rooster et al, Nobody Likes Trump Except White Evangelicals
"Church of The Donald "Donald Trump’s Presidential Run Began in an Effort to Gain Stature" Never mind Fox. Trump’s most reliable media mouthpiece is now Christian TV. "
By Ed Kilgore April 19, 2018 6:02 pm
Trump-disparagers are common everywhere, other than in the pews of white conservative Evangelical churches.
- White evangelical support for Donald Trump has steadily increased over time. Notably, Trump’s favorability among white evangelicals never reached 50 percent during the 2016 primary season. By the early fall of 2016, however, his favorability among white evangelicals had jumped to 61 percent. By the inauguration it increased to 68 percent, and shortly after the inauguration in February 2017 it jumped again to 74 percent. Over the course of 2017, there were minor fluctuations, but Trump’s favorability among white evangelicals never dipped below 65 percent during this time.
Trump’s favorability ratio among white evangelicals now, says PRRI, is 75-22, as compared to 42-54 among the American population generally. And his popularity is just insanely high among men (81 percent) and the non-college-educated (78 percent) within the white Evangelical universe. -
[...] .. to end ..
Non-white-Evangelical America is a pretty big part of this great big country, and it’s a place where Donald Trump is really unpopular. Get used to that idea.
"Church of The Donald [...] By the time Trump arrived on the political scene, it almost didn’t matter that he wasn’t much of a Christian, or tended to mangle the names of the books of the Bible. This audience recognized him as a kindred spirit in everything but religion. His hair-sprayed reality-TV persona—to say nothing of the bluster and the heroic monologues—aren’t that far from the preaching style that has prospered on cable evangelism. His family’s pastor when he was a child wasn’t the minister of the local Presbyterian church, but celebrity success guru Norman Vincent Peale .. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/10/donald-trump-2016-norman-vincent-peale-213220 , who had a long-running radio show called “The Art of Living.” Trump ran his campaign events more like tent revivals than policy symposia. And his books and TV persona dovetailed surprisingly well with the “prosperity gospel” preaching that thrives on Christian TV, the relatively new American theology in which material wealth is seen not only as a reward for good behavior, but a kind of endorsement by God."
Could say Trump is the Joel Osteen of presidents today. A real-life Elmer Gantry.
Trumpology
POLITICO Illustration/Getty Images/iStock
The president always has believed he could will himself to success. But has he crossed the line between optimism and delusion?
By MICHAEL KRUSE
October 13, 2017
Donald Trump is a self-help apostle. He always has tried to create his own reality by saying what he wants to be true. Where many see failure, Trump sees only success, and expresses it out loud, again and again.
Trump and his father were Peale acolytes—the minister officiated at at the first of Donald Trump's weddings—and Peale’s overarching philosophy has been a lodestar for Trump over the course of his decades of triumphs as well as the crises and chaos. “Stamp indelibly on your mind a mental picture of yourself as succeeding,” Peale urged his millions of followers. “Hold this picture tenaciously. Never permit it to fade.” It was a mindset perfectly tailored for an ambitious builder determined to change the skyline of one of the globe’s great cities. Trump, who used this self-confidence to blow right past a series of seemingly fatal gaffes .. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/09/trump-biggest-fatal-gaffes-mistakes-offensive-214289 .. and controversies to win an election last fall that polls said he couldn’t and wouldn’t, in this respect has been a prize Peale pupil—arguably the most successful Peale disciple ever.
“I don’t even think it’s an argument,” Trump biographer Gwenda Blair told me recently. “It’s a fact.” The power of positive thinking? “He weaponized it.”
But now, in the political realm, where the space between spin and truth is parsed constantly—and with consequences—it is Trump’s very success that has opened him up to questions that simply didn’t matter as much when he was a television star, or opening golf courses, or licensing his last name to steaks, bottled water or far-flung condominium projects. Is Trump’s relentlessly optimistic insistence on his own version of reality an asset, a sign of admirable grit for a politician desperate to score some legislative victories? Or is it a sort of self-delusion that risks embarrassment, or worse, in the highest-stakes geopolitical arena?
Science, it turns out, has something to say about this.
[INSERT: Which, IF Trump is aware of science's concern about him, that could go in part to his dismissal of science. After all it is science attacking his own very, very, inner core. Science, in Trump's mind, could be actually putting Donald Trump at risk.]
