The Evangelical Thirst For Power Replaces Jesus With Trump

I grew up in an evangelical church in the 1950's and early 1960's. It was a strict religion that looked down on and condemned adultery, lying, cheating, grifting, mistreating others, and any kind of "loose morality".

So, like many others, I was surprised when evangelicals went all in to support a man guilty of all those things - and continue to support him knowing all of his faults. Why do the evangelicals overwhelmingly support Donald Trump?

You must understand that the evangelical movement liked the world of the 1950's. Their religion was king in the country, and they controlled the laws that were passed. There was forced praying in public schools. Women were second-class citizens, who could not get a legal abortion or even a credit card (without a man's signature). Most minority citizens either could not vote or lived in areas where whites could easily outvote them. Poor people were stuck in poverty, and the little help they could get usually came from a church. And the culture was rather mundane, with both images and thoughts rigidly controlled.

It was the world as they liked it - and they wanted it to stay that way. But change happens - especially in a country with a Constitution and a vibrant democracy. And the United States changed - a lot!

Women were established as to have rights - even the right to have an abortion if they chose to do so. Male dominance began to recede. And with the sexual revolution, sex was recognized as being Ok outside of the institution of marriage.

Rights were also established for racial minorities, including the right to vote. Congress (and eventually even the presidency) were no longer the sole right of whites. And the demographics of the population was changing. Soon, the United States would become a nonwhite majority nation.

Lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transsexuals were recognized to have rights - and they came out of the closet (even gaining the right to marry the person of their choice).

And with the advent of the internet, atheists and agnostics also came out of the closet and finally were able to proclaim their lack of religion. This started a decline in church membership.

All of these changes upset evangelicals - and it scared them. They saw their power begin to decline. Other Americans no longer had to live by evangelical rules. They tried to re-establish the old order through movements like the Moral Majority, but it didn't work. The genie was out of the bottle.

And then Donald Trump comes along. He was the antithesis of their beliefs, but he promised to restore their power. He was their hope to recreate the old white, christian, patriarchy. They eagerly jumped on board (ignoring the fact that it labeled them as racist, homophobic, misogynistic, and hypocritical).

It's sad, but given the choice of the teachings of Jesus and the hate agenda of Trump, they chose hate. 

Why Are White Evangelicals Eager To Endorse GOP Bigotry?

 

Have you wondered why white evangelicals, who profess to follow the teachings of Jesus, are so accepting of the Republican Party's growing bigotry? Robert P. Jones, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), has an answer. He says:

White evangelicalism, with its strong emphasis on personal salvation, has always had a weakly developed and myopic political ethic. It developed a theology obsessed with personal (especially sexual) morality, which largely screened out concerns about social or structural injustice outside the church. This was by design, given that for most of its existence, it required a theology that was externally compatible with slavery and segregation — in short, with white supremacy. More recently, White evangelicals faced a crossroads when [Donald] Trump entered the political scene in the Republican Party, the party to which they fled in the 1970s and 1980s in the wake of the Democratic Party’s support for the civil rights movement.

Given that history, with the vast majority of White evangelicals supporting and blessing segregationist leaders just a generation ago, I wouldn’t characterize the current state of White evangelical responses, or lack of responses, as wildly inconsistent with this past. But the way White evangelicals have overtly given themselves over, not just to one political party but to one authoritarian personality, is deeply troubling.

On these questions, there is one public opinion survey question I keep coming back to, which gets to the heart of this continued White evangelical acquiescence of moral judgment and political responsibility. In 2011, PRRI asked whether people thought an elected official who committed an immoral act “can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” While just 30 percent of White evangelicals said such a candidate could fulfill their duties in 2011, that number jumped to 72 percent in 2016 when Trump was at the top of the ticket, and it remains at 68 percent today.

In short, White evangelicals have never had a robust political ethic based on rigorously developed principles but rather an ends-justify-the-means approach to politics that starts with support for outcomes that are perceived to serve their interests and then marshals theology as backfill.

Vaccine Refusal Is Not Based On Christianity

Millions of Americans are refusing to take the vaccine for COVID-19. They (mainly white evangelicals) are claiming a religious exemption, because that is usually the only exemption honored. But refusing to take the vaccine has no real religious base -- it is purely a political move.

Here is part of what Michael Gerson says about this in The Washington Post:

White evangelical Christians have resisted getting vaccinated against the coronavirus at higher rates than other religious groups in the United States. Some initial resistance came in the context of a familiar ethical debate: Did the creation of coronavirus vaccines involve cell lines produced from aborted fetuses?

The short answer is: no. A slightly longer answer is that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is grown in fetal cell line PER.C6, which was derived from an elective abortion in 1985. “But contrary to social media claims,” Francis Collins, former director of the National Institutes of Health, told me, “there are no fetal cells or fetal DNA in the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.” The Vatican has indicated that Catholics can take the Johnson & Johnson vaccine.

