evang2 bak

<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">lost 1/30/19</font><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">tweet code fail</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">evang2918</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">7/17 age of trump, see main</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see prosperity, steward</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">NEW 419</font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/the-power-of-lies-inside-the-christian-rights-plan-to-remodel-the-us/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/the-power-of-lies-inside-the-christian-rights-plan-to-remodel-the-us/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">On April 3, USA Today published an array of stories under the banner, “</span><a href="https://www.usatoday.com/pages/interactives/asbestos-sharia-law-model-bills-lobbyists-special-interests-influence-state-laws/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Copy, Paste, Legislate</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">,” exploring the political impact of model bills on state-level legislation — more than 10,000 bills from 2010 to 2018 — based on a two-year joint investigation with the Arizona Republic and the&nbsp;</span><a href="https://publicintegrity.org/topics/state-politics/copy-paste-legislate/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Center for Public Integrity</a><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. The lead story headline said it all</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">: “<a href="https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/04/03/abortion-gun-laws-stand-your-ground-model-bills-conservatives-liberal-corporate-influence-lobbyists/3162173002/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">You elected them to write new laws. They’re letting corporations do it instead.</a>”</span></font></p><div class="p1_52" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">OK, it wasn’t quite all. While corporate influence was the strongest, figures revealed that conservative groups weren’t far behind: There were 4,301 bills from industry and 4,012 from conservative groups, far more than the 1,602 from liberal groups or the 248 classified as “other.” The hidden origins of these bills often hides their true intent. The most notorious such group, the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, for instance combines business interests with movement conservatives.

But within the fold of “conservative groups” there’s a whole other story to be told about the organizing of extremist religious conservatives, whose political mobilization, as&nbsp;<a href="https://www.salon.com/2018/04/01/donald-trump-defender-of-christian-america-its-not-as-ludicrous-as-it-sounds/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">I’ve noted in the past</a>, played a crucial role in electing Donald Trump. Indeed, just the day before “Copy, Past, Legislate” was published, the&nbsp;<a href="https://www.texasobserver.org/sb-17-license-to-discrimate-passes-senate-lgbtq/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Texas Senate passed SB-17</a>, a bill that would protect&nbsp;anti-LGBTQ discrimination by&nbsp;<i style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">all</i>&nbsp;licensed professionals who claim to act on a&nbsp;“sincerely held religious belief.”</font></p><div class="p3_52" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">“It’s time for Americans to wake up to the harsh reality that the religious right, fueled by their fear of loss of power from the changing demographics in our country and their support from the Trump administration, is emboldened and aggressively pursuing all means possible to maintain white Christian power in America,” Rachel Laser, the president of Americans United For Separation of Church and State, told Salon. “</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Project Blitz, for example, has already introduced over 50 bills in at least 23 states this year alone,” she added.</span></font></p><div class="p4_52" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One&nbsp;<a href="https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/2019/04/04/tennessee-copycat-bills-target-same-sex-adoption/3357287002/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">spin-off story</a>&nbsp;published in the Nashville Tennessean dealt specifically with an anti-LGTBQ adoption model bill. (Simultaneously,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/feature/nbc-out/anti-lgbtq-adoption-bills-snowballing-state-legislatures-rights-group-says-n991156" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">NBC reported</a>&nbsp;such bills were “’snowballing’ in state legislatures.”) The Tennessee bill came from Project Blitz, which was described as “a legislative effort&nbsp;with the stated aim to ‘bring back God to America.’”&nbsp;But as&nbsp;<a href="https://www.salon.com/2018/04/29/onward-christian-soldiers-right-wing-religious-nationalists-launch-dramatic-new-power-play/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Salon has reported</a>&nbsp;<a href="https://www.salon.com/2018/12/16/christian-nationalists-are-trying-to-seize-power-but-progressives-have-a-plan-to-fight-back/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">in the past</a>, Project Blitz is much more sinister than that.</font></p><div class="p5_52" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><div id="Connatix-MoAP" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Frederick Clarkson, senior research analyst at&nbsp;<a href="https://www.politicalresearch.org/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Political Research Associates</a>, was the first to discover its three-tier playbook, produced by a coalition of right-wing activists</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> he’d long been following, including T</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">exas Republican activist and pseudo-historian David Barton, whose book, “Jefferson Lies,” which tried to remake Thomas Jefferson as an evangelical hero, was&nbsp;<a href="https://mytnnews.com/blog/2012/08/10/thomas-nelson-drops-jefferson-lies-book-over-historical-errors/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">canceled by its publisher</a>&nbsp;under withering criticism from conservative and evangelical scholars (followup

...The authors of the Project Blitz playbook are savvy purveyors of <b>dominionism,</b>” Clarkson told Salon at the time. “They are in it for the long haul and try not to say things that sound too alarming.&nbsp;​But they live an immanent theocratic vision.” Not all their allies would go all the way with them, Clarkson told me, but the theocratic end they envision is chillingly akin to “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003JFJHTS/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?encoding=UTF8&btkr=1" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">The Handmaid’s Tale</a>” — reason enough to warrant far more attention than they’ve gotten so far.</span></font></p><div class="p7_52" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The first tier of Project Blitz aims at importing the Christian nationalist worldview into public schools and other aspects of the public sphere,</b> the<b> second tier aims at making government increasingly a partner in “Christianizing” America, </b>and the t<b>hird tier contains three types of proposed laws that “protect” religious beliefs and practices specifically intended to benefit bigotry.</b></font></p><div class="p8_52" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Although category three is divided in three parts, you could also see it as having two main underlying intentions,” Clarkson explained. “First to denigrate the LGBTQ community, and second to defend and advance the right to discriminate. This is one way that the agenda of theocratic dominionism is reframed as protecting the right of theocrats to discriminate against those deemed second-class, at best. As the late theocratic theologian R.J. Rushdoony said, ‘Only the right have rights.'”</font></p><div class="p9_52" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The broader findings revealed in “Copy, Paste, Legislate” help to expand our understanding by highlighting three significant patterns shared in various ways with Project Blitz, which are used to advance their theocratic agenda, often hiding it in plain sight:</font></p><div class="p10_52" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style=""><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">1) Misleading Language That Inverts Common Sense&nbsp;</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Project Blitz does this repeatedly with the most fundamental terms: “religious </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">freedom,</span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">” “First Amendment,” and so on. In doing so, it mirrors what corporations and insurance companies did with “transparency” in the “Asbestos Transparency Act,” switching the roles of victims and perpetrators, casting themselves as “victims&nbsp;of litigation filed by people harmed by asbestos,” and requiring mesothelioma victims to seek money from an asbestos trust — a lengthy process many won’t live long enough to benefit from. &nbsp;How’s that for “transparency”?</span></font></p><div class="p11_52" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">2) Goalpost Moving</b>&nbsp;The entire Project Blitz concept is premised on moving the goalposts. It’s built into the very structure of its three-tiered playbook, as well as the logic of the supporting arguments. A similar strategy was involved in promoting vouchers in Arizona, beginning with a voucher for students with disabilities, then following up with bill after bill offering vouchers to more and more students, eventually all of them, with no guarantee protecting the first group of recipients from getting lost in the process.</font></p></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/american-evangelicalism-has-varieties-and-these-are-the-ones-you-should-be-worried-about/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/01/american-evangelicalism-has-varieties-and-these-are-the-ones-you-should-be-worried-about/</font></a></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A new report from the&nbsp;<a href="https://crcc.usc.edu/report/the-varieties-of-american-evangelicalism/" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Center for Religion and Civil Culture</a>&nbsp;at the University of Southern California revealed that evangelical Christians can be divided into five different sects.</font></p><div class="p1_13" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The Varieties of American Evangelicalism,” detailed the ways in which the community has managed to divide, thanks in part, to President Donald Trump,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.christianpost.com/news/5-types-of-american-evangelicals-new-report-contributes-to-what-is-evangelicalism-debate.html" target="blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;"><em style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Christian Post</em>cited</a>.</font></p><div class="advertisement " style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 10px 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="teadsNative" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The five groups are described as Trump-vangelicals, Neo-fundamentalist evangelicals, iVangelicals, Kingdom Christians, and Peace and Justice evangelicals.</font></p><div class="p3_13" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Trump-vangelicals</strong>&nbsp;are exactly what many think of when they picture political evangelical Christians.&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Post</em>&nbsp;described them as a kind of “Christian nationalist” serving as Trump’s base. They’re primarily white, with only a few Latino or black pastors. “They value access to political power and many believe God chose and blessed Trump in order to ‘make American great again.'”</font></p><div class="p4_13" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Neo-fundamentalists</strong>&nbsp;can also be folded into the Trump-loving group of evangelicals, the study concluded. The difference is that they still maintain some semblance of their Christian values and distance themselves from the president’s “moral failings.” They focus on understanding their theology and being more personally moral.</font></p><div class="p5_13" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">iVangelicals</strong>&nbsp;sound exactly like the name. The megachurch movement helped spur them on and they aren’t as politically active as the other groups. They tend to be conservative, but they focus more on being non-partisan. Pastors like Joel Osteen and T.D. Jakes are good examples of iVangelicals ministering to mostly white suburbanites.</font></p><div class="p6_13" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" style="" face="Times New Roman"><br style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /></font><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Kingdom Christians&nbsp;</strong>don’t generally consider themselves to be evangelicals but they hold similar beliefs, the report concluded. They’re the group that tends to have smaller churches in urban areas or rented spaces. They focus on their community and helping those in poverty and fighting for social justice issues.</font></p><div class="p7_13" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Peace and justice evangelicals</strong>&nbsp;seem similar to Kingdom Christians but they are the lefties of the evangelical community. The report described them as having origins in the 1973 “<a href="https://sojo.net/about-us/news/continuing-journey-evangelicals-reaffirm-1973-chicago-declaration-evangelical-social" target="_blank" rel="noopener" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Chicago Declaration of Social Concern</a>,” which concluded Christianity should return to the gospel of Jesus Christ and focus less on the prosperity gospel.</font></p><div class="p8_13" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“They side with, and care about, the same issues most liberals care about — war, poverty, racism, immigration — but some are pro-life on abortion (though they tend to not emphasize making abortion illegal),”&nbsp;<em style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">The Post</em>&nbsp;described. This is the branch leaders like Rev. William Barber and Jim Wallis hail from.</font></p><div class="p9_13" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The group descriptions reveal those that have strayed more from the foundation of Christianity.</font></p><div class="p10_13" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“First, each type shares a basic agreement on evangelical theology,” the USC report said. “Second, they each understand themselves as existing within the larger tradition of American evangelicalism, whether or not they refer to themselves, their churches and other organizations as ‘evangelical.’ And third, their theology motivates how they act in the world, including appropriate social and political actions, and attitudes toward people who do not share their religious commitments.”</font></p><div class="p11_13" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Post explained that classifying the groups proved difficult for historians and social scientists, but one major sect stood out as the group overwhelmingly flocked to Trump in 2016. A full 81 percent of those who self-identify as white evangelicals who voted supported the president.</font></p><div class="p12_13" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Evangelicals were generally classified by their dedication to The Bible and their baptismal status as “born again” with a commitment to the belief of Jesus Christ as their savior. For some groups, Trump seems to have taken over that role.</font></p><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/african-american-preachers-are-fed-far-right-white-evangelicals-and-they-have-every-reason-be</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the Donald Trump era, far-right white evangelicals have been jumping for joy; as they see it, they now have a president who is on their side. Trump, despite allegations that he had extramarital affairs with an adult film star (Stormy Daniels) and a former Playboy model (Karen McDougal) and paid both of them hush money to keep quiet, continues to be on very friendly terms with James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Franklin Graham and other theocrats who insist that he is fighting for Christianity. But listening to black talk radio stations in the U.S., one encounters a much more negative view of Trump’s presidency—and many African-American preachers are absolutely fed up.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump is not popular in the African-American community, and that includes black ministers. The Rev. Al Sharpton, who hosts “Politics Nation” on MSNBC as well as the syndicated radio program “Keeping It Real,” is perhaps Trump’s most visible critic in the black church. Yet there are many other African-American preachers who have nothing good to say about Trump, and for them, liberal/progressive politics and Christianity go hand in hand.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When the Rev. Raphael G. Warnock spoke at Atlanta’s historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in January to celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday, he originally planned to avoid Trump-bashing during his sermon. But when Trump described El Salvador, Haiti and some African nations as “shithole countries,” Warnock felt he had no choice but to speak out—and he denounced Trump as “a willfully ignorant, racist, xenophobic, narcissistic con man.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Since taking office, President Trump and his administration have strongly championed religious liberty, but only of a particular kind. At this week’s White House dinner for evangelical leaders, Trump emphasized that the U.S. is a “nation of believers” and promised to protect religious liberty.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump’s proposed policies reflect the political goals of conservative evangelicals.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At a summit last month, Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a new “Religious Liberty Task Force” in the Justice Department to protect “people of faith” from “unjust discrimination” in all areas of life. Despite Sessions’ inclusive reference to “people of faith,” what was noteworthy was the presence of conservative Christians like Jack Phillips, the baker in the Masterpiece Cakeshop, who spoke at the summit.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Many critics have observed that demands for religious liberty do not extend to all religions, which prevents fair treatment. Others have noted that greater protections might harm women and LGBT Americans.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I recognize the merits of these critiques. However, largely absent from them is an equally powerful argument made over a century ago. Back then, some evangelical Christians argued that demands for government protection for Christianity signaled that their religion had failed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The decline of Protestant influence</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">My research shows the late 19th century was a bad time for American Protestants. Agnosticism and atheism became popular, especially among younger intellectuals. Rising numbers of non-Protestant immigrants brought greater religious diversity.