Self-help is a multibillion-dollar business. Airport shelves groan under the weight of how-to and pick-me-up books churned out by writers who all are essentially Peale progeny. The industry is prevalent in American culture to the point that it has spawned its own sub-group of critics who dismiss it as silly at best and dangerous at worst. “If you are simple enough to buy a self-help book, you may be congenitally programmed to fail,” Tom Tiede wrote in 2001 in his own book, Self-Help Nation: The Long Overdue, Entirely Justified, Delightfully Hostile Guide to the Snake-Oil Peddlers Who Are Sapping Our Nation’s Soul. “Positive thinking” has garnered such social currency that it also has become a subject of academic inquiry. And though it certainly was not conceived with this in mind, the science of self-help—of happiness and well-being, of specific phenomena called “unrealistic optimism” and “positive illusions”—is now in some respects the study of the way Trump thinks and what it could mean for the country and beyond.
How can Trump say the things that he does?
In 1988, in a seminal paper within the subject area, psychologists from UCLA and Southern Methodist University wrote .. http://faculty.washington.edu/jdb/articles/Illusion%20and%20Well-Being.pdf .. that “considerable research evidence suggests that overly positive self-evaluations, exaggerated perceptions of control or mastery, and unrealistic optimism are characteristic of normal human thought.” They added that “positive illusions may be especially useful when an individual receives negative feedback or is otherwise threatened.” They warned, though, of inherent risks and limitations: “For example, a falsely positive sense of accomplishment may lead people to pursue careers and interests for which they are ill-suited.”
Two years ago, English researchers published an update. People with “unrealistic optimism,” they wrote .. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4323577/ , “believe that they are more virtuous, more talented and more compassionate than others, and less prone to error.” They “believe that they can control events that are not under their control.” They “believe that they are less likely to experience future negative outcomes.” They “have overly flattering conceptions of themselves that are also resistant to negative feedback.” Sometimes, they said, all of that can help people like this perform well. “In conditions of uncertainty and risk,” the researchers explained, “some instances of optimism lead people to make better decisions by helping avoid more costly mistakes and contribute to survival and flourishing.” Even so, it’s true only to a point. “Excessive optimism,” they concluded, “can become problematic and lead to poor strategic planning, disillusionment and disappointment, and risky behaviors.”
Where precisely the benefits of “unrealistic optimism” and “positive illusions” end and the drawbacks and dangers begin is nearly impossible to identify, researchers told me. There are just too many variables. A person’s web of characteristics. That person’s wider environment. The complexity of a situation. There’s almost no way to know for sure when a line is crossed between helpful self-assurance and disastrous self-delusion.
“If there is, I don’t know it,” said retired professor Neil Weinstein, who wrote .. http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167282082002 .. a paper in 1982 when he was at Rutgers University titled “Egocentrism as a Source of Unrealistic Optimism.”
“The world isn’t that predictable,” he said.
Donald Trump, after all, is the president.
***
He was born into a house that Norman Vincent Peale helped build.
Peale’s cheery, simple tips allowed Trump’s father to alleviate his anxieties and mitigate the effects of his innately awkward, dour disposition. Emboldened, Fred Trump banked hundreds of millions of dollars building single-family houses and then immense apartment buildings in New York’s outer boroughs. Peale appealed to the elder Trump, too, because both men embraced conservative, right-wing, us-versus-them politics—an important but often forgotten portion of Peale’s M.O.
A generation down, Peale appealed to Donald Trump because Trump idolized his father, and because what Fred Trump drilled into his most eager, most ambitious, most like-minded son—be a killer; be a king; be a winner, not a loser—is what made that son so receptive to the teachings of Peale. Born in 1946, Donald Trump’s childhood was spent in a house with white columns and nine bathrooms and a live-in maid and chauffeur in Jamaica Estates, Queens. Sometimes, when it rained .. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/meet-young-donald-trump-pioneer-self-promotion/ .. or snowed .. https://www.yahoo.com/news/killer-king-education-donald-trump-000000711.html , he did his paper route from the back of his father’s limousine.
Peale, known as “God’s salesman,” reached the peak of his influence in the heart of Trump’s childhood, preaching in the 1950s to millions of people on Sundays at Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan as well as through a syndicated newspaper column, radio and television shows, his Guideposts magazine and a spate of books that were self-help trailblazers—first and foremost, of course, The Power of Positive Thinking, his defining work and wild bestseller that came out in 1952. It offered chapters such as “Believe in Yourself,” “Expect the Best and Get It” and “I Don’t Believe in Defeat.” “Whenever a negative thought concerning your personal powers comes to mind, deliberately voice a positive thought,” he wrote .. https://goo.gl/3h5uU3 . “Actually,” Peale once said .. https://goo.gl/K873jY , “it is an affront to God when you have a low opinion of yourself.”
