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Replies to post #458709 on Tornado Alley (PROG)
God had to have someone willing to go into the den of vipers. Call out the fake news for their
tongues as sharp as a serpent’s. The poison of vipers is on their lips. So God made Trump.
God said, “I will need someone who will be strong and courageous. Who will not be afraid or terrified of wolves when they attack. A man who cares for the flock. A shepherd to mankind who won’t ever leave or forsake them. I need the most diligent worker to follow the path and remain strong in faith. And know the belief in God and country.”
an organized collective of video producers who call themselves “Trump’s Online War Machine.” The group’s leader, Brenden Dilley, characterizes himself as Christian and a man of faith but says he has never read the Bible and does not attend church. He says that Mr. Trump has “God-tier genetics” and, in response to the outcry over the “God Made Trump” video, Dilley posted a meme depicting Mr. Trump as Moses parting the Red Sea.
Some of Trump’s Christian followers do appear to have grown to see him as a kind of religious figure. He is a savior. I think it began with the sense that he was uniquely committed to saving them from their foes (liberals, Democrats, elites, seculars, illegal immigrants, etc.) and saving America from all that threatens it.
he is sometimes also viewed as an anointed leader sent by God. “Anointed” here means set apart and especially equipped by God for a holy task. Sometimes the most unlikely people got anointed by God in the Bible. So Trump’s unlikeliness for this role is actually evidence in favor.
The prosecutions underway against Trump have been easily interpretable as signs of persecution, which can then connect to the suffering Jesus theme in Christianity. Trump has been able to leverage that with lines like, “They’re not persecuting me. They’re persecuting you.” The idea that he is unjustly suffering and, in so doing, vicariously absorbing the suffering that his followers would be enduring is a powerful way for Trump to be identified with Jesus.
Jesus was arrested and murdered by the Roman government. There have been many people throughout history that have been arrested and persecuted by radical, corrupt governments, and it’s beginning today in New York City, and I just can’t believe it’s happening, but I’ll always support him. He’s done nothing wrong.
is Trump himself. I accept as given that he entered politics as the amoral, worldly, narcissistic New York businessman that he appeared to be. Like all G.O.P. politicians, he knew he would have to win over the conservative Christian voting bloc so central to the party.
If people wanted to make him out to be savior, anointed one and agent of God, he would not object. It enhanced their attention and loyalty and his power over and in this group. Lacking any inner spiritual or moral compass that would seek to deflect overinflated or even idolatrous claims about himself, he instead reposted their artwork and videos and so on. Anyone truly serious about the Christian faith would deflect claims to being a savior or anointed one, but he did not have such brakes operating. I do not suppose that he actually believed himself to be any of these things, but others did, and it helped him, and it fed his ego, so why stand in the way?
there are evangelicals of the charismatic and Pentecostal variety — the so-called New Apostolic Reformation or Independent Network Charismatics — who believe that Donald Trump is an agent of God to rescue the United States from the atheistic, even demonic, secularists and progressives who want to destroy the country by advancing abortion, gay marriage, wokeness, transgenderism, etc.
is rooted in prophecy. The prophets speak directly to God and receive direct messages from him about politics. They think that politics is a form of spiritual warfare and believe that God is using Donald Trump to help wage this war. (God can even use sinners to accomplish his will — there are a lot of biblical examples of this, they say.)
Trump has given us adequate evidence that he has little religious sensibility or theological acuity. He has scant knowledge of the Bible, he has said that he has never sought forgiveness for his sins, and he has no substantive connection to a church or denomination. He’s not only one of the least religious but also likely one of the most theologically ignorant presidents the country has ever had.
Cyrus is the model of an ungodly king who nonetheless frees a group of Jews who are held captive in Babylon. It took white evangelicals themselves a while to settle on an explanation for their support, but this characterization of Trump was solidified in a 2018 film that came out just before the 2018 midterms entitled “The Trump Prophecy,” which portrayed Trump as the only leader who could save America from certain cultural collapse.
another salient trait of populist politics is the willingness to ignore democratic civility. We constructed a “rough politics” score from three A.N.E.S. items: whether protesters deserve what they get if they are hurt in demonstrating, whether the country would be better off if it got rid of rotten apples and whether people are “too sensitive” about political discourse. Here the usual pattern recurs: Evangelical affiliation, evangelical identity and biblical literalism predicts agreement with those assertions, while religious minorities, secular folks and progressives tend to demur.
evangelicals end up far above any other religious group, with about two-thirds falling into the populist category. White Catholics, mainline Protestants and Latter-day Saints have significant numbers in that group but far fewer than evangelicals and nowhere near a majority. The religiously unaffiliated and minority ethnoreligious groups have few populists — often very few — with Jews, agnostics/atheists, Black Protestants and members of world religions the most antipopulist.
is that white evangelicals have a transactional relationship with the president: As long as he nominates conservative jurists and makes appropriate gestures on abortion and sexual politics, they will support him.
White evangelicals share with Trump a multitude of attitudes, including his hostility toward immigrants, his Islamophobia, his racism and nativism, as well as his political style, with its nasty politics and assertion of strong, solitary leadership. Indeed, Trump’s candidacy may have “authorized” for the first time the widespread expression of such attitudes.
The pervasive populism of white evangelical laity not only helps explain their support for President Trump but suggests powerful barriers to influence by cosmopolitan internationalist evangelical elites, who want to turn the community in a different direction. As hostile responses to efforts of antipopulist evangelicals like Michael Gerson, Russell Moore, David Platt and many others indicate, there is currently a very limited market for such alternative perspectives among the rank and file. Indeed, the vocal populism of many of the conservative evangelicals filling President Trump’s religious advisory council is probably more representative of the community as a whole.
Nor does cosmopolitan or cooperative internationalism find much purchase among local evangelical clergy. Analysis of the 2017 Cooperative Clergy Survey shows that ministers from several evangelical denominations, especially the large Southern Baptist Convention and Assemblies of God, exhibit exactly the same populist traits seen here in white evangelical laity, but in more pronounced form: strong Islamophobia, Christian nationalism, extreme moral traditionalism, opposition to trade pacts, militaristic attitudes, resistance to political compromise and climate change denial, among others.
AI
