There’s a very high cost to our politics for celebrating the Trump style, but what is most personally painful to me as a person of the Christian faith is the cost to the Christian witness. Nonchalantly jettisoning the ethic of Jesus in favor of a political leader who embraces the ethic of Thrasymachus and Nietzsche—might makes right, the strong should rule over the weak, justice has no intrinsic worth, moral values are socially constructed and subjective—is troubling enough.
But there is also the undeniable hypocrisy of people who once made moral character, and especially sexual fidelity, central to their political calculus and who are now embracing a man of boundless corruptions. Don’t forget: Trump was essentially named an unindicted co-conspirator (“Individual 1”) in a scheme to make hush-money payments to a porn star who alleged she’d had an affair with him while he was married to his third wife, who had just given birth to their son.
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….Evangelical Christians should acknowledge the profound damage that’s being done to their movement by its braided political relationship—its love affair, to bring us back to the words of Ralph Reed—with a president who is an ethical and moral wreck. Until that is undone—until followers of Jesus are once again willing to speak truth to power rather than act like court pastors—the crisis in American Christianity will only deepen, its public testimony only dim, its effort to be a healing agent in a broken world only weaken.
At this point, I can’t help but wonder whether that really matters to many of Donald Trump’s besotted evangelical supporters.
— Peter Wehner, The Atlantic, The Deepening Crisis in Evangelical Christianity, July 5, 2019
Maybe I’m unique in that I fail to see the conflict here, really……The ‘god’ of the Judeo-Christian bible has ALWAYS been a cruel, tyrannical dictator on the Might Makes Right, obey & worship me, or else program!
I agree. Christians are so used to rationalizing their god’s horrid behavior it is probably easy to apply the same process to a vile person.
At one time, Evangelicals — especially Baptists — believed in a strict separation of church and state. What’s changed today is that many Evangelicals no longer believe in the separation of church and state. Thus, the drive since the 70s to join church and started. Evangelical beliefs have always been extreme, but there was a time when they kept their nuttiness in the church house.? Those days are long gone. Drunk with political power, Evangelicals will not rest until a Christian theocracy is established in the United States. There is little difference between what Evangelical theocrats want and Muslims clamoring for the establishment of Sharia law. Fundamentalism is the problem, regardless of where it is found.
They love the kool-aid.
What Hugh D. Young said! Fundamentalist evangelical Christianity naturally leads to the Trump embrace.
God is a delusion and the words written around the delusion reveal a prick dictator shit of the first order….
Trump has helped sparked an ex-evangelical movement. He was the gasoline poured on many a deconversion fire including mine. I had doubts for years but guilt kept me in, however Orange Hitler helped wake me up and start thinking about what religion I had become part of.
I never liked fundie politics even while in, the Republican party always seemed selfish and hateful to the poor, but at least Trump helped free me from the fairy tales. Yahweh was no different from narcissists and sociopaths like him. I was in a religion of oppression that was all about dominance and control and I wanted no part of it. If you ever get a chance Bruce, read the book Ishamel by David Quinn. That book helped me a lot to understand the deep underpinnings of Christian malfeasance, and desires and links for power. I do think Trump and his brainwashed minions have shown the claims of morality as brought to us by Christianity to be fake.
I never liked the intertwining of religion and politics even from my childhood witnessing my grandmother boycotting this company or that company for the causes they supported (grandma’s activism got between me and my favorite cereal brands). Today I see former teachers, Sunday school teachers, and Christian classmates spewing the most vile, hateful, racist, uncompassionate statements that I never thought possible from those who profess to follow the live of Jesus. They lose all claim to being the purveyors of morality and the examples of a benevolent deity. Religious fundamentalism is an aggressive cancer that needs to be utterly annihilated
I deconverted long ago but if I had held on to just a shred of my former faith the embrace of this vile leader by evangelicals would have been the proverbial straw. Evangelicals have shown that they are as shallow and Machiavellian as any other group. Christianity cannot be proven to be true and in fact most of its beliefs can be easily disproven. The only argument left was that followers of Jesus were somehow supernaturally morally superior. That weak argument can now join the rest of these on the trash heap.