Peale was far from universally popular. One psychiatrist dubbed .. https://goo.gl/Qcnrux .. The Power of Positive Thinking “saccharine terrorism.” And during the 1952 presidential campaign, the Democratic nominee made his feelings plain. “Speaking as a Christian,” the brainy Adlai Stevenson said .. https://goo.gl/cnRZek .. at a Baptist convention in Texas, “I would like to say that I find the Apostle Paul appealing and the Apostle Peale appalling.” But Peale permanently altered the way many Americans worship. His was a precursor to the prosperity gospel espoused today by, say, the toothy Joel Osteen. “By repeatedly equating business acumen with piety, uncertainty with religious doubt, and personal and cultural failure with godlessness, Peale and his admirers helped to redefine religious Americans as socially superior winners,” Northwestern University English professor Christopher Lane wrote .. https://goo.gl/h6YBxg .. in his 2016 book, Surge of Piety: Norman Vincent Peale and the Remaking of American Religious Life.
Top: A 1988 soiree celebrating Peale’s 90th birthday, Donald Trump and wife Ivana Trump, pose for a photo with Dr. Norman V. Peale and wife Ruth Stafford Peale. Bottom left: Also at the party were Donald Trump's parents, Fred and Mary MacLeod Trump, seen here with Ivana. Bottom right: Trump and Peale. | Getty Images
What Peale peddled was “a certain positive, feel-good religiosity that demands nothing of you and rewards you with worldly riches and success,” said Princeton University historian Kevin Kruse, the author of One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America. “It’s a self-help gospel … the name-it-and-claim-it gospel.”
And for Donald Trump, the attraction to Peale did not diminish with time. Even as more traditional theologians derided Peale as more huckster than holy man and intellectuals mocked him as a lightweight, Trump in his 30s remained a staunch Peale adherent.
Peale, then nearly 80 years old, officiated Trump’s wedding in 1977. In 1983, shortly after the opening of Trump Tower, Trump credited Peale for instilling in him a can-do ethos. “The mind can overcome any obstacle,” he told .. http://www.nytimes.com/1983/08/07/business/the-empire-and-ego-of-donald-trump.html?pagewanted=all .. the New York Times. “I never think of the negative.” The feeling was mutual. In the Times, Peale called .. http://www.nytimes.com/1983/08/07/business/the-empire-and-ego-of-donald-trump.html?pagewanted=all .. Trump “kindly and courteous” and commented on “a profound streak of honesty and humility” he thought Trump possessed. Trump at the time was newly ascendant, and the influence of Peale coursed through his aspirations and interactions. “If you’re going to be thinking anyway,” he wrote in 1987 in The Art of the Deal, “you might as well think big.”
That year, Jack O’Donnell saw it firsthand. He started work for Trump as a marketing executive at one of his casinos in Atlantic City.
“This is the best place in the world to work, and I’m the best guy in the world to work for,” Trump told .. https://goo.gl/zi1e4d .. O’Donnell in their first meeting, according to O’Donnell’s 1991 book, Trumped! The onslaught of Peale-preached superlatives kept coming. “I’m America’s most successful businessman,” Trump said. “I’m a winner. I’ve always been a winner.”
O’Donnell, though, soon was worried about the pitfalls of such optimism. By 1988 .. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/03/1988-the-year-donald-lost-his-mind-213721 , a manic, temperamental Trump was overwhelmed, in O’Donnell’s estimation, by the world that he had created for himself. He had piled up accomplishments, acquisitions and debts. It was too much. “He was at the point where image superseded reality,” O’Donnell would write .. https://goo.gl/yJFsKK .. in his book. “In the same way that he believed a man could retain his hair by willing not to go bald, he thought he could redress the operational shortcoming of a multimillion-dollar company and make it successful by stating and restating that it was.”
It caught up with him.
The early 1990s were a low point .. http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/07/donald-trump-2016-convention-melania-trump-speech-dark-art-of-pr-214083 .. in Trump’s life. As his casinos careened toward corporate bankruptcy and he suffocated under billions of dollars of debt—not to mention the hyperpublic breakup of his marriage to the mother of his first three children—Trump’s credibility and viability as a businessman were in jeopardy. Drawing on Peale, Trump was unswayed, leaning extra-heavy on the principal tenet of the power of positive thinking—think it, say it, and say it and say it and say it, in an all-out effort to make it so. “It’s all going to work out,” he said .. https://goo.gl/2fcYVZ .. to a reporter from the Wall Street Journal. Trump, all but dead? “Hotter than ever,” he told .. https://goo.gl/5yJNxk .. New York magazine.
“I would have been looking for the nearest building to jump off of, and he just remained upbeat all of the time,” Steve Bollenbach .. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/business/stephen-bollenbach-dead.html , the lender-mandated financial fixer who helped Trump avoid personal bankruptcy and lasting business humiliation, once told .. https://goo.gl/ZFT8EU .. biographer Tim O’Brien. “I never suspected that he lost a moment’s sleep.”
Trump tapped into Peale, he would say. “I refused to give in to the negative circumstances,” he said .. https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brainstorm/200905/donald-trump-failure .. in a 2009 interview with Psychology Today that is littered with the particular language of Peale. “I never lost faith in myself. … Being tenacious is part of my personality. … Defeat is not in my vocabulary.” He mentioned Peale and his most famous book. He was, Trump said, “a firm believer in the power of being positive.”
Trump does not often share the spotlight, but it seems likely, based on his decades of testimonials, that he might give Peale at least some credit for the astonishing, highly improbable arc of his life. Trump’s current job is in some ways a confirmation of Peale’s core principles. He visualized. It actualized.
From a scientific perspective, though, Trump is an incomplete experiment. For decades, researchers have attempted to quantify the range of outcomes of positive thinking, looking for objective ways to correlate internal belief and external reality.
“There are really strong benefits in terms of undertaking activities that are difficult and for which the true odds would be daunting if you paid attention to them,” Jonathon Brown told me. He was the SMU psychologist who was one-half of the research team behind the 1988 paper .. http://faculty.washington.edu/jdb/articles/Illusion%20and%20Well-Being.pdf .. on “illusion” and “well-being.” He’s now at the University of Washington. He gave examples of starting a business or getting married. Other researchers I talked to brought up health outcomes. In situations of, for instance, dire cancer diagnoses, the prospect of survivability can get a boost from optimism that’s statistically unjustified.
“Positive thinking can motivate an individual,” Wellesley College psychology professor Julie Norem said. Also: “Other people at least initially often respond positively to it. If I present myself to you as somebody who’s upbeat and really confident … chances are pretty good that initially you’re going to believe me. You’re going to say, ‘Wow, that person’s really got it together. That person’s really going to go someplace.’ And that’s a huge advantage in life.”
Then there’s the but.
“For most people,” said Norem, who specializes in optimism, pessimism and personality psychology, “there’s a point at which, if that’s all they bring to the table, it breaks down.”
The question is where that point is for Trump. He is so clearly not most people. In the words of Mitch Horowitz: “He is a kind of Frankenstein monster of the philosophy” of positive thought.
“Trump,” said Horowitz, a self-help expert and the author of One Simple Idea: How the Lessons of Positive Thinking Can Transform Your Life, “seems to be an example of at least the short-term, destructive gains that you can attain through self-help, through self-assertion, and people’s willingness to believe what they think that they see.”
Short-term. Trump’s version of his own reality, some insist, ultimately will crash against something more real. “In the end, I think reality is like gravity. It exerts its own force,” said Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a consistent conservative critic .. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/26/opinion/sunday/trump-our-child-king.html .. of Trump. “The power of positive thinking can only carry you so far.”
He offered an example. “I could use the power of positive thinking and convince myself that I’m going to be the starting center for the Golden State Warriors,” Wehner said, “but it’s not going to happen.”
To carry this metaphor a small step forward, though, Trump is actually currently the starting center for the Golden State Warriors. (He’s definitely not Stephen Curry .. http://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/23/trump-steph-curry-white-house-invite-withdrawn-243048 .) Wehner granted that. “And his supporters,” he said, “probably think he’s scoring 25 points and a game and averaging 11 rebounds.”
This, though, is just it: Nobody, ever, has had more success convincing himself, and others, that he is a success even when he is not—and thus turning that stated sentiment into actual, tangible, considerable accomplishment. And if he could do that, it seems fair to ask whether gravity or accepted laws of politics apply to him at all. What, exactly, is “unrealistic” about Trump’s optimism? “It’s gotten him this far,” said Blair, the biographer. “He has a lot of reason to believe that something like the power of gravity doesn’t apply to him.”
The science here hits a ceiling. Researchers do their work in controlled settings to obtain empirical results. America under Trump, meanwhile, is far from a controlled setting. And if it’s difficult to determine the location of that line between self-assurance and self-delusion in the former, it’s impossible in the latter. Scientifically speaking, the Trump presidency is uncharted territory.
“The degree of positive thinking that we talk about in the paper bears no resemblance to what President Trump is exhibiting on a daily basis, which would be an extreme form of what we talked about,” said Brown from the University of Washington. “What we were really looking at was sort of … should you know what you are really like? Is a person best served by knowing what they are really like? And I think the answer to that is no. You’re better served believing you are a little bit better than you are—but not wildly …"
“There is a lot to like in the idea of power of positive thinking,” Ed Diener, one of the country’s leading researchers of happiness, told me, “but of course it must be grounded in a degree of realism.”
And where’s that dividing line?
The dividing line, Diener said, “is when the delusions become dysfunctional.”
And where is that?
“Where the distortions become strong enough that they make one act irrationally, impulsively,” he said.
“The biggest problem with the Norman Vincent Peale version of positive thinking,” said Wellesley’s Norem, “is that you can’t know when you’ve crossed the line—because if you’re accepting that as a philosophy, you’re already defining out of the picture any negative thoughts. And one of the ways in which Trump is so extreme is the extent to which he does that for himself. So he’s at the center of this positive world, and anything negative that impinges on it is evil, bad and forbidden.”
He won’t see the line if and when it arrives.
As for the rest of us?
“I mean, if we’re all blown up, in a nuclear war,” Norem said, “then that’s going to be a pretty clear line.”
Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer for Politico.
Faith and freedoms: why evangelicals profess unwavering love for Trump
"Church of The Donald "Donald Trump’s Presidential Run Began in an Effort to Gain Stature" "
The faithful have been ardent supporters who turn a blind eye to the president’s moral indiscretions in favor of agenda
Tom McCarthy @TeeMcSee
Sun 7 Jul 2019 16.00 AEST Last modified on Tue 9 Jul 2019 05.19 AEST
White evangelical America made up one of the most important voting blocs behind Trump in 2016. Photograph: Evan Vucci/Associated Press
When Donald Trump .. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/donaldtrump .. took the stage last month at a mega-conference for the Faith and Freedom Coalition, the country’s largest organization of evangelical Christians, he was granted an extraordinary welcome by the group’s chairman, Ralph Reed.
“We have had some great leaders,” Reed said, to cheers. “There has never been anyone who has defended us and fought for us, who we have loved more than Donald J Trump. We have seen his heart and he is everything he promised he would be, and more.”
For skeptics who see Trump as afflicting society’s most vulnerable – immigrants, refugees, the homeless, racial and religious minorities, single parents, struggling wage-earners – his popularity on the religious right is baffling, a seeming illustration of the hypocrisy at the core of America’s evangelical movement. A minority of evangelicals themselves express alarm .. https://thewayofimprovement.com/ .. at Trump’s appeal in their pews.
White evangelical America made up one of the most important voting blocs behind Trump in 2016, said Robert P Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) and author of The End of White Christian America .. https://www.prri.org/end-white-christian-america/ .
“They made up 26% of voters in the last presidential election and they voted 81% for Trump,” Jones said. “We’ve been tracking his favorability rating among evangelicals since before the election, and it has been remarkably steady.”
Donald Trump at the Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Washington DC, on 26 June. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
Evangelicals feel Trump has kept his covenant with them by nominating conservative judges to federal courts and to the supreme court; by tacitly supporting abortion bans; by supporting Christian universities and organizations that profess a moral objection to same-sex marriage or contraception; by supporting religious dispensations from anti-discrimination laws; by moving the US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and other measures.
Meanwhile, Trump has addressed a central concern for white evangelicals that they are losing influence as a group and that the sun is setting on the United States they dream of – a nation that is white and Christian in its majority and in its essence.
“They’ll look away from the moral indiscretion in order to get their political agenda in place… they want to reclaim, renew, restore what they believe was a Christian culture, a Christian America that has been lost,” said John Fea, a history professor at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, and the author of Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump .. https://www.amazon.com/Believe-Me-Evangelical-Donald-Trump/dp/0802876412 .
Trump’s perceived delivery on that dream overwhelms qualms that many religious voters might have about sexual assault allegations against Trump, or about his multiple marriages or worship of mammon, Fea said.
“They don’t see this at all as hypocrisy,” Fea said. “They believe that Trump is appointed by God for a moment such as this. They believe that God uses corrupt people – there are examples in the Bible of this, so they’ll call upon these verses.
“They truly believe that ‘God works in mysterious ways. He uses even someone like Donald Trump to accomplish His will.’”
But some evangelicals go further. They no longer even see such a conflict because they believe Trump is no longer a corrupt person, because he has had a kind of spiritual awakening since running for president.
-- Donald Trump has changed. I believe that with all my heart. He has changed Nancy Allen --
“Donald Trump has changed,” said retiree Nancy Allen, who attends a large Baptist church in North Carolina and wrote Electing the People’s President, Donald Trump .. https://tinyurl.com/yyu96jh7 . “I believe that with all my heart. He has changed. He hasn’t had any more affairs. Now he’s not perfect, but there’s no perfect person.
“We know that there has been a change in his heart, and he respects our beliefs and values. And I believe he has some of the same beliefs and values.”
Support among white evangelicals for Trump has shown extreme durability through the most controversial moments of his presidency, said Jones.
“I think that’s the remarkable thing, is that if there’s a controversy – whether it’s another person accusing him of sexual assault, whether it’s these heartbreaking images of kids at the border being separated from their parents and held in horrific conditions, whether it’s any of the other kinds of controversies that we’ve seen – none of them has shaken white evangelical support for the president.”
In the background is the question of just how strong a voting bloc white evangelicals will be next year. While they have declined in their share of the overall population from 23% in 2004 to 15% in 2018, said Jones, they have not declined in their share of the electorate because they are among the country’s most reliable voters.
“So even as they’re shrinking, they have maintained their importance at the ballot box, basically by turning out at higher and higher rates relative to other Americans,” Jones said.
In his speech to the Faith and Freedom crowd, Trump warned the faithful not to grow complacent.
When Christianity Today, an evangelical magazine long associated with the late evangelist Billy Graham, editorialized ?on Thursday in favor of Trump’s impeachment and removal from office, the reaction from Trump and his religious-right boosters was swift and harsh—and? is ongoing.
Trump lashed out in anger, taking to Twitter to denounce Christianity Today as a “far left magazine”—a ludicrous lie—and to fume that “No President has done more for the Evangelical community, and it’s not even close.”
Religious?-?right leaders were quick to reassure Trump of their loyalty and denounce Christianity Today. Franklin Graham declared that his late father “believed in Donald Trump” and voted for him. Ralph Reed mocked the magazine as “Christianity Yesterday.” The White House and its?boosters in the conservative ?evangelical ?community subsequently announced the January 3 launch of “Evangelicals for Trump.”
Reactions came from across the religious right, from fundamentalists like Jerry Falwell, Jr. to leaders of the dominionist apostles-and-prophets branch of charismatic Christianity that has embraced Trump as God’s anointed. Among those slamming the Christianity Today editorial and its author Mark Galli were New Apostolic Reformation leader Ché Ahn, ?Bill Johnson, senior leader of the charismatic Bethel Church in Redding, Calif., and prophetic author Lance Wallnau?, who published a video portraying? Christianity Today as a captive of progressive philanthropist George Soros, the target of authoritarians and right-wing leaders everywhere.
Nearly 200 conservative evangelical leaders, including Trump’s spiritual adviser and White House aide Paula White, signed an open letter slamming the editorial’s author, Christianity Today’s editor-in-chief Mark Galli.
The letter repeats Team Trump talking points on “the entirely-partisan, legally-dubious, and politically-motivated impeachment.” And it claims that the editorial “offensively questioned the spiritual integrity and Christian witness of tens-of-millions of believers who take seriously their civic and moral obligations.”
Oh, please. Religious-right leaders wrote the book (many of them, in fact) on questioning and denouncing the spiritual integrity and religious beliefs of their opponents. They claim that Trump was anointed and put into office by God and that his opponents therefore are demonic agents of Satan fighting against God himself. (Earlier this month, signatory and Trump adviser Pastor Robert Jeffress mocked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi‘s assertion of her Catholic faith during an exchange with a reporter.)
On Sunday, Christianity Today published a response to critics of Galli’s editorial, refuting the? claims? about the magazine as a repository of leftism made by Trump and his religious-right allies? and arguing that “the alliance of American evangelicalism with this president has wrought enormous damage to Christian witness?” and harmed perceptions of the “Bride of Christ,” as religious followers sometimes refer to the broader Christian church.
--- It has alienated many of our children and grandchildren. It has harmed African American, Hispanic American, and Asian American brothers and sisters. And it has undercut the efforts of countless missionaries who labor in the far fields of the Lord. While the Trump administration may be well regarded in some countries, in many more the perception of wholesale evangelical support for the administration has made toxic the reputation of the Bride of Christ. ---
?In the Christianity Today ?response, the writer argues that the magazine is “happy to celebrate the positive things the administration has accomplished,” which in its view includes Trump’s?appointment of vast numbers of conservative judges. But, it adds:
--- The problem is that we as evangelicals are also associated with President Trump’s rampant immorality, greed, and corruption; his divisiveness and race-baiting; his cruelty and hostility to immigrants and refugees; and more. In other words, the problem is the wholeheartedness of the embrace. It is one thing to praise his accomplishments; it is another to excuse and deny his obvious misuses of power. ---
Excusing and denying Trump’s abuses of power? in fact represents just a tiny bit of the relentless sycophancy of his religious-right boosters, who declare his presidency miraculous, a result of divine intervention in the 2016 election to give America a chance to return to God and save itself from secularism.
There are a few things going on with the massive backlash against the Christianity Today article.
One is that religious-right leaders know that Trump thrives on ego-stroking and cannot abide criticism, and they want to stay in his good graces by making sure he knows that Christianity Today doesn’t speak for them. And they resent the Christianity Today editorial for asking hard questions about the cost of their unwavering support for Trump and Trumpism?, knowing that some in their congregations may receive the magazine in their monthly mail.
Perhaps more important, though, is that religious-right leaders want Trump to stay in office as long as possible because they desperately want to keep the unprecedented access to the levers of power .. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/white-evangelicals-trump-impeachment_n_5df950c6e4b08083dc5ae146 .. that Trump’s presidency gives them. They’re investing in efforts to guarantee a huge conservative evangelical turnout for Trump? in 2020. And they’re eager to clamp down hard on anything that might encourage independent-minded Christians inclined to be appalled at Trump’s immigration cruelties or climate recklessness to believe that voting against Trump in 2020 is a spiritually viable option.
The mutually beneficial relationship between Trump and the religious right is grounded in a deal Trump offered at a meeting with hundreds of religious-right leaders shortly after securing the Republican nomination: If they helped put him in the White House, he’d give them the Supreme Court of their dreams and make them more politically powerful by doing away with restrictions on overt politicking by churches.
Religious-right leaders took the deal. They told Christians who were unenthusiastic about voting for the morally bankrupt Trump that it was their duty to do so because he had promised a Supreme Court that would overturn Roe v?. Wade. They told Christian voters that a Hillary Clinton presidency would mean the end of religious freedom and their ability to preach the gospel.
Religious-right groups spent millions to turn out conservative white evangelical voters for Trump. And they succeeded.
Trump has held up his end of the deal beyond? the wildest imaginings of these religious leaders. He has embraced Christian nationalists and welcomed a steady flow of religious-right leaders to the White House. He has not only?put two right-wing justices? on the Supreme Court?; he and the Republican Senate are filling the federal courts at a record pace with young far-right ideologues who will shape American law for decades to come. He has turned over federal agencies, like the Department of Health and Human Services, to religious-right activists who are using their power to make the religious right’s agenda the official policy of the? United States government. He has embraced the right-wing government in Israel, moved the embassy to Jerusalem, and reversed U.S. policy on the legality of settlements in the occupied territories—a move celebrated by religious-right activists who oppose any land-for-peace plan as contrary to God’s will.
In short, the religious right has gotten what it wanted from a Trump presidency, and it dearly wants more of it. And, like their “anointed” leader, they have little tolerance for dissenting opinions.
"Church of The Donald "Donald Trump’s Presidential Run Began in an Effort to Gain Stature""
Donald Trump made a promise to white evangelical Christians, whose support can seem mystifying to the outside observer.
By Elizabeth Dias Elizabeth Dias covers religion for The New York Times.
Photographs and Video by Jenn Ackerman and Tim Gruber
SIOUX CENTER, Iowa — They walked to the sanctuary in the frozen silence before dawn, footsteps crunching over the snow. Soon, hundreds joined in line. It was January 2016, and the unlikely Republican front-runner, Donald J. Trump, had come to town.
He was the boastful, thrice-married, foul-mouthed star of “The Apprentice.” They were one of the most conservative Christian communities in the nation, with 19 churches in a town of about 7,500 people.
Many were skeptical, and came to witness the spectacle for themselves. A handful stood in silent protest. But when the doors opened and the pews filled, Mr. Trump’s fans welcomed him by chanting his name. A man waved a “Silent Majority Stands With Trump” sign. A woman pointed a lone pink fingernail up to the sky.
In his dark suit and red tie, Mr. Trump stood in front of a three-story-tall pipe organ and waved his arms in time with their shouts: Trump, Trump, Trump.
The 67-minute speech Mr. Trump gave that day at Dordt University, a Christian college in Sioux Center, would become infamous, instantly covered on cable news and to this day still invoked by his critics. But the line that gained notoriety — the promise that he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” and “wouldn’t lose any voters” — overshadowed another message that morning.