“The Pfizer and Moderna mRNA are synthesized without the need for a cell line,” Collins said. “The only possible objection against those is that their effectiveness was tested in certain lab experiments that used fetal cell lines. But if that is sufficient reason to decline them, that would also need to apply to a very long list of current medicines, including aspirin and statins.”

The main resistance of evangelicals to public health measures does not concern abortion. Having embraced religious liberty as a defining cause, they are now deploying the language of that cause in opposition to jab and mask mandates. Arguments crafted to defend institutional religious liberty have been adapted to oppose public coercion on covid. But they do not fit.

More than that, the sanctification of anti-government populism is displacing or dethroning one of the most basic Christian distinctions. Most evangelical posturing on covid mandates is really syncretism, a merging of unrelated beliefs — in this case, the substitution of libertarianism for Christian ethics. In this distorted form of faith, evangelical Christians are generally known as people who loudly defend their own rights. They show not radical generosity but discreditable selfishness. There is no version of the Golden Rule that would recommend Christian resistance to basic public health measures during a pandemic. This is heresy compounded by lunacy.

It is worth recalling, as a matter of law, that someone does not need a good or theologically coherent religious-liberty claim to make a religious-liberty claim in court (absent fraud or opportunism). To deny such a claim, government needs a compelling interest advanced in the least restrictive manner. But it is hard to imagine a clearer, more fundamental example of a compelling state interest than preventing the spread of a virus that has already taken the lives of more than 800,000 Americans.

And when Christians are asserting a right to resist basic public health measures, what is the actual content of their religious-liberty claim? The right to risk the lives of their neighbors in order to assert their autonomy? The right to endanger the community in the performative demonstration of their personal rights?

This is a vivid display of the cultural and ideological trends of a warped and wasted year. It just has nothing to do with real Christianity.

White Evangelicals: White Supremacy "Trumps" Their Religion

It has always been strange that white evangelicals embraced Donald Trump, even after it became common knowledge that he abused women, made fun of disabled people, and showed little respect for marriage and morality. After his failed first term, they remained with him in an incredibly large percentage. Why?

The answer is that they liked his views on race and white supremacy, which parallel their own views. It has become obvious that their fear of losing their white privilege is stronger than their religious beliefs.

The following is part of an op-ed by Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post:

A decade or two ago, no one had trouble figuring out what White evangelical Christians wanted from the federal government. Alongside supply-siders and national security hawks, they made up the triumvirate of the GOP base and were willing to embrace their allies’ economic and foreign policy positions to ensure support for abortion restrictions and anti-gay policies. (During the Cold War, they were enthusiastic partners with national security hawks in the battle against godless communism.)

But social policy is no longer at the heart of the agenda of the demographic. Instead, it has become nearly indistinguishable from the MAGA movement.

Conservative commentator and evangelical Christian David A. French acknowledges in a piece for the Dispatch: “We know that opposition to abortion rights motivates white Evangelicals far less than their leaders’ rhetoric would suggest. Eastern Illinois University’s Ryan Burge, one of the nation’s leading statisticians of American religion, has noted, for example, that immigration drove Evangelical support for [Donald] Trump more than abortion.”

As for gay rights, the Public Religion Research Institute’s annual values survey shows a majority of White evangelical Christians still oppose gay marriage, but that “substantial majorities in every major religious group favor nondiscrimination laws that protect LGBTQ people, ranging from 59% among white evangelical Protestants to 92% among religiously unaffiliated Americans.” Moreover, even opposition to gay marriage is declining because of a massive generational divide on the issue between older evangelicals and more tolerant millennials and Generation Xers.

So what, then, do these voters want? Many essentially see politics as a great battle between White, Christian America and the multiracial, religiously diverse reality of 21st century America. They want someone to help them win that existential fight. Government is there not to produce legislative fixes to real-world problems but to engage their enemies on behalf of White Christianity. . . .

The fixation with defining the United States as a White Christian nation is on full display nightly on Fox News, where replacement theory — not abortion or gay rights — drives so much more of the conversation. 

In this context, White evangelical Christians’ attraction to the thrice-married philanderer Trump is understandable, as is their support for the cruelest immigration policies (e.g., child separation) and the anti-Muslim travel ban. It’s all about race and religious identity, not policies founded in Christian values and certainly not about finding a role model for civic virtues. Trump was determined to protect White evangelicals against people of color and the decline in Christian identification; that was all they could hope for in a politician.

For these voters, government is a means of enforcing (they would say “preserving”) domination of Whites and Christianity as essential to America’s identity. That’s why they support politicians who demonize Black Lives Matter, demand that corporations meekly accept voter suppression, express outrage over a publisher’s decision about Dr. Seuss titles or fixate on saying “Merry Christmas.” It’s also why insurrectionists marauded through the Capitol on Jan. 6 bearing Confederate flags and wearing T-shirts mocking the Holocaust. They keep telling us who they are and what they want, but well-meaning Americans and the media often refuse to accept that their fellow Americans’ motives are so antithetical to American values. . . .

The fixation on race and Christian nationalism has serious ramifications for American political life. First, White evangelical Christians are fighting an impossible crusade against demographic inevitability (their minority status is what has fueled the MAGA movement). Because they can never win (at least in a democracy with free and accurate elections), their political venom will not abate.

Second, the aims of White evangelicals run smack into the American ideal that “all men are created equal” and constitutional protections that allow no bias against any particular religion or racial group. In that regard, they have become deeply antidemocratic.

Finally, a Democratic Party committed to social justice and racial tolerance is never going to win over the hardcore White evangelical base of the GOP. There is nothing Democrats can “give” them (e.g., jobs, cheaper health care) to satisfy their need for White Christian ascendency.

Evangelicals Are Abandoning Religion For GOP Politics

The following is part of a thought-provoking article by Anthea Butler at MSNBC.com:

According to new analysis from Pew Research center, "evangelical" doesn’t mean born-again anymore; it means Republican. Of course, evangelicals have embraced the Republican party since the late 1970s, but, per the analysis, more white Americans adopted the evangelical label between 2016 and 2020, years that include former President Donald Trump’s presidential campaigns and his time in the White House.

When it comes down to it, evangelical is more a political label than a religious one. People who embrace the label use it to signal that they’re against immigration, science and abortion and to signal a belief that discussions of racism in America are antithetical to their idea of America.

The Pew survey shows that Trump garnered even more support in 2020 from evangelicals than he did in 2016. Between 2016 and 2020, 16 percent of people who had not self identified as evangelical in 2016 identified that way by 2020. Interestingly enough, this 16 percent did not vote for Trump in 2016. In 2020, out of the 78 percent of white evangelical voters who voted for Trump, 18 percent of these were Trump converts — evangelicals who didn’t support him in 2016.

The Pew Survey isn’t the only evidence pointing to this hardening of American evangelicalism. A PRRI survey finds that while the majority of Americans place the blame of the insurrection on white supremacist groups, Trump, and conservative media platforms, conservatives like evangelicals do not believe those were the culprits. To the contrary, 57 percent of white evangelical Protestants believe liberal left-wing groups such as antifa were responsible for the Jan 6. riots, and 68 percent of white evangelicals surveyed believe Trump is a “true patriot.”

All of this points to the fact that evangelicalism is not a religious group exclusively, but a majority white religious group linked strongly to Trump, the Republican party and particular ideas about race, gender, morality and America. . . .

There are a lot of reasons one might attribute for more people calling themselves evangelical, but it certainly isn’t because of a great religious revival. Evangelicals are engaged in a political revival, steeped in racism, anti-immigrant sentiment, sexual morality and misplaced nostalgia. . . .

These surveys tell us the trajectory Republican politicians will use to stoke their evangelical base in 2022 and 2024 election cycles. Now that those who don’t know the theological beliefs of evangelicalismare identifying themselves as such, there should be no confusion about what evangelicalism really is in America: a full-fledged religious political movement whose allegiance is to the Republican party’s issues and to whiteness.

Mostly White Evangelicals Grew During Trump Regime

The charts above are from the Pew Research Center. They compare the religious groups in 2016 to those after the 2020 election. 

Note that protestants and catholics remained constant -- with protestants at 45% and catholics at 18%. The non-religious grew slightly -- from 29% to 30%.

But the protestant groups were different. The born-again evangelicals actually grew from 25% to 29%, while those not claiming to be born-again dropped from 20% to 17%.

As the second chart shows, most of the growth for born-again evangelicals came from white Trump supporters.

Religious Right Is Shrinking - & It's Making Them Dangerous

For too long in this country, the religious right (evangelical christians) was the most powerful political force in the United States. That is no longer absolutely true. Their numbers are shrinking. That is both a good and bad thing. It's good because they can no longer force their weird view of religion on all Americans. It's bad because it has made them more dangerous (as we saw on January 6th).

The following is part of a column in The New York Times by Michael Goldberg:

The presidency of George W. Bush may have been the high point of the modern Christian right’s influence in America. White evangelicals were the largest religious faction in the country. “They had a president who claimed to be one of their own, he had a testimony, talked in evangelical terms,” said Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute and author of the 2016 book “The End of White Christian America.”. . .

Activists imagined a glorious future. “Home-schoolers will be inordinately represented in the highest levels of leadership and power in the next generation,” Ned Ryun, a former Bush speechwriter, said at a 2005 Christian home-schooling convention. Ryun was the director of a group called Generation Joshua, which worked to get home-schooled kids into politics. The name came from the Old Testament. Moses had led the chosen people out of exile, but it was his successor, Joshua, who conquered the Holy Land.

But the evangelicals who thought they were about to take over America were destined for disappointment. On Thursday, P.R.R.I. released startling new polling data showing just how much ground the religious right has lost. P.R.R.I.’s 2020 Census of American Religion, based on a survey of nearly half a million people, shows a precipitous decline in the share of the population identifying as white evangelical, from 23 percent in 2006 to 14.5 percent last year. (As a category, “white evangelicals” isn’t a perfect proxy for the religious right, but the overlap is substantial.) In 2020, as in every year since 2013, the largest religious group in the United States was the religiously unaffiliated.

One of P.R.R.I.’s most surprising findings was that in 2020, there were more white mainline Protestants than white evangelicals. This doesn’t necessarily mean Christians are joining mainline congregations — the survey measures self-identification, not church affiliation. It is, nevertheless, a striking turnabout after years when mainline Protestantism was considered moribund and evangelical Christianity full of dynamism.

In addition to shrinking as a share of the population, white evangelicals were also the oldest religious group in the United States, with a median age of 56. “It’s not just that they are dying off, but it is that they’re losing younger members,” Jones told me. As the group has become older and smaller, Jones said, “a real visceral sense of loss of cultural dominance” has set in.

White evangelicals once saw themselves “as the owners of mainstream American culture and morality and values,” said Jones. Now they are just another subculture.

From this fact derives much of our country’s cultural conflict. It helps explain not just the rise of Donald Trump, but also the growth of QAnon and even the escalating conflagration over critical race theory. “It’s hard to overstate the strength of this feeling, among white evangelicals in particular, of America being a white Christian country,” said Jones. “This sense of ownership of America just runs so deep in white evangelical circles.” The feeling that it’s slipping away has created an atmosphere of rage, resentment and paranoia. . . .

“It’s not unlike a belief in the second coming of Christ,” said Jones. “That at some point God will reorder society and set things right. I think that when a community feels itself in crisis, it does become more susceptible to conspiracy theories and other things that tell them that what they’re experiencing is not ultimately what’s going to happen.”

The fight over critical race theory seems, on the surface, further from theological concerns. There are, obviously, plenty of people who aren’t evangelical who are anti-C.R.T., as well as evangelicals who oppose C.R.T. bans. But the idea that public schools are corrupting children by leading them away from a providential understanding of American history has deep roots in white evangelical culture. And it was the Christian right that pioneered the tactic of trying to take over school boards in response to teachings seen as morally objectionable, whether that meant sex education, “secular humanism” or evolution.

Jones points out that last year, after Trump issued an executive order targeting critical race theory, the presidents of all six seminaries of the Southern Baptist Convention came together to declare C.R.T. “incompatible” with the Baptist faith. Jones, whose latest book is “White Too Long: The Legacy of White Supremacy in American Christianity,” could recall no precedent for such a joint statement. . . .

Then again, white evangelicals probably aren’t wrong to fear that their children are getting away from them. As their numbers have shrunk and as they’ve grown more at odds with younger Americans, said Jones, “that has led to this bigger sense of being under attack, a kind of visceral defensive posture, that we saw President Trump really leveraging.”

I was frightened by the religious right in its triumphant phase. But it turns out that the movement is just as dangerous in decline. Maybe more so. It didn’t take long for the cocky optimism of Generation Joshua to give way to the nihilism of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. If they can’t own the country, they’re ready to defile it.

Nearly Half Of White Evangelicals Are Refusing Vaccinations

(This chart is from the Pew Research Center.)

After more than a year of experiencing the COVID-19 pandemic, and the economic problems it has created, reasonable people understand that the nation will not return to "normal" until herd immunity is established.

To accomplish that, about 75% of the nation must be vaccinated against the virus. Failure to do that will just prolong the pandemic, and cause the deaths of many more people.

One would think that religious people, especially christians (who claim to follow a man who told them to love their neighbor), would willingly do something to save the lives of their fellow citizens. But sadly that is not true.

And it is especially not true of white evangelicals. Nearly half of them (45%) say they will refuse to take the vaccine for COVID-19. instead of loving their neighbor, they are willing to put them in danger. I guess this should not surprise anyone, since this is also the group that flocked to support a racist demagogue. But it does make me wonder why they are so willing to reject the teachings of their own religion.

The following is a small part of an article in The New York Times by Elizabeth Dias and Ruth Graham:

The deeply held spiritual convictions or counterfactual arguments may vary. But across white evangelical America, reasons not to get vaccinated have spread as quickly as the virus that public health officials are hoping to overcome through herd immunity.

The opposition is rooted in a mix of religious faith and a longstanding wariness of mainstream science, and it is fueled by broader cultural distrust of institutions and gravitation to online conspiracy theories. The sheer size of the community poses a major problem for the country’s ability to recover from a pandemic that has resulted in the deaths of half a million Americans. And evangelical ideas and instincts have a way of spreading, even internationally.

There are about 41 million white evangelical adults in the U.S. About 45 percent said in late February that they would not get vaccinated against Covid-19, making them among the least likely demographic groups to do so, according to the Pew Research Center.

“If we can’t get a significant number of white evangelicals to come around on this, the pandemic is going to last much longer than it needs to,” said Jamie Aten, founder and executive director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College, an evangelical institution in Illinois.

As vaccines become more widely available, and as worrisome virus variants develop, the problem takes on new urgency. Significant numbers of Americans generally are resistant to getting vaccinated, but white evangelicals present unique challenges because of their complex web of moral, medical, and political objections. The challenge is further complicated by longstanding distrust between evangelicals and the scientific community. . . .

White evangelicals who do not plan to get vaccinated sometimes say they see no need, because they do not feel at risk. Rates of Covid-19 death have been about twice as high for Black, Hispanic, and Native Americans as for white Americans.

White pastors have largely remained quiet. That’s in part because the wariness among white conservative Christians is not just medical, but also political. If white pastors encourage vaccination directly, said Dr. Aten, “there are people in the pews where you’ve just attacked their political party, and maybe their whole worldview.”. . .

There has been a “sea change” over the past century in how evangelical Christians see science, a change rooted largely in the debates over evolution and the secularization of the academy, said Elaine Ecklund, professor of sociology and director of the Religion and Public Life Program at Rice University.

There are two parts to the problem, she said: The scientific community has not been as friendly toward evangelicals, and the religious community has not encouraged followers to pursue careers in science.

Distrust of scientists has become part of cultural identity, of what it means to be white and evangelical in America, she said. . . .

Politics has increasingly been shaping faith among white evangelicals, rather than the other way around, he said. Pastors’ influence on their churches is decreasing. “They get their people for one hour, and Sean Hannity gets them for the next 20,” he said.

Evangelical Christian Magazine Calls For Trump Removal

The tweets above, from Donald Trump, are in response to an editorial in Christian Today -- an evangelical magazine. The editorial called for the impeachment and removal from office of Donald Trump. The magazine said Trump's behavior was criminal and immoral, and should not be supported by christians.

Trump's response was to lie. Calling the magazine "far left" or "progressive" is far from the truth. It is a religious magazine for evangelicals, founded by Billy Graham in the 1950's, and seldom gets political at all (for either the left or right).

Graham's son (Franklin Graham) said his father would not have approved of the magazine's editorial. I think he's wrong about that. As the graphic below shows, Billy Graham was wary of mixing christianity with right-wing politics.

Here is the editorial from Christian Today:

In our founding documents, Billy Graham explains that Christianity Today will help evangelical Christians interpret the news in a manner that reflects their faith. The impeachment of Donald Trump is a significant event in the story of our republic. It requires comment.

The typical CT approach is to stay above the fray and allow Christians with different political convictions to make their arguments in the public square, to encourage all to pursue justice according to their convictions and treat their political opposition as charitably as possible. We want CT to be a place that welcomes Christians from across the political spectrum, and reminds everyone that politics is not the end and purpose of our being. We take pride in the fact, for instance, that politics does not dominate our homepage.

That said, we do feel it necessary from time to time to make our own opinions on political matters clear—always, as Graham encouraged us, doing so with both conviction and love. We love and pray for our president, as we love and pray for leaders (as well as ordinary citizens) on both sides of the political aisle.

Let’s grant this to the president: The Democrats have had it out for him from day one, and therefore nearly everything they do is under a cloud of partisan suspicion. This has led many to suspect not only motives but facts in these recent impeachment hearings. And, no, Mr. Trump did not have a serious opportunity to offer his side of the story in the House hearings on impeachment.

But the facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.

The reason many are not shocked about this is that this president has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration. He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals. He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his relationship with women, about which he remains proud. His Twitter feed alone—with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders—is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.

Trump’s evangelical supporters have pointed to his Supreme Court nominees, his defense of religious liberty, and his stewardship of the economy, among other things, as achievements that justify their support of the president. We believe the impeachment hearings have made it absolutely clear, in a way the Mueller investigation did not, that President Trump has abused his authority for personal gain and betrayed his constitutional oath. The impeachment hearings have illuminated the president’s moral deficiencies for all to see. This damages the institution of the presidency, damages the reputation of our country, and damages both the spirit and the future of our people. None of the president’s positives can balance the moral and political danger we face under a leader of such grossly immoral character.