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These changes caused Protestants to lose the privileges they had enjoyed in public life, such as their control over many of the nation’s academic institutions. In one notable example, the school board in Cincinnati, Ohio, prohibited Bible reading in public schools. Catholics had objected that schools used a Protestant translation of scripture and officials agreed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The evangelical Protestant amendment</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Fearing similar cases, devout Protestants turned to the federal government. They supported an amendment first proposed during the Civil War that would have placed the language of evangelical Protestantism in the Constitution.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The amendment sought to include references to God and Jesus in the Constitution. It also declared the Bible “the supreme rule for the conduct of nations.” This final point was at odds with Catholic teaching. It made clear that the amendment was intended to placate only Protestants.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Supporters of the amendment had friends in high places. William Strong, a justice on the Supreme Court, led a group advocating its passage.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Much like Jeff Sessions, Strong urged protection for Christianity in the public sphere. The future of the religion was at stake. The justice warned that the Constitution must be made “explicitly Christian.” Otherwise, Christianity – specifically evangelical Protestantism – would be “obliterated” from the nation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But other Protestants disagreed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The religious critic</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Among them was Washington Gladden. He was a minister who had grown up in a very devout family. Though he would become a leading religious liberal, Gladden was well within the mainstream of American Protestantism at the height of debates about the constitutional amendment.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the 1870s, Gladden had great influence as religious editor of the New York Independent, one of the most read U.S. periodicals of the day. The paper had strong religious credentials. It proclaimed that in all its coverage it was “bound to the evangelical faith by the firm belief of its editors.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The case against religious amendment</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That belief, however, did not include endorsing government support of Protestantism. In his editorials, Gladden railed against the proposed amendment. The state was “not called to the inculcation or confirmation of religious truth,” he wrote.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Gladden invoked religious liberty – the same rhetoric President Trump and members of his administration have used to reassure modern evangelicals – to demand no special protection be made. Citizens should expect “equal footing for their faith, no matter what it may be,” rather than particular privilege.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Most boldly, Gladden argued that a religion that needed protection from government was a religion that had no reason to exist. He wrote on his editorial page,</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“If our Christianity is of such a flimsy texture that nothing but a constitutional amendment will save it, the sooner it is obliterated the better for the land.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Simply put, he insisted, religious people had to make their own case for their values. If they could not, they certainly did not deserve greater support. This was a controversial argument in what was largely a Protestant country, but other Protestants amplified it. Other Christian leaders came to see support for the amendment as a sign of weak faith.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A lesson for the Trump era?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Despite the backing of powerful men like William Strong, the Christian amendment failed. The nation’s Protestant leaders never came together in support of it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While the religious critique was not the sole cause the amendment’s failure, Gladden’s line of argument was powerful. It shamed the amendment’s supporters by arguing that their demands were antithetical not only to American values but to Christian ones as well. Demands for government support only confirmed evangelical Christianity’s impotence.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">History suggests it is a rhetorical strategy that critics of the Trump administration’s religious liberty policies might do well to revisit.The Conversation</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">David Mislin, Assistant Professor of Intellectual Heritage, Temple University</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Donald Trump, First Lady Melania Trump,and Vice President Mike Pence will host a huge event honoring the contributions made by Evangelical Christians. One reporter from a far right wing Christian news organization is comparing it to a state dinner. It is being billed as a dinner "celebrating evangelical leadership."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">About 100 Evangelical Christians are expected to attend. Among them, a large number of Cabinet members, and other top Trump administration officials. The White House has not released a list of invited guests, nor any agenda.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Looking forward to celebrating with President Trump and the First Lady his unprecedented accomplishments in less than two years," Fox News pundit and right wing pastor Robert Jeffress tells David Brody at Pat Robertson's CBN News.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"President Trump is the most pro-life, pro-religious liberty, and pro-conservative judiciary president in history which is why evangelicals continue to support him enthusiastically," Jeffress, a top member of Trump's Evangelical advisory board, added.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Texas pastor notably has labeled the Mormon faith a "cult." Catholics he says were led astray by "Satan." He also says Islam is an "evil religion." And he has repeatedly attacked LGBT people, calling homosexuality dirty and linking it to disease, pedophilia, alcoholism, depression, and suicide.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">President Trump's Cabinet holds weekly Bible study meetings led by a pastor who was deemed "not biblically qualified for spiritual leadership" by his own congregation. Among its regular attendees are Vice President Mike Pence, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/fringe-christian-group-close-senate-chaplain-prays-destruction-military-freedom-organization</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;Tuesday of this week, a fundamentalist prayer group associated with U.S. Senate chaplain Barry Black published what is known as an imprecatory prayer. It began: “Father, we ask that You take down Mikey Weinstein and his FFRF [sic] group," an apparent reference to Weinstein's group, the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and the 22-page complain it recently filed against Air Force Brig. Gen. John Teichert, as Salon reported last weekend. The MRFF complaint alleges serious violations of Air Force regulations stemming from Teichert's online ministry, and was filed on behalf of 41 clients, 32 of whom identify as Christian.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To underscore the prayer’s apparent threat, it ineptly quoted Psalm 37:22: "For those who are blessed by Him shall inherit the earth, but those who are curses [sic] b [sic] Him shall be cut off." That's an approximate quotation from the King James Bible; in numerous other translations the word "destroyed" is used in place of "cut off."&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Weinstein has previously described such “imprecatory prayers" as "code words" used by the Christian far right to "troll for assassins," or at least to legitimize possible acts of violence. “We view this as a clear and present threat against me, my family and the foundation, and we take it very seriously,” Weinstein told Salon.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Weinstein's organization, which is not popular among fundamentalist members of the military, has received previous threats, he said. “But this one is inextricably intertwined with the U.S. Senate, and that is intolerable.” His lawyers are drafting letters to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and others, he says, demanding redress.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One MRFF staff member has resigned this week, Weinstein said, "because of pressure from his or her family over the threats that these individuals face, even in their own homes, for being connected with MRFF." And that was before the emergence of this potentially threatening prayer, he added.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What's the connection between that prayer asking God to "take down" Weinstein and the U.S. Senate? Capitol Hill Prayer Partners, the group that issued the prayer, "has served in on-site prayer under the full blessing of the Office of the Chaplain of the United States Senate" since its founding in 1994, according to the online biography of Sara Ballenger, its founder and president. Chris Rodda, the MRFF's director of research and author of "Liars for Jesus," a survey of religious-right fake history, confirmed that the group holds a semi-official status on Capitol Hill.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"We intend to have our legal counsel send a demand letter to the majority leader of the U.S. Senate, Mitch McConnell, demanding that they completely disengage with this fundamentalist Christian terrorist organization," Weinstein said. A similar letter will be sent to retired Navy Adm. Barry Black, the current Senate chaplain.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Weinstein says he plans to send a separate "demand letter" to Ballenger at the listed address of Capitol Hill Prayer Partners in Herndon, Virginia, demanding "that she cease and desist" and take down the prayer in question. "In addition, we intend to have a counsel reach out and file an official complaint with the U.S. Capitol Police," he said.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In an email to Salon, Rodda cited a report on the 2014 event to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Capitol Hill Prayer Partners as further evidence of the group's “close relationship with Chaplain Barry Black, in the form of both a personal note from Black to Ballenger and the fact that Black was a speaker at this Capitol Hill Prayer Partners event.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to Rodda, Ballenger has a lengthy history of associating with fringe religious positions and dubious figures, especially on the anti-Muslim far right. It's unclear whether Black, the Senate chaplain, is aware of this. Rodda found the report about Capitol Hill Prayer Partners' 20th-anniversary event, for instance, on the website of Koome Ministries, which was founded by a man named Kamal Saleem, who was keynote speaker at the event.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Saleem was one of a trio of "self-proclaimed former Muslim terrorists" who became celebrities on the Christian right, Rodda explained, but were later exposed as frauds. Saleem enthralled right-wing audiences with his implausible tales of working for Yasser Arafat, Moammar Gadhafi and Saddam Hussein before finding Jesus, but there's no evidence that any of them were true. He appears to have been an evangelical Christian for many years before outing himself as a supposed former terrorist.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">MRFF had pursued "these Islamophobic fraudsters since 2008, when they were hired to speak at the Air Force Academy,” Rodda wrote to Salon. In 2011, the "three ex-terrorists" became the focus of an investigation by CNN's Anderson Cooper. Rodda wrote about them again at that time in an article for the Huffington Post. Nothing about their stories made sense, but they were key players in a widespread propaganda campaign whose constituency was eager to believe them, so it took sustained effort to discredit them. (A big-picture account can be found in "Terrified: How Anti-Muslim Fringe Organizations Became Mainstream"; Salon author interview here.) And even three years after being exposed as a near-certain fraud, Saleem was CHPP’s keynote speaker.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The U.S. Senate should not be engaged with someone like this,” Weinstein said, “asking God to kill people and destroy them.”&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.c-span.org/video/?447883-1/american-politics-postwar-sunbelt</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">MAY 7, 2018</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">American Politics in the Postwar Sunbelt</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Sean Cunningham talked about his book, American Politics in the Postwar Sunbelt: Conservative Growth in a Battleground Region, in which he examines the emergence of the American Sunbelt as the center of conservative Republican power after World War II.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The AMERICAN SUN BELT LABELS THAT SCHOLARS AND HISTORIANS HAD CREATED OVER THE YEARS TO TRY TO UNDERSTAND THIS WORLD WAR II MERGER. SHORT ANSWER IS THAT IT'S THIS KIND OF MERGER OF THOSE REGIONS, PROBABLY THAT THE SUN BELT DOESN'T EXIST, IT'S AN IMAGINED CREATION TO TRY TO UNDERSTAND WHAT WE HAVE AS MOVEMENT OF WAVE OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH, THE EXCONFEDERATE SOUTH PAST THE WORLD WAR II PERIOD MOVING INTO MODERN INDUSTRIAL AGE AND CONNECTING IN SIMILAR WAYS IN SOUTHWEST AND DRAWING THAT PREVIOUSLY HADN'T EXISTED. YOU HAVE A WORLD KIND OF PLANTATION HERITAGE SOUTH AND A RUGGED FRONTIER RANCH LAND WILD AMERICAN WEST BUT AFTER WORLD WAR II, THOSE TWO SECTIONS OF THE COUNTRY BEGAN TO DEVELOPED ECONOMICALLY IN INTERESTING WAYS ALONG THE WAY WITH TREMENDOUS FEDERAL, YOU END UP WITH A CONNECTION OF MAJOR AMERICAN CITIES FROM SAN DIEGO, LOS ANGELES, SUBURBAN LOS ANGELES, PHOENIX, ALBUQUERQUE ALBUQUERQUE, DALLAS, HOUSTON, AUSTIN, SAN ANTONIO AND MOVING THROUGH SOUTH, YOUNGER CITIES LIKE TAMPA, ORLANDO, JACKSONVILLE AND CHARLOTTE AND A LOT OF PLACES IN BETWEEN WHERE THE PERSONALITY TO HAVE CITIES IS SUBURBAN. IT'S VERY COLLEGE EDUCATED, MIDDLE CLASS, SPRAWLING AND REALLY KIND OF TAKES THESE TWO REGIONS AND MORPHED THEM INTO SOMETHING THAT WE TRY TO UNDERSTAND AS SUN BELT. ONE OF THE THINGS AS A RESULT OF WORLD WAR II AND THE TECHNOLOGIES THAT ARE PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF WORLD WAR II ERA AND THEN VERY CRITICALLY NOT JUST WORLD WAR II BUT SEEMLESS TRANSITION FROM WORLD WAR II TO THE POTENTIAL FOR WORLD WAR III IN A COLD WAR WITH THE SOVIET UNION, IT HAD TYPICALLY BEEN TRADITION IN THE UNITED STATES TO GO TO WAR, MOBILIZE ARMED FORCES THAT ARE CAPABLE OF WINNING WINNING THE WAR AND TO DEMOBILIZE AND ATTEMPT TO MAINTAIN SOME SORT OF GLOBAL NEUTRALITY. COLD WAR IS A GAME CHANGER AND SO THE UNITED STATES IN PERCEIVING THE POTENTIAL THREATS OF ESPECIALLY A NUCLEAR WAR WITH THE SOVIET UNION AFTER WORLD WAR II IS THE GOVERNMENT NEEDS TO MAKE SURE THAT IT'S READY TO WAGE AND WIN THAT FIGHT AND SO IN NOT THE MOBILIZING THE 16 MILLION PEOPLE WHO ARE BROUGHT INTO THE SERVICE TO FIGHT WORLD WAR II AND THEN NOT REALLY DEMOBILIZING THAT AND FEELING THE NEED TO MAINTAIN A MUCH LARGER MILITARY PRESENCE THAT MEANS NEW DEFENSE BASES THAT ARE FEDERALLY FUNDED, IT MEANS NEW RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENTS SUCH AS MANHATTAN PROJECT THAT'S BASED IN LOS ALAMOS AND IN SOME PLACE TEXAS, AND THE WEAPON'S TECHNOLOGY, THE AEROSPACE ENGINEERING, THE EMPLOYMENT THAT'S NECESSARY TO STAFF THESE NEW TRAINING GROUNDS STRETCHING ALL THE WAY FROM TEXAS ACROSS THE SOUTH WESTERN DESERTS, MEXICO, ARIZONA, NAVAL BASES, SHIPBUILDING, AVIATION CONSTRUCTION IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA. ALL OF THESE JOBS THAT REQUIRE COLLEGE EDUCATION ESPECIALLY STEM, SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY, ENGINEERING, MATH, THIS IS RADICALLY TRANSFORMING THE LANDSCAPE OF WHAT THE SOUTH AND THE SOUTHWEST EXISTS TO PROVIDE THE AMERICAN PEOPLE BUT IT'S ALSO RADICALLY TRANSFORMING THE NEED FOR COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES AND RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES AND RELOCATING PEOPLE FROM OTHER PARTS OF THE COUNTRY INTO THE AMERICAN SUN BELT AND YOU SEE THIS IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH IN FLORIDA AND IN GEORGIA AND IN NORTH CAROLINA AND ALL THE WAY ACROSS THROUGH TEXAS, NEW MEXICO, ARIZONA, CALIFORNIA AND NEVADA ESPECIALLY YOU'RE GOING SEE A LOT OF WEAPON'S TESTING IN THE NEVADA DESERT, FOR INSTANCE, A LOT OF DEVELOPMENTS THAT IS, AGAIN, COLD WAR AND POST WORLD WAR II RELATED. SO AS THOSE STATES ARE GROWING ECONOMICALLY, THEY ARE GROWING DEMOGRAPHICALLY, THE POPULATION IS GROWING, NEW HOUSING CONSTRUCTION, THIS MEANS NEW HIGHWAY CONSTRUCTION, MOST OF WHICH IS FEDERALLY FUNDED. SO BILLIONING AND BILLIONS OF DOLLARS OF FEDERAL RESOURCES ARE BEING POURED INTO THE SOUTH AND SOUTHWEST TO CREATE THIS NEW DEVELOPMENT, DEFENSE ORIENTED SOCIETY THAT IS BOTH FIGHTING COMMUNISM ABROAD AND PURSUING FREE-MARKET DREAMS AT HOME AND IT CREATES THIS KIND OF IN THE AMERICAN SOUTHWEST THAT JUST REINFORCES A LOT OF IDEAS OF AMERICAN INGENUITY AND HARD WORK AND COMMITMENT TO FIGHTING. CONSERVATISM IN SUN BELT HAS BEEN LINGERING IN THE BACKGROUND AND AS I MENTION WITH THE CONCEPT OF A SUN BELT AT ALL IS THE FUSION OF THE SOUTH AND THE WEST AND THE SOUTHWEST IN SOME WAYS. IF YOU LOOK AT THE POLITICAL HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN SOUTH, CERTAINLY YOU CAN'T ESCAPE RACE, YOU CAN'T ESCAPE THE LEGACY OF SLAVERY, SUCCESSION, OF THE CIVIL WAR. SO YOU CERTAINLY HAVE LINGERING IN THE SOLIDLY CONSERVATIVE DEMOCRATIC SOUTH A SENSE OF HOSTILITY TOWARD WASHINGTON, D.C., A SENSE THAT STATE'S RIGHTS AND LOCAL CONTROL MOST OF THE TIME IS ADVANCED IN THE CAUSE OF RACIAL SEGREGATION BUT IT'S A USEFUL RHETORIC THAT CAN BE EMPLOYED IN A VARIETY OF DIFFERENT WAYS WHEN IT COMES TO LOW TAXES AND THE FREEDOM OF BUSINESSES TO PURSUE THEIR OWN INTERESTS AND OPPOSITION TO LABOR UNIONS AND RIGHT TO WORK LAWS THAT DEVELOP IN PLACES LIKE TEXAS IN THE EARLY 1940's AND BECOME NATIONAL AFTER 1947 OR OPTIONAL TO NATIONAL AFTER 1947. SO YOU HAVE THE ANTISTATISM THAT'S PREEXISTING IN THE SOUTH AND YOU ALSO HAVE THE THIS AMERICAN WEST OF THE FRONTIER AND AMERICAN ADVENTURE AND RUGGED INDIVIDUALISM IN THAT THE PIONEERING SPIRIT OF AMERICANS WILL PULL THEMSELVES UP BY BOOTSTRAPS AND MAKE THEMSELVES IN THE AMERICAN WEST AND WHEN SOMETHING IS NOT WORKING AT HOME, THEY CAN TAKE THEIR FAMILY AND GET AWAY FROM FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND MOVE IN THE WEST AND ESTABLISH A HOME FOR THEMSELVES AND EQUATE THIS WITH FREEDOM AND ALL GETS REINFORCED IN HOLLYWOOD AND THE IDEAS OF RUGGED INDIVIDUALISM AND FREEDOM AND THE ABILITY TO CONTROL YOUR OWN DESTINY. IN TERMS OF MAJOR MOMENTS FOR CONSERVATISM AND SPECIFICALLY REPUBLICAN CONSERVATISM. WE HAVE A LINGERING DEMOCRATIC CONSERVATISM IN THE SOUTH AND THAT'S SOMETHING THAT IN VARIOUS WAYS SUN BELT, SUN BELT POLITICIANS LIKE JIMMY CARTER AND BILL CLINTON WILL BE ABLE TO TAP TO AND DRAW BACK CONSTITUENCIES INTO THE DEMOCRATIC POLL OF THE 70's AND 80's AND 90's. IN TERMS OF MY JUROR AMENDMENTS WHERE WE SEE A DEVELOPING REPUBLICAN CONSERVATISM, CERTAINLY REAGAN'S ELECTION AS GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA, JOHN TOWER'S ELECTION, FAST-FORWARDING TO ELEMENTS THAT REALLY PUSHES THE DEVELOPMENT OF TRADITIONALIST CONSERVATISM THAT BLENDS TOGETHER WITH KIND OF ANTISTATE LIBERTARIANISM IS IN THE 1970's ADDED TO POLITICAL CULTURE IS AN EVANGELICAL THRUST, A RENEWAL OF FAMILY VALUES POLITICIZED AFTER ROW -- ROE VERSUS WADE WHICH IS A CASE THAT ORIGINATES OUT OF TEXAS AND THERE'S A CASE DOLE VERSUS BOLTON. AND SO THE SUPREME COURTS SANCTION OF ABORTION IN 1973 MIXED WITH DECISION ON SCHOOL PRAYER, ON TAX EXEMPT STATUS ON PRIVATE SCHOOLS WHICH HAVE DEVELOPED IN THE SUN BELT ESPECIALLY AFTER BROWN VERSUS ED I'D SAY THAT THE DEVELOPMENT IN THE 1970's OF A RELIGIOUS MOBILIZATION AND DEVELOPMENT OF WHAT JERRY WILL BE PART OF WITH THE MORAL MAJORITY AND CHRISTIAN RIGHT WHICH HISTORIANS HAVE WRITTEN ABOUT THROUGH '76 WHEN JIMMY CARTER OUT OF GEORGIA IS THE FIRST NATIONAL POLITICIAN TO REALLY EMBRACE THE LABEL OF BORN-AGAIN CHRISTIAN AND '76 BECOMES THE YEAR OF EVANGELICAL, ALL OF A SUDDEN IN '76, '77, '78, '79 AND '80 POLITICIANS ARE TRYING TO ATTRACT NEW DEMOGRAPHIC VOTE WHICH IS THE EVANGELICAL VOTE WHICH IS BRINGING IN ANTICOMMUNIST CATHOLICS OUT OF THE SOLIDLY DEMOCRATIC COLUMN INTO MORE A REAGAN DEMOCRAT BY 1980 AN OPPORTUNITY FOR THE REPUBLICAN PARTY TO REMAKE THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE BY USING EVANGELICALS WITH TRADITIONAL DEMOCRATIC VOTERS IN OTHER PARTS OF THE COUNTRY, URBAN CATHOLICS, DISAFFECTED UNION WORKERS WHO ARE STRUGGLING IN THE WORLD OF A POST INDUSTRIAL ECONOMY WHICH THE SUN BELT IS PLAYING A BIG PART OF BECAUSE OF THE LACK OF LABOR UNIONS IN MOST OF THE SUN BELT. ALL OF THESE THINGS, IT'S NOT SO MUCH ABOUT MAJOR MOMENTS. ALTHOUGH YOU CAN'T POINT TO A FEW, I MIGHT ADD BILL'S ELECTION IN 1978, FIRST REPUBLICAN TO WIN THE GOVERNOR SEAT IN TEXAS SINCE RECONSTRUCTION. THERE ARE THESE MOMENTS WHERE YOU CAN SEE CONSERVATIVE REPUBLICAN BREAKTHROUGHS, REAGAN'S ELECTION AS GOLDWATER CONSERVATIVE WINS LANDSLIDE ELECTION AFTER 16 YEARS AFTER GOLDWATER HAD BEEN ANILIATED. PERFECT STORM OF SOCIAL CONSERVATISM AND EVANGELICALISM AND RELIGIOUS MOBILIZATION AND THE IDEA THAT SCANDAL AND CORRUPTION AND WATERGATE AND ALL OF THESE THINGS WERE THE MESSAGE OF I TRUST MY GOVERNMENT AND MY GOVERNMENT IS COMPETENT AND MY GOVERNMENT IS NOT GOING WEIGH MY MONEY, GETS TRANSFORMED BY 1980, GOVERNMENT IS NOT THE SOLUTION TO YOUR PROBLEM, GOVERNMENT IS THE PROBLEM.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/here-are-5-far-right-pro-trump-evangelists-who-could-drive-gop-voter-turnout-2018</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here Are 5 Far-Right Pro-Trump Evangelists Who Could Drive GOP Voter Turnout in 2018</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Evangelical leaders will be urging their unquestioning followers to go out and vote for pro-Trump candidates.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Alex Henderson / AlterNet July 31, 2018, 12:39 PM GMT</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Whether Democrats retake the U.S. Senate and/or the U.S. House of Representatives in November will come down to one thing about all else: turnout. Opponents of President Donald Trump are motivated, but so are Trump supporters—and that includes far-right evangelists, who will be urging their unquestioning followers to go out and vote for pro-Trump candidates. Not all right-wingers are fans of the Christian Right; for example, Gary Johnson, former Republican governor of New Mexico and the Libertarian Party’s presidential candidate in 2012 and 2016, believes that the Christian Right has been terrible for the GOP brand and the conservative movement. But Trump, although hardly a religious scholar, has been more than happy to pander to the Christian Right—and he knows that fanatics like Tony Perkins and James Dobson could get numerous social conservatives to the polls in November, especially with the future of the U.S. Supreme Court hanging in the balance.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here are five pro-Trump Christian fundamentalists who could do a lot to drive evangelical voter turnout in 2018.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1. Tony Perkins&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In 2016, Tony Perkins—president of the Family Research Council—endorsed Sen. Ted Cruz for president and campaigned for him aggressively. But when Trump received the GOP’s presidential nomination, it didn’t take Perkins long to form a bond with the brash real estate developer and reality TV star. And Perkins remains one of Trump’s most ardent supporters despite allegations that he had extramarital affairs with a porn star (Stormy Daniels) and a Playboy model (Karen McDougal) and paid them hush money to keep quiet. As Perkins sees it, Trump deserves a “mulligan” because—as he told CNN’s Erin Burnett in an interview—he “has followed through on his promises to evangelicals.” And that includes nominating severe social conservatives of the Antonin Scalia/Clarence Thomas variety for the U.S. Supreme Court: first Neil Gorsuch, now Brett Kavanaugh. Perkins considers Trump the most pro-Christian president in recent memory, and he is hoping that Congress will have even more Trump-supporting theocrats after the midterms.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2. Franklin Graham&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Franklin Graham, 66-year-old son of the late Rev. Billy Graham, recently became the butt of jokes after issuing a stern warning to Christians and the media: support Trump or face the wrath of God. According to Graham, God Himself wanted Trump to become president—and Graham even quoted scripture to explain why it was ungodly and immoral to bring up Trump’s alleged trysts with a porn star and a Playboy model. But as much as Graham has been mocked and ridiculed for giving Trump a pass despite having lambasted President Bill Clinton for his affair with intern Monica Lewinsky in the 1990s, his followers take him seriously. And if Graham tells them to vote for a lot of pro-Trump Republicans in November, they will gladly obey.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3. James Dobson</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Like Graham, James Dobson (who founded Focus on the Family in 1977 and the Family Research Council in 1981) believes that God Himself wanted Trump to win the presidential election in 2016—and earlier this year, the 82-year-old theocrat urged Christians to fast and pray in order to provide a protective shield that will keep Trump from being impeached. “It seemed evident on Election Night that the Lord gave us victory,” Dobson declared. “So Lord, if that is true, we ask you to protect our president from anything that could hurt him.” According to Dobson, Trump is doing God’s work by opposing abortion and packing the U.S. Supreme Court with social conservatives—and as the midterms approach, he will be doing everything he can to help pro-Trump Republicans get elected.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4. Jerry Falwell, Jr.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the 1980s, the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, Sr.—the former segregationist who founded the Moral Majority and Liberty University—did a lot to make the Christian Right and the Republican Party inseparable. And just as Falwell (who died in 2007) campaigned aggressively for President Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984, his son Jerry Falwell, Jr. (now 56) has been an unwavering Trump supporter. Falwell hasn’t been swayed a bit by Trump’s alleged extramarital affairs; he has even banned anti-Trump evangelist Jonathan Martin from Liberty University altogether. And as the leader of one of the Christian Right’s most profitable empires, Falwell can be counted on to give pro-Trump Republicans a great deal of support this year.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">5. Jerry Boykin</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jerry Boykin, vice president of the Family Research Council, believes that God Himself made certain that Trump was elected in 2016. When Boykin appeared on evangelist Jim Bakker’s show in March, he described opposition to Trump as “diabolical” and asserted that “God’s imprint” was all over Trump’s presidential win. As Boykin sees it, Trump is doing God’s work—and he will no doubt be endorsing Republican candidates who can help the president get that work done.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Alex Henderson is a news writer at AlterNet and veteran political journalist. His work has also appeared in Salon, Raw Story, Truthdig, National Memo, Philadelphia Weekly, Democratic Underground, L.A. Weekly, MintPress News and many other publications.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/evangelical-christians-try-defend-their-support-sinner-trump-stunning-interviews-we-rationalize</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...Like many members of the church, Terry Drew said that abortion is front and center when it comes to support for Trump and that he is willing to look the other way because he believes Trump is anti-choice.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I hate it,” he explained. “My wife and I talk about it all the time. We rationalize the immoral things away. We don’t like it, but we look at the alternative, and think it could be worse than this.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The alternative, in their view was Hillary Clinton, who they described as “Of Satan.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“She hates me,” Drew confided . “She has contempt for people like me, and [First Baptist Pastor Clay Crum], and people who love God and believe in the Second Amendment. I think if she had her way it would be a dangerous country for the likes of me.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">You can read the rest of their comments here.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/here-are-5-craziest-christian-fundamentalist-sects-cults-or-movements-feel-0</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">5&nbsp; of the Craziest Christian Fundamentalist Sects, Cults or Movements That Feel Empowered in the Trump Era</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Extremist groups are coming out of the woodwork.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Alex Henderson / AlterNet July 19, 2018, 8:30 AM GMT</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Evangelist Frank Amedia, leader of POTUS Shield</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Photo Credit: The Jim Bakker Show</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">President Donald Trump—despite his alleged sexual activity with porn star Stormy Daniels, two divorces, lack of Biblical knowledge and a reputation for having a very foul mouth at times—has, ironically, become an icon of the Christian Right in the United States. His predecessor at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Barack Obama, actually has a long history of going to church and clearly possesses a greater knowledge of the Bible. Regardless, the Christian Right considers Obama an enemy and Trump a staunch ally—and with Trump in office, extremist groups are coming out of the woodwork more and more.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Here are some of the craziest far-right sects, organizations or Christian fundamentalist movements that are feeling empowered in the Trump era.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1. POTUS Shield</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Led by television evangelist Frank Amedia, POTUS Shield is a new organization of far-right Christian fundamentalists that describes itself as “warriors, worshippers and watchmen”—and the one they are watching out for, through prayer, is Trump (POTUS stands for “President of the United States). Amedia insists that before Trump’s inauguration, God paid him a visit in the middle of the night and asked him to help form a protective shield of prayer around Trump—who the group believes was sent by God to promote a Christian fundamentalist takeover of government. Others active in POTUS Shield include Jerry Boykin, executive vice president of the Family Research Council, and Lou Engle (known for his large anti-abortion, anti-gay and pro-Republican prayer rallies).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2. People of Praise</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">After Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from the U.S. Supreme Court, one of the people on Trump’s “short list” of possible nominees for a replacement was Amy Coney Barrett—a 46-year-old federal appellate judge who, the New York Times reported in 2017, was involved in a group called People of Praise (Brett Kavanaugh, not Barrett, eventually received Trump’s nomination). And given People of Praise’s beliefs, Barrett shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the High Court.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">People of Praise is a predominantly Catholic group, although it has some non-Catholic members and incorporates Pentecostal practices (speaking in tongues, for example). Considered a cult within mainstream Catholicism, People of Praise require members to swear an oath of loyalty to the group and teach that while women can have some leadership positions, they must ultimately submit to male authority. In the past, People of Praise used the terms “handmaid” and “handmaiden” to describe women—which is downright chilling if one is familiar with Margaret Atwood’s 1985 novel “The Handmaid’s Tale” or the 1990 film and 2017/2018 television that were based on the book.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3. Quiverfull</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Christian Right’s hatred of reproductive freedom goes way beyond its opposition to abortion; some fundamentalists are equally opposed to all forms of contraception. And this anti-contraception ideology is exemplified by the looney Quiverfull movement. Quiverfull is a not a sect or denomination per se, but a movement within fundamentalist Protestant Christianity—and those who embrace it could be anything from Pentecostal to Calvinist. Quiverfull ideology asserts that it is a sin for Christian couples to do anything that might prevent a pregnancy; therefore, birth control pills and IUDs for women or condoms and vasectomies for men are considered tools of the Devil. And according to Quiverfull, Christian wives must have as many babies as possible while remaining totally submissive to their husbands. Other Quiverfull rules: wives cannot have their own bank accounts or e-mail addresses without their husbands’ permission, and they must always be sexually available to their husbands whether they’re in the mood for sex or not.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4. Project Blitz</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Project Blitz is not a Christian fundamentalist church or sect, but rather, a coalition of Christian fundamentalist activists with a political agenda: to make sure that state legislatures are flooded with as many theocratic bills as possible. Working with Republicans who are sympathetic to their dominionist views—anti gay, anti-abortion, anti-contraception—Project Blitz believes that it is important for bills to be introduced regardless of how far they get. The more bills that are introduced, Project Blitz believes, the more likely they are to achieve some home runs eventually.&nbsp;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">5. WallBuilders&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In Texas, David Barton has been very active in both Republican politics and far-right fundamentalist Christianity. In addition to being a former vice chairman of the Texas Republican Party and serving as director of Keep the Promise PAC—a political action committee that supported Sen. Ted Cruz’ presidential campaign in 2016—Barton founded WallBuilders, which has taught through books and videos that the separation of church and state is not constitutional and that the government should be run according to strict Biblical law. And Barton has been active in the Providence Foundation, another group with dominionist views.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">pfaw</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Religious Right activist and right-wing commentator Star Parker appeared on the “Vocal Point” radio program today to discuss a recent column she wrote in which she declared that “Gay Pride Month has become a time for LGBTQ storm troopers to pursue political enemies. Not much different from the infamous Kristallnacht in Nazi Germany, when Nazi brown shirts took to the streets to smash windows of shops owned by Jews.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">During the interview, Parker absurdly claimed that the “B” in “LGBTQ” stands not for “bisexual” but rather for “bestiality.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“They keep pushing out this idea, LGBTQ,” she said. “We did the ‘L’ and the ‘G,’ they legalized marriage for themselves. We doing the ‘T’ now—the trans—and this is a big, big challenge in our society right now. They did the ‘Q’ where they’re changing all the textbooks, even as low as kindergarten, to reflect that you don’t know what you are, you’re questioning. But notice they skipped over the ‘B,’ and there are some that say this ‘B’ is going to bombard us with real vileness in our society if they get what they want because it’s not about bisexuality, it’s about bestiality.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When the host, Jerry Newcombe, asked Parker to clarify her comment, she insisted that since the LGBTQ movement is constantly changing the meaning of terms and pushing an increasingly radical agenda, “we’re not sure what they mean by ‘B.'”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“We do know that there is an agenda and we do know that there have been discussions about bestiality in their closed doors,” she said. “I’m just saying don’t be surprised if we find out that that ‘B’ is not what they said publicly—that we just love each other—that it may, in law, show up as something else.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">5/18 heartbeat bill 6 wks?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/heres-why-new-bbc-report-trumps-predatory-behavior-wont-sway-his-evangelical</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">no secret that President Trump is wildly unpopular in Europe, and a 30-minute BBC report that aired earlier this week as part of the “BBC Panorama” series is unlikely to improve his image overseas.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;Titled “Trump: Is the President a Sex Pest?,” the report contains anecdotes describing Trump’s creepy behavior around women in the 1980s and 1990s. One of the women interviewed, Barbara Pilling, alleged that when she met Trump at a party in New York City in the late 1980s and told him she was only 17, he responded, “Oh, great. So, you’re not too old and not too young. That’s just great.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pilling recalled, “I felt I was in the presence of a shark.'