“I will tell you, Christianity is under tremendous siege, whether we want to talk about it or we don’t want to talk about it,” Mr. Trump said.
Christians make up the overwhelming majority of the country, he said. And then he slowed slightly to stress each next word: “And yet we don’t exert the power that we should have.”
If he were elected president, he promised, that would change. He raised a finger.
“Christianity will have power,” he said. “If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power, you don’t need anybody else. You’re going to have somebody representing you very, very well. Remember that.”
Nine days later, the Iowa caucuses kicked off the most polarizing road to the White House in memory. Mr. Trump largely lost the evangelicals of Sioux County that day: Only 11 percent of Republicans caucused for him. But when November came, they stood by him en masse: 81 percent of the county voted for him. And so did 81 percent of white evangelical voters nationwide.
Now, this group could be Mr. Trump’s best chance at re-election. The president’s response to the coronavirus pandemic has battered his political standing: He has trailed Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee, by nearly double digits for a month in national polls. Even among white evangelicals, his approval rating has dipped slightly. But 82 percent say they intend to vote for him, according to the Pew Research Center.
To the outside observer, the relationship between white evangelical Christians and Donald Trump can seem mystifying.
From the start it appeared an impossible contradiction. Evangelicals for years have defined themselves as the values voters, people who prized the Bible and sexual morality — and loving your neighbor as yourself — above all.
Donald Trump was the opposite. He bragged about assaulting women. He got divorced, twice. He built a career off gambling. He cozied up to bigots. He rarely went to church. He refused to ask for forgiveness.
It is a contradiction that has held for four years. They stood by him when he shut out Muslim refugees. When he separated children from their parents at the border. When he issued brash insults over social media. When he uttered falsehoods as if they were true. When he was impeached.
Theories, and rationalizations, abound:
That evangelical support was purely transactional.
That they saw him as their best chance in decades to end legalized abortion.
That the opportunity to nominate conservative justices to the Supreme Court was paramount.
That they hated Hillary Clinton, or felt torn to pick the lesser of two evils.
That they held their noses and voted, hoping he would advance their policy priorities and accomplish their goals.
But beneath all this, there is another explanation. One that is more raw and fundamental.
Evangelicals did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is. They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are. He is their protector, the bully who is on their side, the one who offered safety amid their fears that their country as they know it, and their place in it, is changing, and changing quickly. White straight married couples with children who go to church regularly are no longer the American mainstream. An entire way of life, one in which their values were dominant, could be headed for extinction. And Mr. Trump offered to restore them to power, as though they have not been in power all along.
“You are always only one generation away from losing Christianity,” said Micah Schouten, who was born and raised in Sioux Center, recalling something a former pastor used to say. “If you don’t teach it to your children it ends. It stops right there.”
Ultimately Mr. Trump recognized something, said Lisa Burg, a longtime resident of nearby Orange City. It is a reason she thinks people will still support him in November.
“The one group of people that people felt like they could dis and mock and put down had become the Christian. Just the middle-class, middle-American Christians,” Ms. Burg said. “That was the one group left that you could just totally put down and call deplorable. And he recognized that, You know what? Yeah, it’s OK that we have our set of values, too. I think people finally said, ‘Yes, we finally have somebody that’s willing to say we’re not bad, we need to have a voice too.’”
Explained Jason Mulder, who runs a small design company in Sioux Center: “I feel like on the coasts, in some of the cities and stuff, they look down on us in rural America. You know, we are a bunch of hicks, and don’t know anything. They don’t understand us the same way we don’t understand them. So we don’t want them telling us how to live our lives.”
He added: “You joke that we don’t get it, well, you don’t get it either. We are not speaking the same language.”
The speech in Sioux Center symbolized why there has been so much confusion about evangelical support for Mr. Trump. From the beginning, the outside world focused on the comment about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. Those in the town, though, ultimately heard something else entirely. What mattered was not just what Mr. Trump said. It was where he said it. And to whom.
And so to understand the relationship, one has to go back to Jan. 23, 2016. One has to hear the speech at Dordt the way the evangelical community heard it.
The apocalyptic myth that helps explain evangelical support for Trump "Is this fascism? No. Could it become fascism? Yes" [...] “God’s used imperfect people all through history. King David wasn’t perfect. Saul wasn’t perfect. Solomon wasn’t perfect,” outgoing Energy Secretary Rick Perry said in an interview on “Fox & Friends” before going on to claim that he had given the president “a little one-pager on those Old Testament kings about a month ago. And I shared with him, I said, ‘Mr. President, I know there are people who say, you know, you are the chosen one,’ and I said, ‘You were.’” https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=157009731
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