This concern for the character of our national leader is not new in CT. In 1998, we wrote this:

The President's failure to tell the truth—even when cornered—rips at the fabric of the nation. This is not a private affair. For above all, social intercourse is built on a presumption of trust: trust that the milk your grocer sells you is wholesome and pure; trust that the money you put in your bank can be taken out of the bank; trust that your babysitter, firefighters, clergy, and ambulance drivers will all do their best. And while politicians are notorious for breaking campaign promises, while in office they have a fundamental obligation to uphold our trust in them and to live by the law.

And this:

Unsavory dealings and immoral acts by the President and those close to him have rendered this administration morally unable to lead.

Unfortunately, the words that we applied to Mr. Clinton 20 years ago apply almost perfectly to our current president. Whether Mr. Trump should be removed from office by the Senate or by popular vote next election—that is a matter of prudential judgment. That he should be removed, we believe, is not a matter of partisan loyalties but loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments.

To the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record, we might say this: Remember who you are and whom you serve. Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior. Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency. If we don’t reverse course now, will anyone take anything we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come? Can we say with a straight face that abortion is a great evil that cannot be tolerated and, with the same straight face, say that the bent and broken character of our nation’s leader doesn’t really matter in the end?

We have reserved judgment on Mr. Trump for years now. Some have criticized us for our reserve. But when it comes to condemning the behavior of another, patient charity must come first. So we have done our best to give evangelical Trump supporters their due, to try to understand their point of view, to see the prudential nature of so many political decisions they have made regarding Mr. Trump. To use an old cliché, it’s time to call a spade a spade, to say that no matter how many hands we win in this political poker game, we are playing with a stacked deck of gross immorality and ethical incompetence. And just when we think it’s time to push all our chips to the center of the table, that’s when the whole game will come crashing down. It will crash down on the reputation of evangelical religion and on the world’s understanding of the gospel. And it will come crashing down on a nation of men and women whose welfare is also our concern.

Character & Integrity Are Unimportant To GOP Evangelicals

(Cartoon image is by Bob Englehart at cagle.com.)

Will evangelicals ever be able to live down their support of the most immoral and unethical politician of all time? They have shown they are willing to give up their values for political power.

Here's what Peter Wehner, former advisor to President Reagan, had to say about this at CNN:

Speaking to CNN this Saturday, former advisor to President Ronald Reagan and “lifelong evangelical” Peter Wehner slammed evangelical supporters of President Trump, saying that they see him as a champion of their cause despite his moral failings — many of which are in direct contrast to the principles evangelicals claim to uphold.

“The bottom line is that [Trump] will fight for them,” Wehner said. “Not that he himself is of Christian faith. Not even he himself is a manifestation of Christian virtues, but they feel like they’re involved in an existential struggle against a malicious enemy that they consider to be the American Left. And Trump will try and vanquish that enemy.”

According to Wehner, evangelicals think Trump is bringing “a gun to a cultural knife fight,” and that he “hates the same people that they hate. And that he’ll employ means that’ll get it done.”

Although Wehner has been a fixture in past GOP administrations, he’s been a vocal Trump critic.

“I think it’s been tremendously discrediting to the Christian faith,” Wehner continued. “I think it’s shown to a watching world a tremendous amount of hypocrisy.”

“After all, this ‘character counts’ and ‘personal integrity’ and political leadership was central to what a lot of evangelicals argued when Bill Clinton was president,” he added. “And now that it’s Donald Trump, they’ve decided to push it aside, which means for them, that reality is a means to an end, not an end. It was something to be used as a political weapon.”

“I think a lot of these white evangelical leaders are doing more to hurt Christianity than the so-called New Atheists ever could,” he concluded.

White Evangelical Support For Trump Is At A Record High

The chart above shows results of a poll by the Public Religion Research Institute released  in mid-April of 2018. It shows the support of Donald Trump by white evangelicals is at an all-time high at 75% (or about three out of four evangelicals).

This group, more than any other in the country, likes to proclaim itself as the guardians of "family values" in the United States. They have tossed those values out the window to support Trump -- a man who is an incessant liar, a serial adulterer, a sex abuser, a racist, an immigrant hater, a deadbeat who doesn't pay his bills, a perpetrator of consumer frauds, and someone who makes fun of those less fortunate than he is. He is the very antithesis of christ-like behavior.

I don't ever want to hear the word "values" uttered by a white evangelical ever again. They have shown us those values don't matter to them. Only the pursuit of political power matters.

Evangelicals Are Fighting A Losing Battle On LGBT Rights

Evangelicals continue their fight to be able to discriminate against the LGBT community. That's one of their reasons for supporting an obviously immoral man to be president (Donald Trump). Trump has told them he supports their right to discriminate when using religion to disguise that discrimination.

But in spite of having Trump on their side, they are fighting a losing battle. The American people have already decided that the LGBT community should have the same rights as all other citizens. The charts above illustrate that.