&nbsp; Another interviewee, Heather Braden, alleged that when she met Trump at a party in Miami in the 1990s that was attended by 50 female models and only four men, she “felt like a piece of meat in a market.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The BBC report is hardly the first time Trump has been described as disrespectful of women. Allegations of sexism and misogyny dogged him throughout his presidential campaign of 2016. But those allegations didn’t scare away far-right Christian fundamentalists two years ago when they came out in droves to vote for him, and the BBC report is most unlikely to bother them either. In the minds of the Christian Right, the prosperity gospel gives Trump a sort of diplomatic immunity regardless of allegations that he sexually harassed women in the past or had sex with adult film star Stormy Daniels.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Christianity is diverse and complex in the United States, which has its share of Christians who lean to the left economically—for example, African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church members who are civil rights activists or Sister Mary Scullion (a Catholic nun famous for her liberal/progressive activism and efforts on behalf of the poor and the homeless). Scullion is most certainly not a proponent of the right-wing prosperity gospel, which teaches that the rich are rich because God has blessed them and the poor are poor because God is punishing their immorality.&nbsp;&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Prosperity theology is common among white Pentecostal fundamentalists; Pastor Joel Osteen, for example, is a strong proponent. Although the Houston, Texas-based evangelical never officially endorsed his presidential campaign in 2016, Osteen described Trump as a “friend of our ministry” and “a good man.” And Osteen is hardly the only white evangelical who admires the president. Among the far-right white Christians he has courted, Trump hasn’t lost any popularity.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a May 2017 lecture, Kate Bowler—religious scholar and author of the 2013 book “Blessed: A History of the American Prosperity Gospel”—described Trump as the “first American president whose only religious impulses arise from the American prosperity gospel” and explained that “Trump is, in short, the prosperity gospel’s religious trifecta.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As liberal sex columnist Dan Savage—a blistering critic of Trump—has pointed out, the president is merely portraying a social issue and has hardly lived his life like one. But Trump, Savage noted, gets a pass from far-right white evangelicals because he’s willing to help them abuse the poor and people of color.Right-wing libertarians and right-wing evangelicals have very different views in some respects. While many libertarians combine extreme fiscal conservatism with socially liberal views on abortion, porn, marijuana and same-sex marriage (for example, 2016 Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson), the prosperity gospel combines extreme fiscal conservatism with a disdain for those things—although the ultra-rich are so adored in prosperity theology that Trump’s evangelical supporters are quite happy to overlook his sexual history. To prosperity theologists, Trump wouldn’t be so rich if he didn’t enjoy God’s stamp of approval.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While Trump’s overall approval ratings in the U.S. are lower than President Barack Obama’s were—Trump enjoyed a 43% approval among the overall U.S. population in a Gallup poll in May—they are high among white Protestant evangelicals. A March survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found that among that demographic, Trump enjoys an approval rating of 75%. And that’s the same crowd that detested Obama when he was president despite the fact that he has a much longer history of attending church and obviously knows a lot more about the Bible. Obama has obviously led a much more clean-cut life than Trump, but to the Christian Right and proponents of prosperity theology, that doesn’t matter. Right-wing white evangelicals equate Donald “Grab ‘Em by the Pussy” Trump with money and power—and therefore, Christian morality—while equating Obama with socialism and giveaways for poor Americans they consider freeloaders, although truth be told, Obama was a decidedly centrist president even though his rhetorical style could sound very populist at times.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The chances that the BBC’s “Trump: Is the President a Sex Pest?” will harm the president’s relationship with his far-right white evangelical supporters are slim and none. And with Trump appointing wingnuts like Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh—severe fiscal conservatives who are also severe social conservatives—to the U.S. Supreme Court, his popularity among the Christian Right is likely to grow even stronger.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump, as Savage asserted, is merely portraying a social conservative. But it’s a portrayal that is working extremely well for him among far-right white evangelicals who hate the poor as much as they hate abortion, porn and same-sex marriage.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.newsweek.com/evangelical-christians-trump-religion-religious-liberty-640310</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;no mnay lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">EVANGELICALS</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">RELIGION</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Evangelical Christians have unprecedented access to President Donald Trump’s White House and are “on speed dial” with the administration, according to an activist who prayed over the president in the Oval Office.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The evangelical community overwhelmingly backed the Republican in November’s election, and Trump has been quick to repay it. The president has signed an executive order on religious liberty and cut funding to abortion providers overseas.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Now, it appears that the president is rewarding one of his most important support bases with a hotline to the White House and some of the most senior officials in the administration.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A photo emerged last week of a meeting between over 20 evangelical leaders and Trump, along with Vice-President Mike Pence, in the Oval Office. In the photo, Trump has his head bowed and several people have placed their hands on him in prayer; Pence is pictured with his eyes close, presumably praying.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Johnnie Moore ?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">@JohnnieM</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;Such an honor to pray within the Oval Office for @POTUS & @VP .</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">6:08 PM - Jul 11, 2017</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">7,630</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">8,879 people are talking about this</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Twitter Ads info and privacy</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Johnnie Moore, a Christian businessman and activist based in California, took the photo. Moore tells Newsweek that the occasion was an impromptu “time among friends” and that evangelicals feels like they can raise their concerns at the highest level in this administration—a contrast to the situation under former President Barack Obama.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Keep Up With This Story And More By Subscribing Now</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I couldn’t get the Obama administration to do anything. They denied a visa to an Iraqi nun that was petitioned to testify in front of our Congress, and I took it all up the chain to the State Department. It was a fight every step of the way and the White House was trying to block it and it was just crazy,” says Moore, a former senior vice president for communications at Liberty University, the largest evangelical Christian college in the U.S. and the venue for a commencement speech by President Trump in May.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">(The nun in question was Diana Momeka, whose visa to testify before a congressional hearing on the persecution of religious minorities by the Islamic State militant group (ISIS) was initially denied by the State Department in 2015, but was later granted.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But things have changed under Trump, he says. “It’s a totally different time now. They’re not only on our speed dial, we’re on their speed dial. In my opinion, it’s good for America,” says Moore.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump at Liberty</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivers the convocation at the Vines Center on the campus of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, on January 18, 2016.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Moore is a member of a board of evangelical advisers—in addition to Trump's board of Catholic advisers—first convened by Trump during the presidential campaign in June 2016. The evangelist says that members of the board are on first-name terms with many in Trump’s inner circle, including Jared Kushner, the president’s son in law.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“A number of us...communicate with Jared Kushner every other day, and, back during the campaign, he was our principal point of contact and in many ways still is,” says Moore.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">With Trump in the Oval Office, evangelicals have a direct line of communication to express concerns about policy, says Moore. “We have an open relationship with the White House, we can and do express those reservations,” he says. “There’s been specific instances when things have been changed. You win some, you lose some, but we’re part of a conversation.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Evangelical Protestants form the largest single religious demographic in the United States and, in the 2016 election, were the biggest backers of Trump among faith groups. Eighty-one percent of white evangelical (or born-again) Christians voted for Trump, according to a Pew Research Center poll released the day after the election. (The poll did not give a breakdown of evangelical votes by race, and 24 percent of U.S. evangelicals are non-white.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Liberty University prayers</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thousands of students, supporters and invited guests sing songs of Christian praise before then Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivers the convocation in the Vines Center on the campus of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia on January 18, 2016.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This support has continued throughout Trump’s first six months in office, according to Paul Djupe, an associate professor at Denison University who specializes in religion and politics. Djupe says he has collected data in recent months that shows that aside from traditional hot-button issues for evangelicals like abortion and religious liberty, the community has backed Trump through the scandals his administration has weathered. For example, evangelicals mostly supported Trump’s decision to fire ex-FBI director James Comey and do not believe that the multiple investigations into alleged collusion between Trump’s campaign and Russia will uncover any wrongdoing, says Djupe.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Evangelicals, really, from the beginning of Trump’s campaign, have been working in symbiosis with the administration. They clearly have their own interests but they are all aboard the Trump train,” says Djupe.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Despite the U.S. Constitution embodying a separation of church and state, religion has long played a prominent role in American political life. This has included various religious groups gaining access to the White House, and specifically the president. Most notably, Billy Graham, the famous Southern Baptist Convention televangelist, has held personal audiences with 12 consecutive presidents from Harry Truman to Barack Obama. (His son, Franklin Graham, read scripture at Trump’s inauguration.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Other presidents have been upfront in courting the so-called Christian right. In a famous speech to evangelicals in Dallas in 1980, then Republican candidate Ronald Reagan said : “I know you can’t endorse me. But I only brought that up because I want you to know that I endorse you and what you are doing.” (Reagan’s comment was likely a reference to the Johnson Amendment, a 1954 tax provision that prohibits all non-profit organizations, including churches, from endorsing or opposing political candidates. Trump’s executive order on religious liberty was aimed partly at loosening the restrictions imposed by the amendment.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump religious liberty</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">President Donald Trump is flanked by clergy members as he signs an executive order on promoting free speech and religious liberty during a National Day of Prayer event in the Rose Garden at the White House on May 4.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Given their steadfast support for Trump, it is unsurprising that evangelicals have received greater access to the president than other religious groups in his first few months in office, says Jacob Neiheisel, a political scientist at the University of Buffalo.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Access doesn’t always translate into policy victories, however, and it remains to be seen as to whether the chance that evangelical leaders took on Trump is going to help them gain back lost ground on the moral issues that matter to them,” says Neiheisel.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If Trump’s first half-year in office are anything to go by, evangelicals can look forward to a privileged status during the declared Presbyterian’s time in office. His nomination of Neil Gorsuch—an ultra-conservative jurist feted by the Christian right—was the pinnacle so far, but Trump has also signalled his fondness for the group in smaller ways, such as giving two interviews to the Christian Broadcasting Network since taking office in January.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">And according to Moore, that means evangelical priorities may dovetail more and more closely with government priorities, to the detriment of opponents of the conservative religious right. “I understand why people on the left are getting very, very nervous. They should be, frankly.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/how-religious-right-indoctrinates-its-followers-false-version-history</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">week ago Sunday, June 24, 2018, First Baptist Church of Dallas held its annual “Freedom Sunday.” The church website described the special service this way: “Celebrate our freedom as Americans and our freedom in Christ with patriotic worship and a special message from Dr. Robert Jeffress, “America is a Christian Nation.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Not everyone in Dallas was happy about it. Robert Wilonsky, an opinion writer at the Dallas Morning News, wrote that Jeffress and the First Baptist Church were “divisive” for claiming that America was a Christian nation. Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings agreed. Atheists protested. Eventually, the billboard company contracting with the church removed signs advertising Freedom Sunday.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This, of course, did not stop the service from going forward. The people of First Baptist Church spent the morning of the 24th waving American flags, wearing red, white, and blue shirts, singing the Star-Spangled Banner, and celebrating the United States military. Vice-president Mike Pence sent a letter of encouragement.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Was this a religious service or a celebration of nationalism? What was the object of the congregation’s worship?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jeffress has been preaching his “America is a Christian Nation” sermon for a long time. On Sunday he stuck with his usual script. He indicted the “secularists, atheists, and infidels” for “perverting” the Constitution. He chided the federal government’s failure to acknowledge God in the public square. He told his congregation that academics, historians, and teachers have been lying to them about the religious roots of the United States.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jeffress made one problematic historical reference after another. He made the wildly exaggerated claim that fifty-two of the original fifty-five signers of the Constitution were “orthodox conservative Christians.” He peddled the false notion that the disestablishment clause in the First Amendment was meant to apply solely to Protestant denominations. Robert Jeffress is best known as a Fox News religion commentator and one of the first evangelical leaders to support Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy. He has called Trump “the most faith-friendly president in history.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Within two weeks following the announcement of his candidacy, several polls had Trump leading among white evangelical GOP voters. In November 2016, 81% of these evangelicals cast their vote for Donald Trump for President of the United States. The reasons for this are complex, and we probably need to wait a generation or two before historians can begin to make sense of them, but three young sociologists have published a scholarly essay that suggests the most plausible explanation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Andrew Whitehead of Clemson University, Sam Perry of the University of Oklahoma, and Joseph O. Baker of East Tennessee State University argue that “the more someone believed the United States is—and should be—a Christian nation, the more likely they were to vote for Trump.” They conclude that “no other religious factor influenced support for or against Trump.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These sociologists found that the average Trump voter believes the federal government should: declare the United States a Christian nation, advocate for Christian values, oppose the “strict separation of church and state,” allow the “display of religious symbols in public spaces,” and return prayer to public schools. Likewise, Trump voters believe that whatever success the United States has had over the years is “part of God’s plan.” This essay is revealing, and it confirms much of what I have written about since the 2011 release of my Was American Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction. But it does not address why and how Americans have come to believe these things. The answer to that question invites us to think historically.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ever since the founding of the republic, a significant number of Americans have supposed that the United States is exceptional because it has a special place in God’s unfolding plan for the world. Since the early 17th century founding of the Massachusetts Bay colony by Puritans, evangelicals have relished in their perceived status as God’s new Israel—His chosen people. America, they argued, is in a covenant relationship with God. The defenders of this idea like to apply Chronicles 7:14 to the United States: “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Though dissenters have always been present, the Christian culture of the United States remained intact well into the 20th century. But since World War II, the moorings of this culture have loosened, and evangelicals have responded with fear that their Christian nation is about to collapse. Robert Jeffress is correct about this.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">During the 1960s, the Supreme Court removed prayer and Bible reading from public schools, the federal government cut federal funding to Christian academies and colleges that practiced segregation, the country grew more diverse through immigration, and the sexual revolution threatened evangelical patriarchy and gave women the right to choose to have an abortion.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The fear that America’s Christian civilization was falling apart translated into political action. In the late 1970s, conservative evangelicals such as Jerry Falwell, Tim LaHaye (the author of the popular Left Behind novels), and a group of politicians who had been closely affiliated with the 1964 Barry Goldwater presidential campaign, developed a political playbook to win back the culture from the forces of secularization. Most of the 81% of American evangelicals who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 understood, and continue to understand, the relationship between their faith and their politics through this playbook.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This playbook, which would eventual become the culture-war battle plan of the “Religious Right,” was tweaked occasionally over the years to address whatever moral issues seemed most important at the time, but it never lost its focus on “restoring,” “renewing,” and “reclaiming” America for Christ through the pursuit of political power.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When executed properly, the playbook teaches evangelicals to elect the right President and members of Congress who will pass laws privileging evangelical Christian views of the world. These elected officials will then appoint and confirm conservative Supreme Court justices who will overturn Roe v. Wade, defend life in the womb, and uphold religious liberty for those who believe in traditional views of marriage.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The playbook rests firmly on the Religious Right’s understanding of American identity as rooted in its view of the American past. If America was not founded as a Christian nation, the Religious Right’s political agenda collapses or, at the very least, is weakened severely.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">To indoctrinate its followers in the dubious claim that America was founded as a Christian nation, the Religious Right has turned to political activists, many of whom claim to be historians, to propagate the idea that the founding fathers of the United States were in the business of building a Christian nation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The most prominent of these Christian nationalist purveyors of the past is David Barton, the founder of Wallbuilders, an organization in Aledo, Texas that claims to be “dedicated to presenting America’s forgotten history and heroes, with an emphasis on the moral, religious, and constitutional foundation on which America was built—a foundation which, in recent years, has been seriously attacked and undermined.” Barton and Wallbuilders were the source of most of the historical information Jeffress presented in his Freedom Sunday sermon on June 24th.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For the past thirty years, Barton has provided pastors and conservative politicians with inaccurate or misinterpreted facts used to fuel the Religious Right’s nostalgic longings for an American Christian golden age. American historians, including those who teach at the most conservative Christian colleges, have debunked Barton’s use of the past, but he continues to maintain a large following in the evangelical community.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">David Barton peddles fake news about the American past. Yet, if Andrew Whitehead, Sam Perry, and Joseph Baker are correct, his work is essential to the success of the Trump presidency in a way that I imagine even Donald Trump and his staff do not fully understand or appreciate.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump does not talk very much about America’s supposedly Christian origins. His grasp of history is not very strong. But his evangelical supporters see him as a gift of God—a divinely appointed figure who has emerged on the scene for such a time as this. He is in the White House to preserve God’s covenant with America, to make America Christian again.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The support for the President is a sign of intellectual laziness in the evangelical community. Rather than thinking creatively about how to move forward in hope, Trump evangelicals prefer to respond to cultural change by trying to reclaim a Christian world that is rapidly disappearing, has little chance of ever coming back, and may never have existed in the first place.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The American founding fathers lived in a world that was very different from our own. In the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, America was a nation of Christians—mostly Protestants—who put their stamp on the culture.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yet, amid this Christian culture, the founders differed about the relationship between Christianity and their new nation. Thomas Jefferson and James Madison defended the separation of church and state. John Adams and George Washington also opposed mixing church and state, while at the same time suggesting that Christians, because Christianity taught an ethic of selflessness, could be useful in the creation of a virtuous republic in which citizens sacrificed self-interest for the common good.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The founding fathers believed in God, but most of them did not believe that God inspired the Old and New Testaments or sent His son to die and rise from the dead as the ultimate payment for human sin. The God of the Declaration of Independence is a providential deity who created the world and the people in it, but there is nothing in this important American document that defines this God in terms of the Incarnation or the Trinity.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The United States Constitution never mentions God or Christianity but does forbid religious tests for office. The First Amendment rejects a state-sponsored church and celebrates the free-exercise of religion. This is hardly the kind of stuff by which Christian nations are made. Yet Barton and Jeffress invoke these founders and these documents to defend the idea that the United States was founded as a distinctly Christian nation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">*</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If the Christian Right, and by extension the 81% of evangelical voters who use its political playbook, are operating on such a weak historical foundation, why doesn’t someone correct their faulty views and dubious claims?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We do.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">We have.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But countering bad history with good history is not as easy as it sounds. David Barton and his fellow Christian nationalist purveyors of the past are well-funded by Christian conservatives who know that the views of the past they are peddling serve their political agenda. Barton has demonized Christian intellectuals and historians as sheep in wolves’ clothing. They may call themselves Christians on Sunday morning, but, according to Barton, their “world view” has been shaped by the secular universities where they earned their Ph.Ds. Thanks to Barton, many conservative evangelicals do not trust academic and professional historians—even academic and professional historians with whom they share a pew on Sunday mornings.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I know this first-hand from some of the negative emails and course evaluation forms I received after teaching a Sunday School course on the history of religion and politics at the Evangelical Free Church congregation where my family worship every Sunday. Because I was a college history professor—even a college history professor at a Christian college with strong evangelical roots—I could not be trusted.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What David Barton does not understand is that there are hundreds of evangelical historians who see their work as part of their Christian identity and vocation. These historians are women and men who pursue truth about the past wherever it leads. This pursuit of truth is a deeply Christian pursuit, as is the case with all efforts to distinguish truth from error.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">When people like David Barton cherry-pick from the past to promote political agendas, they do a disservice to the past, fail to treat it with integrity, and ultimately harm their Christian witness in the world. They make evangelicals look foolish. This is not what Paul described in 1 Corinthians 1:18 as the “foolishness of the cross,” it is just good old-fashioned foolishness. It is a product of what evangelical historian Mark Noll has described as the “Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Many of us engaged in trying to bring good history to the evangelical church need the support of Christians who are concerned about the direction Donald Trump, the Christian Right, and the pseudo-historians who prop-up their political agenda are trying to take the country and the church. Good history is complex. It is nuanced. And it is an essential part of truly worshipping God with our minds (Luke 10:27). Unfortunately, complexity, nuance, and intellectual discipleship are not the kinds of subjects that inspire Christians to dig into their pocketbooks.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">What would it take to fund evangelical historians to travel to receptive churches around the country and spend some concentrated time teaching American religious history, and American history more broadly, to lay men and women? Perhaps such visits could also include times of worship and prayer?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It is unlikely that such an effort would reach the Robert Jeffress’ of the world. but there are many evangelicals who are open and willing to listen and learn. This was another lesson I took away from my Sunday School class. In fact, the criticism I received paled in comparison with the positive comments I got from those who had never heard a fellow evangelical offer a different, more accurate, view of American history.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">American evangelical political engagement is built on a very weak historical foundation. It is time that Christian philanthropists, motivated by an entrepreneurial spirit informed by the pursuit of truth and a concern for the testimony of the Gospel in the world, take the long view and invest in responsible Christian thinking about the American past. The American republic, and more importantly, the witness of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, depends on it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">John Fea teaches American history at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. He is the author of the new book, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump (Eerdmans Publishing, June 2018).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.c-span.org/video/?448033-1/believe-me</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">JULY 7, 2018</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Believe Me</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">History professor John Fea examined the history of evangelism in America and offered his thoughts on why some conservative evangelicals support President Trump.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/evangelical-historian-explains-how-christians-came-put-trump-ahead-jesus</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">John Fea is an evangelical Christian and a historian. When Donald Trump was elected with 81 percent of the self-described white evangelical vote, Fea was both stunned and surprised. “As a historian studying religion and politics, I should have seen this coming,” he notes. Yet he did not. Which was why Fea ended up writing his new book, “Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On its own terms, the book clearly succeeds in making sense for Fea and others like him, with potential for reaching wavering Trump supporters as well. He identifies and lucidly explores three fundamental flaws in evangelical thinking that have led them to embrace a leader who is wholly unfit by their own once-cherished moral standards, in pursuit of ends they cannot possibly achieve — restoring 1950s America via government action. In a key passage, Fea explains:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For too long, white evangelical Christians have engaged in public life through a strategy defined by the politics of fear, the pursuit of worldly power, and nostalgia for a national past that may never have existed in the first place. Fear. Power. Nostalgia. These ideas are at the heart of this book, and I believe they best explain the 81 percent.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/right-wing-evangelicals-are-blame-sharp-decline-christians-america-report</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If there's one thing the Millennial Generation is known for, it's their love of everyone regardless of their differences. Perhaps that is why they see the turn Christianity has taken to intolerance and has become far too conservative.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A poll from the Public Religion Research Institute revealed that the recent decline in people describing themselves as a particular religion, the Daily Beast cited.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The generation born between 1980 and 2000 is the most diverse generation in history and was raised during the rise of the LGBT rights movement and strive for equality. So, seeing anti-choice, anti-LGBT white evangelicals co-opting Christianity and supporting President Donald Trump to the tune of 75 percent, isn't exactly good for the religion's branding.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to surveys by the Pew Foundation, 23 percent of Generation X (born before millennials in 1965-1980) claim no religious affiliation. That number shoots up to 34 percent of older millennials (born between 1981-1989). It's even higher, 36 percent for younger millennials (born between 1990 and 1996). The Washington Post conducted their own survey in 2017 that had similar results.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The shift didn't happen with Trump, however. There was a time that former President Bill Clinton had a strong relationship with the late Rev. Billy Graham, whose son Franklin Graham has taken his father's somewhat compassionate conservatism and turned it into rants about morality while justifying Trump's adultery.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">An important moment in the life of millennials came during the 2004 election, when Karl Rove and the right-wing collaborated to put nearly a dozen initiatives on the ballot to outlaw same-sex marriage during the 2004 election. It mobilized 10 million evangelicals to the polls and ushered in a wave of Republicans. Churches across the country railed against the immorality of homosexuality, bumping up against pop-culture icons coming out of the closet and anti-bullying campaigns aimed at teens.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">White evangelicals have coopted mainstream Christianity, and an entire generation has never lived in an world without hypocritical pastors worshiping the almighty dollar and begging the poor to send Jesus their retirement funds.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Then there is Christianity's science problem. Rather than embracing science and finding new ways to frame religion around kindness, humility or service, the evangelical movement has fought tooth and nail to ban science. From textbook lies to biology rewrites that demand teaching a religious text next to religious text, the right wing has tried to turn an generation into being science-stupid. They might win small battles with Baby Boomers but they're losing the long-term war with the largest generation in history also being the most educated in history.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While millennials share very close relationships with their parents, they've formulated their own ideas and opinions. Today, millennials have now become key influencers in changing the culture and the minds of Baby Boomers along with it.Global, the decline in Christianity has been steady over time. Western European countries, Australia and New Zealand have all seen declines in religious affiliation. The United States has historically maintained it's stronghold. Until now. The Beast points out that the decline in the U.S. is unprecedented in American history. "Until the last decades of the 20th century, they fell in line with the denominational attachments of their parents."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The days of Focus on the Family and Pat Robertson warning you about the evil homosexuals coming to take your soul are coming to an end -- and they might take the majority of Christianity down along with i</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/what-makes-people-distrust-science-its-not-politics-according-science</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;there is a crisis of trust in science. Many people – including politicians and, yes, even presidents – publicly express doubts about the validity of scientific findings. Meanwhile, scientific institutions and journals express their concerns about the public’s increasing distrust in science. How is it possible that science, the products of which permeate our everyday lives, making them in many ways more comfortable, elicits such negative attitudes among a substantial part of the population? Understanding why people distrust science will go a long way towards understanding what needs to be done for people to take science seriously.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Political ideology is seen by many researchers as the main culprit of science skepticism. The sociologist Gordon Gauchat has shown that political conservatives in the United States have become more distrusting of science, a trend that started in the 1970s. And a swath of recent research conducted by social and political psychologists has consistently shown that climate-change skepticism in particular is typically found among those on the conservative side of the political spectrum. However, there is more to science skepticism than just political ideology.