Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) bashed former President Trump online and said Christians who support him “don’t understand” their religion.
“I’m going to go out on a NOT limb here: this man is not a Christian,” Kinzinger said on X, formerly known as Twitter, responding to Trump’s Christmas post. “If you are a Christian who supports him you don’t understand your own religion.”
Kinzinger, one of Trump’s fiercest critics in the GOP, said in his post that “Trump is weak, meager, smelly, victim-ey, belly-achey, but he ain’t a Christian and he’s not ‘God’s man.’”
He’s not wrong, but this is honestly the ‘no true Scotsman’ fallacy.
The bible does technically say you should treat your fellows as you would want to be treated and promotes brotherhood, but it also says women and other races are inferior and advocates for truly heinous behaviour. Cherry picking has always been the point, and shitloads of crimes against humanity have been officially sanctioned by the church.
There’s a very good reason the founders these people claim to venerate wanted the church and state to be separate. They were deists, but not overt Christians, and they’d seen what happens when religion mingles with government: horrible, horrible things.
It’s “no true Scotsman” if the person were waving an English flag, pissing on a set of bagpipes, and loudly proclaiming that Scottish people are useful idiots who will eat whatever bullshit you feed them.
I can’t tell if you’re being serious, but in case you are, these definitions may help:
No true Scotsman fallacy: No true Scotsman fallacy is an informal logical fallacy that occurs when one tries to define a term or group in a way that excludes certain counterexamples by arbitrarily changing the definition to fit their argument.
metaphor: a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable.
Yes, except the example here is someone who very clearly does NOT fit in the group. It’s basically saying Donald Trump isn’t a real Christian, not because of some arbitrary definition of what it means to be Christian, but because he is literally not a real Christian. No True Scotsman doesn’t apply here because the subject is as far removed from a Scotsman as a squirrel living in Japan is.
Obviously Trump is not a Christian. That’s not what he’s saying.
He’s talking about people who follow trump and who call themselves Christian. Literally no true Scotsman. They 100% think they’re Christian, and they have just as much a claim on the title as anyone.
eta: relevant quote: