In the same Washington Post interview where he very candidly conceded that there was literally nothing Donald Trump could do to endanger his support among evangelicals, including, it stands to reason, standing before the United Nations and declaring himself the Anti-Christ, second-second-generation garbage monster/evangelist Jerry Fallwell Jr. spoke of Jesus’ little-known preference for super-rich sinners when he argued, “There’s two kingdoms. There’s the earthly kingdom and the heavenly kingdom. In the heavenly kingdom the responsibility is to treat others as you’d like to be treated. In the earthly kingdom, the responsibility is to choose leaders who will do what’s best for your country. Think about it. Why have Americans been able to do more to help people in need around the world than any other country in history? It’s because of free enterprise, freedom, ingenuity, entrepreneurism and wealth. A poor person never gave anyone a job. A poor person never gave anybody charity, not of any real volume. It’s just common sense to me.”

I am perpetually astonished by our culture’s seething hatred of poor people. But it’s one thing to see those kinds of sentiments expressed by Facebook commenters convinced that paying the people who prepare our food and look after our children and clean our offices enough money to pay their bills and afford healthcare would single-handedly destroy capitalism and send us hurtling into a nightmare Marxist dystopia of endless bread lines and widespread despair. It’s another to hear it coming from an ostensible man of God. If I remember correctly, that Jesus dude didn’t have a whole lot of money and did not seem to have a terribly high opinion of people who did.

Falwell Jr’s odious sentiments really underline just how much hostility, if not outright hatred our culture has for the people at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. Falwell is drawing a preposterous dichotomy between the inherent good of “free enterprise, freedom, ingenuity, entrepreneurism and wealth” and the evil of being poor, a state that, by Falwell Jr’s definition at least, completely negates one’s ability to contribute anything meaningful to society.