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The same research that has observed the effects of political ideology on attitudes towards climate change has also found that political ideology is notthat predictive of skepticism about other controversial research topics. Work by the cognitive scientist Stephan Lewandowsky, as well as research led by the psychologist Sydney Scott, observed no relation between political ideology and attitudes toward genetic modification. Lewandowsky also found no clear relation between political conservatism and vaccine skepticism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So there is more that underlies science skepticism than just political conservatism. But what? It is important to systematically map which factors do and do not contribute to science skepticism and science (dis)trust in order to provide more precise explanations for why a growing number of individuals reject the notion of anthropogenic climate change, or fear that eating genetically modified products is dangerous, or believe that vaccines cause autism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">My colleagues and I recently published a set of studies that investigated science trust and science skepticism. One of the take-home messages of our research is that it is crucial not to lump various forms of science skepticism together. And although we were certainly not the first to look beyond political ideology, we did note two important lacunae in the literature. First, religiosity has so far been curiously under-researched as a precursor to science skepticism, perhaps because political ideology commanded so much attention. Second, current research lacks a systematic investigation into various forms of skepticism, alongside more general measures of trust in science. We attempted to correct both oversights.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">People can be skeptical or distrusting of science for different reasons, whether it is about one specific finding from one discipline (for example, ‘The climate is not warming, but I believe in evolution’), or about science in general (‘Science is just one of many opinions’). We identified four major predictors of science acceptance and science skepticism: political ideology; religiosity; morality; and knowledge about science. These variables tend to intercorrelate – in some cases quite strongly – which means that they are potentially confounded. To illustrate, an observed relation between political conservatism and trust in science might in reality be caused by another variable, for example religiosity. When not measuring all constructs simultaneously, it is hard to properly assess what the predictive value of each of these is.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So, we investigated the heterogeneity of science skepticism among samples of North American participants (a large-scale cross-national study of science skepticism in Europe and beyond will follow). We provided participants with statements about climate change (eg, ‘Human CO2 emissions cause climate change’), genetic modification (eg, ‘GM of foods is a safe and reliable technology’), and vaccination (eg, ‘I believe that vaccines have negative side effects that outweigh the benefits of vaccination for children’). Participants could indicate to what extent they agreed or disagreed with these statements. We also measured participants’ general faith in science, and included a task in which they could indicate how much federal money should be spent on science, compared with various other domains. We assessed the impact of political ideology, religiosity, moral concerns and science knowledge (measured with a science literacy test, consisting of true or false items such as ‘All radioactivity is made by humans’, and ‘The centre of the Earth is very hot’) on participants’ responses to these various measures.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Political ideology did not play a meaningful role when it came to most of our measures. The only form of science skepticism that was consistently more pronounced among the politically conservative respondents in our studies was, not surprisingly, climate-change skepticism. But what about the other forms of skepticism, or skepticism of science generally?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Moving beyond domain-specific skepticism, what did we observe about a general trust in science, and the willingness to support science more broadly? The results were quite clear: trust in science was by far the lowest among the religious. In particular, religious orthodoxy was a strong negative predictor of faith in science and the orthodox participants were also the least positive about investing federal money in science. But notice here again political ideology did not contribute any meaningful variance over and beyond religiosity.Skepticism about genetic modification was not related to political ideology or religious beliefs, though it did correlate with science knowledge: the worse people did on the scientific literacy test, the more skeptical they were about the safety of genetically modified food. Vaccine skepticism also had no relation to political ideology, but it was strongest among religious participants, with a particular relation to moral concerns about the naturalness of vaccination.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">From these studies there are a couple of lessons to be learned about the current crisis of faith that plagues science. Science skepticism is quite diverse. Further, distrust of science is not really that much about political ideology, with the exception of climate-change skepticism, which is consistently found to be politically driven. Additionally, these results suggest that science skepticism cannot simply be remedied by increasing people’s knowledge about science. The impact of scientific literacy on science skepticism, trust in science, and willingness to support science was minor, save for the case of genetic modification. Some people are reluctant to accept particular scientific findings, for various reasons. When the aim is to combat skepticism and increase trust in science, a good starting point is to acknowledge that science skepticism comes in many forms.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bastiaan T Rutjens</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/conspiratorial-way-viewing-world-how-christian-news-media-shaped-american-politics</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;growth of Christian media</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">American Christians have historically used new media to spread the gospel. In the 19th century, evangelicals used pamphlets and advertising techniques. The early 20th century produced a religious radio subculture that is still thriving in programs like the ones offered by Focus on the Family or Moody Radio.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By the early 1950s, preachers like Fulton Sheen, Robert Schuller or Billy Graham took to television.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While there was occasionally a political overtone to these programs, most of them refrained from explicit commentary. This changed beginning in the 1970s, in large part, because of two related political trends:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One, since the late 1970s, largely fundamentalist Protestant organizations like the Moral Majority took to popularizing Christian conservatism. These organizations rallied national support to influence politicians to oppose abortion rights and the Equal Rights Amendment, among other causes.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Two, around the same time, beginning with Ronald Reagan’s presidency, conservative politicians started to harness evangelicals as a voting bloc. As a result, many of these politicians began paying closer attention to Christian media for indications of this bloc’s concerns. This gave Christian media further influence in the political world.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The above political changes were reflected in the rapid growth of Christian shows on cable television.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The televangelists</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Pat Robertson’s longstanding talk show “The 700 Club,” the end-times prophecy show “Jack Van Impe Presents” and others began to address what was happening in the news from a Biblical perspective. They claimed they were providing viewers with “real” explanations that media and liberal politicians covered up. These shows also reinforced conservative talking points as objective facts.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It is true that during this period, American “televangelists” experienced several withering scandals. Evangelist Jimmy Swaggart, for example, was discovered with a prostitute, and televangelist Jim Bakker was convicted of fraud. This led some scholars to suggest that religious television “went underground” because of this disrepute.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For example, from the mid-1990s, popular films and novels like “Left Behind” suggested that viewers with the “wrong” religious or political beliefs would suffer damnation. Such films and literature attracted tens of millions of viewers and readers.On the contrary, as the data shows, religious broadcasting grew hugely in the 1990s and 2000s. Christian media increasingly commented on current events. And, critically, it began to have an influence on the wider culture.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Furthermore, Christian media was used to advance conservative biases. Authors and advocates of textbooks and curricula, for example, downplayed the women’s movement in American history or referred to slavery as “involuntary immigration.” Such changes were adopted in some Christian schools and their authors were often featured in Christian media. Even when the influence was indirect, the media, schools and entertainment mutually reinforced each others’ ideas.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There is considerable evidence, then, of the connections between evangelical media broadly speaking, Christian news specifically, and a conservative Republican base that sought steady support and advocacy from it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Why this matters</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The power of these programs is more than simply the stories covered or guests interviewed – it is their social impact on religious beliefs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Christian news is effective in conveying its views because it repeats claims that viewers already believe, and provides them with particular emotional experiences that are described as facts. This way of viewing the world has moved closer to the center of conservative politics since the 1980s, a period of time when the Christian right acquired more influence in American politics.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The themes central to Christian television were more consistently those of the Republican Party. Consider how in the 1980s, Ronald Reagan began to be depicted as God’s agent on Earth. In the 1990s, the growth of multinational corporations and trade deals was decried as part of a demonic “new world order.” And today, when Islamophobia is on the rise, Christian television channels depict and celebrate President Trump as the fighter-in-chief, who defends Christians despite his personal fault</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">hese attitudes are reflected in the contemporary news programs themselves.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For example, Robert Jeffress of Dallas’ First Baptist Church has called Islam a “false religion” that is demonically inspired. Such claims have been widespread since September 11, 2001, but on Jeffress’ “Pathway to Victory” program, with an audience estimated in the millions, they are given a vast reach without the facts of Islam ever being addressed.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Further, Christian Broadcasting Network news regularly features stories about Christians persecuted in Turkey or India. While such persecution clearly does occur in places across the world, it is often cited by CBN and other outlets to support the idea that American Christians are censored or otherwise embattled by liberalism or secularism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Amplifying one view?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The growing regularity of such examples has significant implications for American politics.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">First, assertions that religious liberty is being violated around the world are put out endlessly in what I call “the resonance chamber of American public life,” in which repetition, aided by social media, helps claims to achieve legitimacy. Second, stories on the Christian news channels are constantly tailored to the idea that viewers are being persecuted.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By presenting itself as authoritative, trustworthy journalism, Christian news reassures viewers that they do not need to consult mainstream media in order to be informed. More dangerously, it authorizes a particular, often conspiratorial way of viewing the world. It denounces neutrality or accountability to multiple constituencies as burdensome or even hostile to Christian faith.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The ConversationSadly, tens of millions of its viewers are left without a sense of two of democracy’s most necessary foundations: the value of multiple viewpoints and shared political participation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jason C. Bivins, Professor, North Carolina State University</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2018/05/09/christian-right-groups-wage-crusade-capture-courts/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=5c5ed87e-0075-4ed8-aad0-19dc7ba0c82b</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">big-budget religious-right organizations are waging a sustained crusade to advance their controversial social agenda by rigging the rules in state courts, according to a new report released by the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ten of the largest groups with a combined annual budget of more than $220 million have spent millions over the past decade to mount a relentless attack on traditional safeguards designed to insulate judges from politics, including merit selection, campaign finance laws, and judicial codes of conduct that limit what judges can say about legal issues likely to come before their courts.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Christian right groups oppose same-sex marriage and adoption rights, promote gay conversion therapy, oppose reproductive rights, and fight for broad religious exemptions. Some have been classified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Emboldened by the successful ousting of three state Supreme Court justices in Iowa in 2010, as retaliation for the Court’s unanimous decision overturning a ban on same-sex marriage, those conservative religious groups have used legal challenges, legislation, and dark-money election spending in more than a dozen states to politicize state courts.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Religious Right Assaults on Judicial Indipendence</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“All courts are under attack by conservative warriors,” said Arn Pearson, CMD’s executive director and the report’s author. “But since Iowa, those most at risk are in the states.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The organized Christian right thinks judges should be accountable to ‘values’ voters, and does not believe in the separation of church and state,” Pearson said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">While the religious right has not been able to replicate its Iowa rout, it has successfully teamed up with corporate and partisan players to abolish merit selection in Tennessee, win a conservative majority on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court, and mount a major 2016 challenge against four Kansas Supreme Court justices based on their rulings on abortion, the death penalty, and school funding.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Those efforts have been bolstered by the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, which allowed corporations–including nonprofits–to pour money into judicial elections for the first time in more than a century.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The influence of big money–already pervasive in federal and state elections–increasingly casts a shadow over how state judges handle controversial cases concerning equal marriage or privacy rights,” Pearson said. “Million-dollar-plus campaigns against sitting judges have become the new normal and can intimidate judges, who are supposed to be neutral arbiters of the law, even when unsuccessful.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Outside spending on state supreme court elections has more than tripled since 2010, reaching a record $28 million in the 2015-16 judicial elections.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Outside Spending in Supreme Court</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Citizens United and many of the state attacks on judicial independence have been masterminded by James Bopp, an Indiana attorney and GOP insider who has represented groups like Focus on the Family, the Christian Coalition, National Organization for Marriage, and National Right to Life.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Focus on the Family and its advocacy partner, the Family Policy Alliance, have been major players in that effort. The groups spent a combined $93 million in 2016 and funneled nearly $7 million to a network of local partners in 38 states between 2012 and 2015.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Focus on the Family recently declared itself a church and announced that it will no longer file informational tax returns with the IRS.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The religious right wants to win ‘Christ-centered’ courts that reflect their extreme religious views, and they will continue to wage a series of small battles until they get there,” Pearson said. “Ensuring that courts will protect the constitutional and civil rights of all Americans, regardless of their religious views, will take an equal commitment from supporters of an independent judiciary.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Read the report: Conquering the Courts</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/republican-insider-explains-how-religion-destroyed-gop</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mike Lofgren.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Religious cranks ceased to be a minor public nuisance in this country beginning in the 1970s and grew into a major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson’s strong showing in the 1988 Iowa presidential caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. Unfortunately, at the time I mostly underestimated the implications of what I was seeing. It did strike me as oddly humorous that a fundamentalist staff member in my congressional office was going to take time off to convert the heathen in Greece, a country that had been overwhelmingly Christian for almost two thousand years. I recall another point, in the early 1990s, when a different fundamentalist GOP staffer said that dinosaur fossils were a hoax. As a mere legislative mechanic toiling away in what I held to be a civil rather than ecclesiastical calling, I did not yet see that ideological impulses far different from mine were poised to capture the party of Lincoln.