By a 27 point margin, the public agrees with the Supreme Court decision giving same-sex couples the right to legally marry. By a 45 point margin, the public supports legislation that would prevent the members of the LGBT community from being discriminated against (jobs, public accommodations, housing, etc.). And by a 20 point margin, the public opposes allowing businesses to refuse service to the LGBT community using religion as an excuse.

Personally, I think this is a huge reason why many young people are leaving the church. Most of them have an LGBT friend, and they don't understand why that friend shouldn't have the same rights as everyone else.

The charts above were made using information contained in a recent Public Religion Research Institute Poll -- done between March 14th and 25th of a random national sample of 2,020 adults, with a 2.6 point margin of error.

Evangelicals Traded Religion For A Socio-Political Agenda

(Cartoon image is by Drew Sheneman in the New Jersey Star-Ledger.)

Evangelism is defined as spreading the gospel of christianity. In today's America, evangelicals are still trying to spread the word, but it's no longer the word of religion. It's a right-wing socio-policital agenda -- which has little to do with the teachings of their Christ. This has been happening for a while, but there support for Donald Trump makes clear that they have chosen politics over religion.

Here's part of a very good article by Hollis Phelps on the subject for Religious Dispatches:

There’s no doubt that evangelicalism seems to have an image problem, especially since its overwhelming alliance with Trump. In the minds of many outside the fold, evangelicalism no longer represents a specific religious position centered on sin and the need for individual salvation but rather a self-serving, power-hungry political movement that will side with the devil himself for the sake of political pragmatism. . . .

It would be wrong to paint all evangelicals with the same brush. Evangelicalism is and will remain a complex socio-political movement propped up by a religious rhetoric that emphasizes individual piety, but its adherents aren’t all the same. Indeed, some of Trump’s most vocal critics come out of evangelicalism.

That said, given the consistency with which white evangelicals as a whole have lent their support to Trump—and right-wing candidates and policies more generally—it’s far past time to own up to the fact that the image is, in many respects, the reality.

Well-intentioned evangelical leaders may not like to hear that, but it remains the case that an overwhelming majority of evangelicals continue to support Trump and his policies. Sure, they may have issues with his moral center, or lack thereof, but they’re willing to overlook all this for the sake of political expediency, for promises of “religious freedom,” and the hope of a judiciary stacked with conservative judges.

This is because, at the end of the day, evangelicalism isn’t really about personal values but, rather, social and political conversion and control. Little has changed, in this sense, since the days of Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority (as Daniel Schultz rightly pointed out recently on RD).

The Trump era, then, does not create a new problem for evangelicals and their image; it’s simply casting a very bright light on what has always been there, at least for the past forty years or so. . . .

I applaud those evangelicals who want to think honestly about the movement’s current image in the Trump age. But appealing to some “pure” form of the faith beyond its supposed political corruption—beyond the racism, xenophobia, nationalism, and the like that even critics of paper over—isn’t the way to go.

Not only do such appeals represent little more than nostalgia-laden theological desires that have little to do with what goes on on the ground, but they also ignore the fact that the line between religion and politics is flimsy at best, if not entirely non-existent. Evangelicalism, in its current manifestation, isn’t a religion that has been corrupted by its entry into politics but is, rather, a social movement that works through a specific type of politics. The substance of that politics has been clearly on display for some time now. Trump and his evangelical allies didn’t invent it; they only exacerbated it.

If evangelicalism ever wants to play a more positive role in social and political life, perhaps it’s time its leaders acknowledge that its public image isn’t a “grotesque caricature,” but the thing itself. 

White Evangelical Support For Trump Is At An All-Time High

This chart is from a recent Public Religion Research Institute Poll -- done between March 14th and 25th of a random national sample pot 2,020 adults (including 364 white evangelicals). The margin of error for the entire poll is 2.6 points. No margin of error was given for just white evangelicals.

We now know that Donald Trump is a consummate liar (having lied over 2,400 times since being sworn in), is a serial adulterer, a misogynist who sexually assaults women, a racist who has further divided the country, a man who doesn't pay his bills and cons consumers through fraudulent businesses, an official who has funneled millions of taxpayer dollars into his own businesses, a person who rewards the rich and corporations while hurting the poor and disadvantaged, and has shown he is not averse to breaking promises and agreements he has made.

In short, Donald Trump is the most corrupt and immoral president in modern American history.

That's why I was amazed that white evangelicals supported him in such large numbers in the last election. None of these things come as a surprise, and anyone could know that by looking at his past history. This is the group that claims to have "family values", and want people to believe their values are superior to those of other Americans.

But they ignored those values by giving Trump the support of about 68% of their members in the 2016 election. And since then, that support has not declined -- but has grown to a record 75%.These people have abandoned their religious beliefs and values to support an immoral politician that promised to support their bigoted social agenda.

