Or: how a dead Russian novelist predicted Kamala Harris’s defeat 150 years early.

In 1976, a born-again Sunday School teacher named Jimmy Carter was elected president. By all accounts he remained a man of genuine Christian faith until the day he died in 2024, and his post-presidency — decades of swinging hammers for Habitat for Humanity well into his nineties — stands as a record of good works in the name of Christianity unmatched by any president before or since.

His great scandal? In a 1976 interview with Playboy (the extent of my literary reach at the time), Carter confessed he had “committed adultery in my heart many times” because he had looked at women with lust. The horror. A man so committed to honesty that he confessed his thoughts. He was the closest thing to Christ the Oval Office has seen since the founding of the republic.

So naturally, we fired him after one term in favor of an actor who promised that tax cuts for the wealthy would trickle down to the rest of us. Reagan cut the top marginal tax rate from 70 percent to 28 percent and nearly tripled the national debt — from $1 trillion to almost $3 trillion in eight years — all under the banner of smaller government. Fifty years and nearly $40 trillion in debt later, we know exactly how much trickled down. The mystery isn’t the math. The mystery is how the Republican Party stole religion and convinced the press it was better on the economy while doing it.

The religion heist has a paper trail. In 1979, Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich formed the Moral Majority. Conventional wisdom says it was a response to Roe v. Wade. But according to Weyrich himself — the man who coined the name — the founding grievance wasn’t abortion. It was the IRS revoking tax-exempt status from racially discriminatory private schools, specifically Bob Jones University. The movement that would spend the next four decades lecturing America about family values was organized, by its own architect’s admission, to defend segregation academies. However you slice it, Falwell’s machine delivered the 1980 election, and the GOP has claimed the mantle of “true Christianity” ever since.

And the press fell for the whole package. To this day, the media repeats the canard that Republicans own both the moral high ground and the economy, and the messaging matters, because Christian conservatives reliably vote the wedge issues — guns, God, and gays — while the actual budget picks their pockets.

Which brings me to a dead Russian.

More than 150 years ago, Fyodor Dostoevsky ran the experiment America keeps refusing to learn from. The premise of The Idiot is simple: what happens if you drop a genuinely good person — honest, compassionate, incapable of scheming — into actual society? His answer is Prince Myshkin, an epileptic returning to Petersburg from a Swiss sanatorium, Dostoevsky’s deliberate attempt to write a “positively beautiful man,” an almost Christ-like figure. Everyone who meets Myshkin is drawn to his sincerity. And then Petersburg society chews him up anyway. His honesty gets read as naivety, his compassion as weakness, his refusal to play the game as proof he can’t. They give him a nickname, and the nickname is the title of the book. Dostoevsky’s thesis: society doesn’t just fail to recognize goodness — it processes goodness as defect. In a fallen world, unguarded decency is indistinguishable from idiocy.

Sound familiar?

I thought Kamala Harris was the perfect candidate. I’m not claiming she was Christ-like — she was a tough prosecutor — but her platform sat closer to the Sermon on the Mount than the Republicans’ by a chasm of biblical proportions. Feed the hungry. Heal the sick. Care for children. And the country ran the Myshkin playbook on her: her laugh became an attack ad, her résumé got waved off with a three-letter acronym (DEI), her earnestness got recast as emptiness. With the media’s help, the voting populace chewed her up exactly like Petersburg society chewed up the Prince — all while insisting, with straight faces, that Donald Trump was the more Christian choice and better for their paychecks.

Which brings me to Moses Mike Johnson — a nickname the Speaker earned honestly, having told a gathering of Christian lawmakers that God had prepared him for leadership like Moses. Johnson says his policies come straight from his Bible. Here’s what the Bible apparently says: the Big Beautiful Bill he shepherded into law cuts Medicaid by roughly $1 trillion over the decade — the largest cut in the program’s history — with the CBO estimating around 12 million people losing health coverage once the ACA changes are counted. Federal nutrition assistance took its largest-ever cut in the same bill. School lunches, SNAP, health care for the poor: gone or gutted. Meanwhile, there is no defense budget too large — north of a trillion dollars now, with more on the way thanks to the Iran war going unchecked.

And when the Social Security trustees warned this summer that the retirement trust fund runs dry in 2032, Johnson went on Louisiana radio to explain that entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid, “and things like Social Security” — “have to be adjusted and fixed,” adding, “We have a plan to do that next year.”

Next year. As in, after the midterms. They have a plan for your Social Security; they’d just prefer you vote first and see it later. And the debt crisis Johnson cites as the emergency? The tax bill he sponsored added nearly $5 trillion to it, flowing overwhelmingly to the wealthiest households. Cut Medicaid for the poor, cut taxes for the rich, point at the debt, come for checks of the downtrodden. It’s Reagan’s magic trick performed a fourth time for an audience that just takes the media’s word for it.

There isn’t any bar too low for Moses Mike and the Republicans. Block release of the Epstein files? No problem. Defend January 6th? Sure, Donald. Explain away grab ’em by the pussy? Locker room talk. Explain away a rape conviction? He never said he was a choir boy.

None of this is Christianity. It’s blind loyalty and the Protestant work ethic filtered through Ayn Rand — a fusion where prosperity signals virtue and poverty signals moral failure. Which is a genuinely impressive theological achievement, given that Job, Ecclesiastes, Amos, and Luke’s Beatitudes (“blessed be the poor… woe unto you that are rich”) exist specifically to refute it.

Dostoevsky saw this coming too. In The Brothers Karamazov, the skeptic Ivan tells his devout brother Alyosha a story about the second coming. Christ returns — not in glory, just quietly walking among the people of Seville at the height of the Inquisition, the day after a hundred heretics were burned. The crowd recognizes him instantly. He restores sight to a blind man. On the cathedral steps he raises a dead seven-year-old girl from her coffin as her mother weeps.

At that moment the Grand Inquisitor passes by — a cardinal, nearly ninety, who watched yesterday’s burnings from the front row. He sees the miracles, understands immediately who this is, and orders his guards to arrest him. The crowd, conditioned to obedience, parts and lets it happen.

But the arrest isn’t the chilling part. The chilling part is the justification. That night the old man visits the cell and explains, with total serenity, that the Church has corrected Christ’s work. The people can’t handle what you actually taught, he says. So we manage them — for their own good. Everything we’ve taken from them, we took out of love.

Now listen to Moses Mike respond to the backlash over his entitlement comments: don’t believe the fake news, Republicans aren’t “reducing a single benefit” — they’re merely rooting out fraud in order to preserve the programs. We are cutting your health care to protect it. We are taking this from you because we love you.

They would jail Jesus himself if he walked the earth again — assuming he made it past the border, which, given his paperwork, is a generous assumption. And Republicans, conditioned to obedience, would part and let it happen.