The Devil Doesn't Wear Horns — He Wears a Suit and Runs for Office by Jeff Callaway

The Devil Doesn't Wear Horns — He Wears a Suit and Runs for Office

By Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

(A Psalm of the Forgotten, the Bleeding, and the Righteous Rage of the People of God)

I.

Lord God Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, Father of the widow, Father of the poor, Defender of the orphan and the broken-backed man who cannot find his way home from a war nobody asked him to fight —

Hear me.

I am not coming to You with soft words tonight. I am coming to You with fire in my chest and blood behind my eyes, with the rage of ten thousand hungry children on my tongue, with the grief of a veteran sleeping under a bridge in January cold, medals rusting in a paper sack, having given everything for a country that now sends his brothers to bleed for somebody else's politics.

Lord, hear my cry. Not as a polished prayer. As a scream from the floor of this broken republic.

II.

They came slick and they came smiling, hair oiled back, teeth bleached white, expensive suits draped over hollow men, promises hanging from their lips like pearls before swine — and the cameras loved them, and the donors loved them, and the lobbyists poured ten thousand silver coins into their open hands while the homeless veteran froze, while the widow buried her husband with borrowed money, while the addict clawed at the walls of a cell with no program, no path, no mercy offered.

O God, the money they spent on fire and iron over Persian skies — the missiles, the bombers, the diplomatic theater of ruin — could have wrapped every suffering American in the arms of a country that actually loved them.

Every homeless veteran could have had a roof. Every widow could have had her dignity restored. Every addict could have been placed in a recovery program built on compassion rather than left in a cage or a gutter like something that ceased to matter the moment it stopped being profitable.

Every immigrant fleeing wars that men in suits manufactured could have been given shelter, process, mercy — the very things the Lord Christ commanded when He said: I was a stranger and you took Me in.

Matthew 25. Read it. It is not a suggestion. It is a reckoning.

III.

But they chose war.

They always choose war.

Because war makes money, and money makes power, and power makes kings, and these men love thrones more than truth and mammon more than mercy and the voice of their donors more than the Voice of the Living God.

They wrap themselves in the flag. They put their hands on Bibles they have never actually read, invoking the name of God as a campaign prop, as a brand, as a weapon to herd the faithful into the machinery of their ambition.

And the people — Lord, Your people — cry out in the night.

We cry out to You, Father. We cry out through the intercession of Your holy Angels, through the prayers of the Saints who have gone before us, through the Blessed Mother herself who held the broken body of her Son and knows grief better than any widow in America.

We are on our knees, God. Not to these politicians. Never to these politicians. We are on our knees to You.

IV.

And I will say what the comfortable dare not say, what the polished pulpits are too afraid to say, what the television preachers will not say because their 501(c)(3) hangs in the balance:

There are those who claim to be of God and are not.

The Word of God says it plainly in the Apocalypse of Saint John: those who say they are of the Covenant but are not, who are the Synagogue of Satan — not by blood, not by ancestry, but by the fruit of their works, by the corrupting of justice, by the purchasing of governments, by the long bloody hand of foreign influence over sovereign souls.

We are not at war because America was threatened. We are at war because power was purchased. We are bleeding in distant deserts because men with foreign allegiances and American title deeds have bought the seats of our government like tables at a banquet they intend to run forever.

And the same people who denied that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, who handed Him to Pilate, who to this day reject the Resurrection — these are the architects of policy in a nation that claims to be Christian.

You cannot serve God and this. You cannot wave a cross and fund the machinery that grinds the poor to dust.

V.

O Lord, I am angry. I confess it before You. Righteous anger, I pray. The anger of a man who reads the Gospel and then reads the headlines and sees the distance between the two is the width of a politician's wallet.

We could have done so much. We could have fed them. We could have healed them. We could have welcomed the stranger. We could have lifted the addict from the mud of despair. We could have honored the widow and sheltered the veteran who bled for this land.

We could have done the things Christ told us to do. We were given the wealth. We were given the power. We were given the moment.

And they spent it on missiles.

VI.

So I cry out with David, I cry out with the prophet Isaiah, I cry out with every saint who ever raised a fist at heaven not in defiance but in desperate petition —

Arise, O Lord. Let the wicked be confounded. Cast down the mighty from their thrones as Your own Mother prophesied before the world knew Your name.

Destroy the corrupt leaders. Pull them from their seats of purchased power. Let their donor networks crumble. Let their war profits turn to ash. Let the hidden things be revealed in the full light of Your justice.

And raise up, O Father, leaders who are hungry for Your will and not for this world's glory. Leaders who have read the Sermon on the Mount and felt it in their bones. Leaders who know that the least of these is Christ Himself in disguise, standing at the border, sleeping under the bridge, shaking in a detox bed, weeping at a grave with no flowers.

Give us leaders who see the face of God in the faces of the broken.

This is our prayer. This is our psalm. This is our righteous, unashamed, God-directed rage.

We will not be silent. We will not be polished. We will not be managed.

We are the People of God — and we are crying out.

Come, Lord Jesus. Come.

~Jeff Callaway

Texas Outlaw Poet

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