I don't ever want to hear the word "values" from a white evangelical again. They have no values.

The Sociopathy Of Evangelical Christians In The U.S.

(Cartoon image is by David Horsey in the Los Angeles Times.)

American evangelicals seem to have decided that political power is more important than religious principles. They have sacrificed their beliefs in the hope of gaining to power to discriminate against others and pass laws to force their religion on others. Here is how Tim Rymel describes this phenomenon:

Since Evangelical Christianity began infiltrating politics, officially in the late 1970s, there has been a disturbing trend to limit or remove rights from those who don’t meet the conservative idea of an American. Many of these initiatives come in the form of “religious freedom” laws, which empower discrimination, while other legislation targets immigrants who believe differently. The result has been a sharp division in American culture, and the redefinition of Christian theology.

Evangelical speaker, author, and university professor, Tony Campolo, said Christianity was redefined in the mid-70s by positions of “pro-life” and opposing gay marriage. “Suddenly theology fell to the background,” he said. And somewhere in the middle of all the change, Evangelical Christianity crossed the line of faith and belief to hatred and abuse. Those who cruelly implement the actions of their faith are oblivious to the destruction they cause to their religion, or the people their beliefs impact. Is it fair to call it sociopathic?

Psychology Today listed sixteen characteristics of sociopathic behaviors, which include: Untruthfulness and insincerity, superficial charm and good intelligence, lack of remorse or shame, poor judgment and failure to learn by experience, pathologic egocentricity and incapacity for love, unresponsiveness in general interpersonal relations, specific loss of insight, and general poverty in major affective reactions (in other words, appropriate emotional responses).

We see examples of these kinds of behaviors in church leaders and followers. Franklin Graham, for example, stated that immigration was “not a Bible issue.” His stand fits well with his conservative politics and vocal support of Donald Trump, but his callousness toward immigrants and those seeking asylum in the United States goes against everything he says he believes (Lev. 19:33-34, Mark 12:30-31). Yet, Graham doesn’t see one bit of irony between his political stance and his religious belief. Nor does he seem to notice the horrific casualties in war-torn countries these immigrants are desperately trying to flee.

Pastor Roger Jimenez of Verity Baptist Church in Sacramento said after the Orlando, Florida terrorist attack on a gay nightclub, “The tragedy is that more of them didn’t die. The tragedy is — I’m kind of upset that he didn’t finish the job!” This “minister of God” showed no compassion for the families of the men and women who died. He appeared incapable of laying aside his religious beliefs for even a moment of shared human connection to a tragic event.

And recently, Kim Higginbotham, a minister’s wife and teacher with a master’s degree in special education, according to her website, wrote a public blog called “Giving Your Child to the Devil.” She claimed, “Being a disciple of Jesus demands our relationship to him be greater than our relationship to our own family, even our own children.” She listed Matthew 10:37 as justification, which says, “Anyone who loves their father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; anyone who loves their son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”

In a self-righteous, self-aggrandizing, martyr’s rant, she claims her son turned his back on God, and she was left with no other option but to abandon him. It turns out her son is gay and – it turns out – the day the diatribe was posted was his wedding day. Sharon Hambrick, a Christian writer, posted a wonderful response to this mom.

But mostly, rather than calling these people out for sociopathic behavior fellow Christians agree. Many of the comments on Higginbotham’s website say, “So sorry for your loss,” or, “Praying for you and your son.”

It’s common for us to avoid cognitive dissonance, when our beliefs dictate one thing, but our experiences show us something else is true. We call this living in denial, and we all do it on one level or another. But when we choose our “truth” while coldly watching a fellow human being suffer, we’ve crossed a line of mental health.

The 2016 election demonstrated an especially high level of insincerity, shamelessness, poor judgment and pathological egocentricity among Christian evangelicals. James Dobson, who once said of Bill Clinton, “Character does matter. You can’t run a family, let alone a country without it. How foolish to believe that a person who lacks honesty and moral integrity is qualified to lead a nation and the world,” and then said of Donald Trump, “I’m not under any illusions that he is an outstanding moral example. It’s a cliché but true: We are electing a commander-in-chief, not a theologian-in-chief.”

The evangelical Christian message is loud and clear. They care for no one but themselves. Their devotion is to the version of Christianity they have created, which calls for ruthless abandonment of immigrants, women, children – even their own – and anyone else who doesn’t fall inline with their message. Social justice, which is mentioned in Bible verses over two thousand times, has been replaced with hardline political ideology. Principle over people. Indifference over involvement. Judgment over generosity.

Every generation redefines what it means to be, or belong to a religious group. Religious ideologies, interpretations, and doctrines are fluid. But whatever it is, or whatever it becomes, is made by the people who belong to the religion and what they collectively decide to make it.