Scott Adams is most known for his highly successful Dilbert comic. He’s also a prolific author on wide variety of subjects. 566,000 people follow him on twitter.


He’s generally an advocate for Trump, but he’s an athiest, he describes himself of “left of Bernie”, he advocates for legalizing drugs, he’s prochoice and recently he said, “I’m the most pro-LGBTQ person you’ve ever met.”


So what do you think he thinks is the most central aspect of Christian behavior? How would you expect him to talk about how he sees Christians acting these days?


He has a daily periscope podcast (“Coffee with Scott Adams” – Today’s had 85,000 viewers). Earlier this month, he experienced something and his comments about Christianity made me glad.


As I say, he’s usually pro-Trump, but not always. He was so disappointed in Trump’s performance in the first debate (including not taking a stronger stand on white supremacy), he openly proclaimed on his podcast that he wasn’t going to vote for him unless things changed.


And you might think that people who don’t like Trump would be pleased to hear this and would be encouraging to Scott. But that’s not what happened. And the negative thoughts that came at him from left caused him to say the following ideas. [Note: even with his disclaimer, I disagree with his overly-negative description of democrats, so I took them out, but thinking towards fairness and completion, I’ll be adding them in the comments of this post. And yes, his description of Republicans is almost certainly overly positive. More’s the pity.]


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(From around time marker 22:15)

I’ve noticed that there’s a distinction between Republicans and Democrats and it goes like this… This is going to be a gross generalization, so I’m not going to say every Republican and I’m not going to say every Democrat…

Would it be true that Republicans tend to be Christian or Christian-biased, meaning that they tend to be influenced by the Bible, and by that teaching? Even if they’re not actively religious, they probably came from that culture.

And one of the biggest elements of Christianity is forgiveness. In fact, there’s almost nothing more central to Christianity than forgiveness, right? Second chance, you know, you can make up for it in heaven. It’s all about forgiving sins.

The Democrats, on the other hand, tend to be a little more godless…

So here’s the distinction: Republicans will, by choice – this is actively their philosophy – they will forgive you for actual real sins. Including, you know, you saw the president do that First Step Act, if you can get your life together in prison, learn something and serve some of your time, you are forgiven. You’re released.

And I think Christians actually mean that. It’s really baked into them. You can do some pretty bad stuff, but if you’re genuinely forgiving and you do something with your life, you can be forgiven.

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What he’s missing here, of course, is the source of a Christian’s interest in forgiveness: Jesus and the fact that we’ve been forgiven by him as a result of what he did for us on the Cross.


But just like with Louis C. K., I’d like to commend the Republicans that Scott’s been talking to. It looks like you’ve represented Christianity (and Christ) well. May we all be more like that.


And Scott, thanks for the nice words.

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