the Vice President of the United States fleeing the United States Capitol. He was determined that we would complete the work that we had set out to do that day, that it was his constitutional duty to see through, and that the rioters who had breached the Capitol would not have the satisfaction of disrupting the proceedings beyond the day on which they were supposed to be completed,” Jacob continued.

And after it was all over, at about 3:50 a.m., Pence’s Chief of Staff Marc Short texted another Bible passage to his boss:

“I remember texting the vice president a passage from Second Timothy chapter four verse seven: I fought the good fight, I finished the race, I’ve kept the faith,” Marc Short said.

So, there it is. Christians helped put Trump in charge of the country, and then prevented him from destroying it. And because of that, Mike Pence occasionally gets heckled by Christians for basically being too Christian to violate his oath, the way his boss did.

That is one big tent indeed.

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