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">results of this takeover are all around us: If the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution, scriptural inerrancy, the presence of angels and demons, and so forth, it is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party, and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary beliefs. All around us now is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science. Politicized religion is the sheet anchor of the dreary forty-year-old culture wars.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Constitution notwithstanding, there is now a de facto religious test for the presidency: Major candidates are encouraged (or coerced) to share their feelings about their faith in a revelatory speech, or a televangelist like Rick Warren will dragoon the candidates (as he did with Obama and McCain in 2008) to debate the finer points of Christology, offering himself as the final arbiter. Half a century after John F. Kennedy put to rest the question of whether a candidate of a minority denomination could be president, the Republican Party has reignited the kinds of seventeenth-century religious controversies that advanced democracies are supposed to have outgrown. And some in the media seem to have internalized the GOP’s premise that the religion of a candidate is a matter for public debate.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Throughout the 2012 Republican presidential campaign, Mitt Romney was dogged with questions about his religion. The spark was a hitherto obscure fundamentalist preacher from Texas, Robert Jeffress, who attacked Romney’s Mormonism by doubting whether he could really be considered a Christian. The media promptly set aside the issues that should have been paramount— Romney’s views on economic and foreign policy—in order to spend a week giving respectful consideration to an attention-grabbing rabble-rouser. They then proceeded to pester the other candidates with the loaded question of whether they thought Romney was a Christian. CNN’s Candy Crowley was particularly egregious in this respect, pressing Herman Cain and Michele Bachmann for a response and becoming indignant when they refused to answer. The question did not deserve an answer, because Crowley had set it up to legitimate a false premise: that Romney’s religious belief was a legitimate issue of public debate. This is a perfect example of how the media reinforce an informal but increasingly binding religious test for public office that the Constitution formally bans. Like the British constitution, the test is no less powerful for being unwritten.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The religious right’s professed insistence upon “family values” might appear at first blush to be at odds with the anything but saintly personal behavior of many of its leading proponents. Some of this may be due to the general inability of human beings to reflect on conflicting information: I have never ceased to be amazed at how facts manage to bounce off people’s consciousness like pebbles off armor plate. But there is another, uniquely religious aspect that also comes into play: the predilection of fundamentalist denominations to believe in practice, even if not entirely in theory, in the doctrine of “cheap grace,” a derisive term coined by the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. By that he meant the inclination of some religious adherents to believe that once they had been “saved,” not only would all past sins be wiped away, but future ones, too—so one could pretty much behave as before. Cheap grace is a divine get- out-of-jail-free card. Hence the tendency of the religious base of the Republican Party to cut some slack for the peccadilloes of candidates who claim to have been washed in the blood of the Lamb and reborn to a new and more Christian life. The religious right is willing to overlook a politician’s individual foibles, no matter how poor an example he or she may make, if they publicly identify with fundamentalist values. In 2011 the Family Research Council, the fundamentalist lobbying organization, gave Representative Joe Walsh of Illinois an award for “unwavering support of the family.” Representative Walsh’s ex-wife might beg to differ, as she claims he owes her over one hundred thousand dollars in unpaid child support, a charge he denies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Of course, the proper rituals must be observed before an erring politician can obtain absolution. In November 2011, at a forum sponsored by religious conservatives in Iowa, all of the GOP presidential candidates struck the expected notes of contrition and humility as they laid bare their souls before the assembled congregation (the event was held in a church). Most of them, including Cain, who was then still riding high, choked up when discussing some bleak midnight of their lives (he chose not to address the fresh sexual harassment charges against him, which surely would have qualified as a trying personal experience preying on his mind). Even the old reprobate Gingrich misted up over some contrived misdeed intended to distract attention from his well-known adventures in serial matrimony.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">All of these gloomy obsequies of repentance having been observed, Gingrich gave a stirring example of why he is hands-down the best extemporaneous demagogue in contemporary America. Having purged his soul of all guilty transgressions, he turned his attention to the far graver sins bedeviling the American nation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If we look at history from the mid-1960s, we’ve gone from a request for toleration to an imposition of intolerance. We’ve gone from a request to understand others to a determination to close down those who hold traditional values. I think that we need to be very aggressive and very direct. The degree to which the left is prepared to impose intolerance and to drive out of existence traditional religion is a mortal threat to our civilization and deserves to be taken head-on and described as what it is, which is the use of government to repress the American people against their own values.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">That is as good an example as any of cheap grace as practiced by seasoned statesmen like Gingrich—a bid for redemption turned on its head to provide a forum for one of the Republican Party’s favorite pastimes: taking opportunistic swipes at the dreaded liberal bogeyman. How quickly one forgets one’s own moral lapses when one can consider the manifold harms inflicted on our nation by godless leftists!</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">- – - – - – - – - -</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Some liberal writers have opined that the socioeconomic gulf separating the business wing of the GOP and the religious right make it an unstable coalition that could crack. I am not so sure. There is no basic disagreement on which direction the two factions want to take the country, merely how far it should go. The plutocrats would drag us back to the Gilded Age; the theocrats to the Salem witch trials. If anything, the two groups are increasingly beginning to resemble each other. Many televangelists have espoused what has come to be known as the prosperity gospel—the health-and- wealth/name-it-and-claim-it gospel of economic entitlement. If you are wealthy, it is a sign of God’s favor. If not, too bad! This rationale may explain why some poor voters will defend the prerogatives of billionaires. In any case, at the beginning of the 2012 presidential cycle, those consummate plutocrats the Koch brothers pumped money into Bachmann’s campaign, so one should probably not make too much of a potential plutocrat-theocrat split.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Most of the religious enthusiasts I observed during my tenure on the Hill seemed to have little reluctance to mix God and Mammon. Rick Santorum did not blink at legislative schemes to pay off his campaign contributors: In 2005 he introduced a bill to forbid the National Weather Service from providing weather forecasts for free that commercial forecasters—like AccuWeather, a Pennsylvania- based company which had contributed to his campaign—wanted to charge for. Tom DeLay’s purported concern about the dignity and sanctity of human life, touchingly on display during the controversy over whether Terri Schiavo’s husband had the right to tell doctors to remove her feeding tube after seeing her comatose for fifteen years, could always be qualified by strategic infusions of campaign cash. DeLay’s quashing of bills to prohibit serious labor abuses demonstrates that even religious virtue can be flexible when there are campaign donations involved.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">One might imagine that the religious right’s agenda would be incompatible with the concerns for privacy and individual autonomy by those who consider themselves to belong to the libertarian wing of the Republican Party—the “don’t tread on me,” “live free or die” crowd that Grover Norquist once called the “leave me alone” conservatives. Given their profound distaste for an oppressive and intrusive federal government, one would think they might have trepidations about a religious movement determined to impose statutory controls on private behavior that libertarians nominally hold to be nobody’s business, and particularly not the government’s business.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Some more libertarian-leaning Republicans have in fact pushed back against the religious right. Former House majority leader Dick Armey expressed his profound distaste for the tactics of the religious right in 2006—from the safety of the sidelines—by blasting its leadership in unequivocal terms:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">[James] Dobson and his gang of thugs are real nasty bullies. I pray devoutly every day, but being a Christian is no excuse for being stupid. There’s a high demagoguery coefficient to issues like prayer in schools. Demagoguery doesn’t work unless it’s dumb, shallow as water on a plate. These issues are easy for the intellectually lazy and can appeal to a large demographic. These issues become bigger than life, largely because they’re easy. There ain’t no thinking.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Armey had previously been an economics professor at several cow colleges in Texas, and when he came to Congress in 1985, libertarian economics was his forte. I do not recall religious issues motivating his political ideology; instead, economics was what gripped him, particularly the flat tax, which he tirelessly promoted. I believe his departure from Congress was impelled not only by the fact that he was not on the inside track to become Speaker, but also because of his disillusionment with the culture wars, as his passionate denunciation of Dobson suggests. But later, Barack Obama’s election and the rise of the Tea Party induced a miraculous change of heart in Armey, as no doubt did the need to raise money for his lobbying organization, known as FreedomWorks. By 2009, Armey had become a significant voice of the Tea Party. As such, he attempted to declare a truce between fiscal and social conservatives, who would thenceforth bury their squabbles and concentrate on dethroning the Kenyan usurper in the Oval Office. That meant soft-pedaling social issues that might alarm fiscally conservative but socially moderate voters, particularly women, who lived in the wealthier suburbs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In September 2010 Armey took one step further in his reconciliation with the people he had called thugs and bullies when he announced that a GOP majority in Congress would again take up the abortion fight, which was only right and proper for those who held such a sincere moral conviction. When the Republicans duly won the House two months later, they did precisely that. State legislatures across the country followed suit: Ohio, Texas, and Virginia enacted the most severe abortion restrictions in any legislative session in memory. Suddenly Armey didn’t seem to have any problem with social issues preempting his economic agenda.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Tea Party, which initially described itself as wholly concerned with debt, deficit, and federal overreach, gradually unmasked itself as being almost as theocratic as the activists from the religious right that Armey had denounced only a few years before. If anything, they were even slightly more disposed than the rest of the Republican Party to inject religious issues into the political realm. According to an academic study of the Tea Party, “[T]hey seek ‘deeply religious’ elected officials, approve of religious leaders’ engaging in politics and want religion brought into political debates.” The Tea Party faithful are not so much libertarian as authoritarian, the furthest thing from a “live free or die” constitutionalist.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Within the GOP libertarianism is a throwaway doctrine that is rhetorically useful in certain situations but often interferes with their core, more authoritarian, beliefs. When the two precepts collide, the authoritarian reflex prevails. In 2009 it was politically useful for the GOP to present the Tea Party as independent-leaning libertarians, when in reality the group was overwhelmingly Republican, with a high quotient of GOP activists and adherents of views common among the religious right. According to a 2010 Gallup poll, eight in ten Tea Party members identify themselves as Republicans. Another study found that over half identified as members of the religious right and 55 percent of Tea Partiers agree that “America has always been and is currently a Christian nation”—6 points more than even the percentage of self-described Christian conservatives who would agree to that. This religious orientation should have been evident from the brouhaha that erupted in mid- 2009 over the charge that the Obama administration’s new healthcare reform plan would set up “death panels.” While there was plenty to criticize about the health-care bill, the completely bogus charge garnered disproportionate attention. Republican political consultants immediately recognized that they had found a classic emotional issue that would resonate with the same people on the religious right who had been stirred up over the Terri Schiavo case. The Tea Party, a supposedly independent group of fiscal conservatives outraged by Obama’s profligate spending plans, fell prey to the hysteria Republican Party operatives whipped up over end-of- life counseling. This self-unmasking of the Tea Party may help explain why, after three years in existence, public support for the organization has been dropping precipitously.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ayn Rand, an occasional darling of the Tea Party, has become a cult figure within the GOP in recent years. It is easy enough to see how her tough-guy, every-man-for-himself posturing would be a natural fit with the Wall Street bankers and the right-wing politicians they fund—notwithstanding the bankers’ fondness for government bailouts. But Rand’s philosophy found most of its adherents in the libertarian wing of the party, a group that overlaps with, but is certainly not identical to, the “business conservatives” who fund the bulk of the GOP’s activities. There has always been a strong strain of rugged individualism in America, and the GOP has cleverly managed to co-opt that spirit to its advantage. The problem is that Rand proclaimed at every opportunity that she was a militant atheist who felt nothing but contempt for Christianity as a religion of weaklings possessing a slave mentality. So how do Republican candidates manage to bamboozle what is perhaps the largest single bloc in their voting base, the religious fundamentalists, about this? Certainly the ignorance of many fundamentalist values voters about the wider world and the life of the mind goes some distance toward explaining the paradox: GOP candidates who enthuse over Rand at the same time as they thump their Bibles never have to explain this stark contradiction because most of their audience is blissfully unaware of who Ayn Rand was and what she advocated. But voters can to some extent be forgiven their ignorance, because politicians have grown so skillful at misdirecting them about their intentions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This camouflaging of intentions is as much a strategy of the religious right and its leaders—James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Pat Robertson, and the rest—as it is of the GOP’s more secular political leaders in Washington. After the debacle of the Schiavo case and the electoral loss in 2008, the religious right pulled back and regrouped. They knew that the full-bore, “theoconservative” agenda would not sell with a majority of voters. This strategy accounts for Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition (who famously said that God sent a hurricane to New Orleans to punish the sodomites), stating the following in October 2011: “Those people in the Republican primary have got to lay off of this stuff. They’re forcing their leaders, the front-runners, into positions that will mean they lose the general election.” I doubt he thought the candidates held positions that were too extreme, merely that they should keep quiet about those positions until they had won the election. Max Blumenthal, author of Republican Gomorrah, argues that this is a “lying for Jesus” strategy that fundamentalists often adopt when dealing with the snares of a wicked and Godless world. Since Satan is the father of lies, one can be forgiven for fighting lies with lies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Hence the policies pursued for at least two decades by the religious right on the federal, state, and local levels. It usually starts at the school board, after some contrived uproar over sex education or liberal indoctrination. The stealthily fundamentalist school board candidates pledge to clean up the mess and “get back to basics.” After a few years they capture a majority on the board, and suddenly “Catcher in the Rye” is heaved out of the curriculum and science teachers are under pressure to teach the (imaginary) controversy about evolutionary biology. This was the path to greater glory of Michele Bachmann: Her first run for public office, barely a dozen years ago, was for a seat on the school board in Stillwater, Minnesota. Up until then she had drawn a taxpayer-funded salary for five years working as an attorney for the Internal Revenue Service, not, of course, because she was one of those lazy, good-for-nothing government bureaucrats that Republican candidates routinely denounce. She was secretly studying the ways of the government beast so as to defeat it later on.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bachmann, Rick Perry, and numerous other serving representatives and senators have all had ties to Christian Dominionism, a doctrine proclaiming that Christians are destined to dominate American politics and establish a new imperium resembling theocratic government. According to one profile of Perry, adherents of Dominionism “believe Christians—certain Christians—are destined to not just take ‘dominion’ over government, but stealthily climb to the commanding heights of what they term the ‘Seven Mountains’ of society, including the media and the arts and entertainment world.” Note the qualifier: “stealthily.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At the same religious forum where the GOP candidates confessed their sins, Bachmann went so far as to suggest that organized religion should keep its traditional legal privilege of tax exemption while being permitted to endorse political candidates from the pulpit. The fact that government prohibits express political advocacy is in her imagination muzzling preachers rather than just being a quid pro quo for tax-exempt status equivalent to that imposed on any 501(c)3 or 501(c)4 nonprofit organization. But for Bachmann and others of like mind, this is persecution of a kind that fuels their sense of victimhood and righteous indignation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/stemming-tide-evangelicalism-and-preventing-next-billy-graham</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/franklin-grahams-astonishing-ungodly-hypocrisy</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/how-anti-war-protests-50-years-ago-helped-mold-americas-modern-christian-right-wing</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...ventually, many alienated Protestants abandoned mainline churches in favor of the evangelical congregations that formed the core of the new conservative Christianity.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Who was Coffin?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Coffin was a prominent figure in mainline Protestantism, the term given to denominations like Episcopalians, Methodists and Presbyterians. These were the churches of the middle- and upper-class establishment, and their leaders had long enjoyed close connections to political elites.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Coffin family belonged to the upper-class circles of New York City. Coffin’s father led the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and his uncle, Henry, had been minister of the prestigious Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church as well as president of Union Theological Seminary, the divinity school that trainedgenerations of noted ministers and theologians.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Coffin’s own life exemplified the overlapping circles of government, academia and religion in which elite Protestants moved. He was a CIA officer during the Korean War, and after completing his studies at Yale, he became the university’s chaplain.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">From cold warrior to anti-war defendant</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Coffin, however, turned against the government when it came to Vietnam. In 1965, he helped establish an anti-war group, “Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam.” At Yale, he openly argued against the war.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He was charged with encouraging young men to “refuse or evade registration in the armed forces” and faced up to five years in federal prison.His trial stemmed from a 1967 antiwar rally in Boston. During the protests, Coffin collected the draft cards of men who refused to serve in Vietnam, which was a crime. He later publicized his actions and sought arrest to force a national debate about the draft.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Anti-war action among the clergy</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Coffin was far from the only mainline Protestant minister to oppose the Vietnam War. Many ministers, in a departure from previous wars, began criticizing U.S. policy in Vietnam in the mid-1960s.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This critique among Protestant leaders grew stronger in early 1968. A crucial event was North Vietnam’s Tet Offensive, a large-scale surprise attack on targets throughout South Vietnam, including the U.S. embassy. Though the attacks were ultimately unsuccessful, they caused many Americans to doubt President Lyndon Johnson’s assurances that the war’s end was in sight.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Soon after, leading Protestant journals offered bolder criticism. The Christian Century, a nondenominational magazine that for decades had been the voice of mainline Protestantism, published an article that condemned the war as antithetical to religious values. Its authors wrote,</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These ministers also joined Coffin in matching their rhetoric with action. The New York Times reported “an increasing number of churchmen are moving toward civil disobedience as a means of expressing dissent.”“A growing consensus among mature, morally sensitive people is that the spiritual integrity of the United States…cannot be secured by our present policy in Vietnam.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Clergy promised to support draft resisters, even if it meant they too might be arrested. Younger ministers and divinity school students returned their own draft cards to signal their resistance.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Support for the war in the pews</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As it became apparent that many mainline church leaders had embraced the anti-war position, it became equally clear that not all U.S. Protestants agreed with them. As The New York Times noted at the time, even the editors of the Christian Century and other Protestant journals recognized that “the majority of church members” did not “share such opposition to American policy in Vietnam.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The most that could be hoped for was that churchgoers would be “willing to listen to reservations about the war.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Times reporter Edward B. Fiske observed how conservative evangelical Protestants supported the war. Many, like the theologian and editor of Christianity Today, Carl F. Henry, believed it to be morally defensible. Fiske wrote that “the majority of laymen and clergy in this country” were more in agreement with Carl Henry than with William Sloane Coffin.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The simmering divisions that boiled over Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr. with Coretta Scott King, widow of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. AP Photo/Henry Burroughs</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This was not the first time that prominent Protestant leaders found themselves at odds with regular churchgoers or even ordinary ministers.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As I have shown in my work on mainline Protestantism, in the early 20th century, a division had long existed between liberal Protestant leaders and more conservative churchgoers. A significant number of ministers, for example, championed civil rights efforts and affirmed interfaith cooperation with Catholics and Jews – efforts staunchly opposed by many of their congregants.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But, it was in the Vietnam era, when a large numbers of Protestant leaders actively campaigned against U.S. military policy, that for many churchgoers the opposition went too far.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As Cambridge University historian Andrew Preston has written, “divisions between liberal clerics and conservative congregants had always existed…but they were rarely as wide as on Vietnam.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Aftermath</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These attacks on U.S. war efforts by Coffin and other church leaders alienated many Protestant Americans – with lasting repercussions.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In terms of Coffin and his trial, the minister himself faced few consequences. Though initially found guilty, his conviction was overturned on appeal. He returned to Yale and later became minister of New York’s prestigious Riverside Church.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Coffin’s activism: William Sloane Coffin Jr. greets captured American pilots in Hanoi, Vietnam. AP Photo/Peter Arnett</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mainline Protestant denominations, however, did not fare as well. They went into decline, losing nearly one in six members between 1970 and 1985.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In the same years, Evangelical churches grew by double-digit percentages. They welcomed Americans who had abandoned mainline denominations to protest the liberal views of clergy on many social issues, including the Vietnam War. These churches supported the religious right and its brand of conservative politics.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">As historian George Bogaski observed, in the Vietnam War, “mainline churches lost.” When prominent ministers like Coffin and writers in leading periodicals attacked the war, they alienated people in the pews.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">For decades, mainline Protestant denominations had united liberal leaders with more conservative churchgoers. That union proved unsustainable in the wake of 1968.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">David Mislin, Assistant Professor of Intellectual Heritage, Temple University</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This article was originally published on The Conversation.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">just beginning to dawn on folks how much Donald Trump’s presidency relies on religious support. All the scandals surrounding Trump have brought intense attention to the 81 percent support he received from evangelical Christians in the 2016 election. New research by Andrew Whitehead, meanwhile, explicates such support in the context of Christian nationalism, and historian John Fea has written an important new book, "Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump," to be published in June.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But the power of the presidency isn’t the only way Christian nationalism is advancing its agenda in America today. As Frederick Clarkson, senior research analyst at Political Research Associates, reported last week at Religion Dispatches, a coalition of Christian right groups — including the Congressional Prayer Caucus Foundation, Wallbuilders, the National Legal Foundation and others — have organized a major legislative initiative called “Project Blitz.” Its goal is to pass an outwardly diverse but internally cohesive package of Christian-right bills at the state level, whose cumulative impact would be immense.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The agenda underlying these bills is not merely about Christian nationalism, a term that describes an Old Testament-based worldview fusing Christian and American identities, and meant to sharpen the divide between those who belong to those groups and those who are excluded. It’s also ultimately "dominionist," meaning that it doubles down on the historically false notion of America as a “Christian nation” to insist that a a particular sectarian view of God should control every aspect of life, through all manner of human institutions. Christian nationalists are not in a position to impose their vision now, and to be fair, many involved in the movement would never go that far. But as explained by Julie Ingersoll in "Building God's Kingdom: Inside the World of Christian Reconstruction" (Salon interview here), dominionist ideas have had enormous influence on the religious right, even among those who overtly disavow them.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The authors of the Project Blitz playbook are savvy purveyors of dominionism,” Clarkson told Salon. “They are in it for the long haul and try not to say things that sound too alarming. ?But they live an immanent theocratic vision, and they sometimes cannot help themselves, such as when they describe the resolutions as seeking to ‘define public policies of the state in favor of biblical values concerning marriage and sexuality.’</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Among the ways they are seeking to implement 'biblical values,'" Clarkson continued, "is by seeking religious exemptions from civil rights laws and professional licensing standards.” The two-tiered society this would create reflects the essence of Christian nationalism, as Whitehead describes it.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Whitehead told Salon: “Our work shows that believing that the United States is a ‘Christian nation’ and desiring a close, symbiotic relationship between Christianity and civil society is significantly associated with a number of stances like opposition toward same-sex marriage, antipathy toward religious minorities and a tendency toward endorsing stricter racial boundaries in romantic and family relationships." So it makes sense, he continued, "that these groups who advocate for a formal recognition of the 'Christian nation' narrative are also seeking to formalize support for particular definitions of marriage, gender identity and family structure” — definitions that elevate some people and effectively subjugate others.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So far this year, supporters of this initiative, and their allies, have introduced 71 bills nationwide (or carried them over from last year) -- and those are only the ones tracked by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. (Some of the bills counted are similar in intent, but may not directly draw on the Project Blitz playbook.)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Most of those have innocuous or feel-good names like the National Motto Display Act (23 bills), the First Amendment Defense Act (10 bills), the Child Protection Act (four bills), the Bible Literacy Act (eight bills) and the Clergy Protection Act (six bills). The goal is to come across as wholesome, apple-pie Americans, while copying the strikingly successful approach of the pro-corporate American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nonetheless, Fea continued, Barton “is one of the most important people in American politics today.” How could that possibly be true? "If Andrew Whitehead and his colleagues are correct, evangelicals supported Trump because they believe America was founded as, and continues to be, a Christian nation," Fea said. "No one has promoted this narrative more effectively than David Barton.”The guiding vision behind Project Blitz is heavily influenced by pseudo-historian David Barton, a leading propagandist for the myth that America was founded as a “Christian nation.” John Fea, author of the aforementioned "Believe Me," told Salon: “David Barton has been discredited by every American historian I know, including evangelical historians who teach at the most conservative Christian colleges in the country, including Bob Jones University and Liberty University. He is a politician who uses the past for his own political agenda."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The war imagery conjured up by the name “Project Blitz” is no accident. This is religious war in the minds of those waging it, and they’ve got specific goals and strategies in mind. But it’s not easy for outsiders to see what’s going on here, as Clarkson explains in his story:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The bills are seemingly unrelated and range widely in content — from requiring public schools to display the national motto, “In God We Trust” (IGWT); to legalizing discrimination against LGBTQ people; to religious exemptions regarding women’s reproductive health. The model bills, the legislative strategy and the talking points reflect the theocratic vision that has animated many in the Christian Right for some time. In the context of Project Blitz’s 116-page playbook, however, they also reveal a highly sophisticated level of coordination and strategizing that echoes the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which infamously networks pro-business state legislators, drafts legislation, and shares legislative ideas and strategies.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The bills are organized into three tiers, “according to the degree of opposition they anticipate — 1 being the least,” Clarkson reports. “The general plan is to begin with the less controversial measures to get legislators comfortable with the subject matter; to seek small victories first.” The full meaning and significance of the earlier measures will not become readily apparent until later measures build on them and covert synergies are revealed.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Category 3’s focus on religious liberty is especially relevant today," in the wake of the Supreme Court's historic Obergefell decision, said Daniel Bennett, author of "Defending Faith: The Politics of the Christian Conservative Legal Movement." With same-sex marriage a settled issue, right-wing Christian groups "will want to prioritize protection for religious liberty, defined in their specific way. The Christian legal movement is fighting these battles in the court, but these sorts of legislative proposals show how wide-ranging the broader movement’s strategy is.”The first tier, “Legislation Regarding Our Country's Religious Heritage,” aims at importing the Christian nationalist worldview (including Barton’s bogus history) into public schools and other aspects of the public sphere. It starts simply with a display of the motto “In God We Trust,” a Cold War replacement for “e pluribus unum” — out of many, one — which better reflects America’s pragmatic, pluralist foundations. The second tier, “Resolutions and Proclamations Recognizing the Importance of Religious History and Freedom,” aims at making government increasingly a partner in “Christianizing” America. The third tier, "Religious Liberty Protection Legislation," has three subcategories, one dealing with “public policy resolutions,” the other two with specifically targeted but sweepingly conceived “protections” for religious practices.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s a defensive fight now, but it’s also laying the groundwork for a possible future counter-offensive. “Although Category 3 is divided in three parts, you could also see it as having two main underlying intentions," said Clarkson. "First to denigrate the LGBTQ community, and second to defend and advance the right to discriminate. This is one way that the agenda of theocratic dominionism is reframed as protecting the right of theocrats to discriminate against those deemed second-class, at best. As the late theocratic theologian R.J. Rushdoony said, 'Only the right have rights.'"</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bills protecting the “right” to discriminate against the LGBTQ community are the most salient example of how Project Blitz aims to produce a radically altered “Handmaid’s Tale-style America. But even the most innocent-seeming proposal — introducing the motto “In God We Trust” into schools — has a divisive, discriminatory, damaging impact, sharply at odds with its presentation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“To an ex-evangelical such as myself, Project Blitz is deeply concerning,” Christopher Stroop told Salon. Stroop is a scholar, writer and Twitter personality with a history and humanities Ph.D. from Stanford, who is currently senior research associate with the Postsecular Conflicts project. As he says, he spent many years in the evangelical world.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“When I was growing up in the 1980s," Stroop said, "two issues that were frequently lamented in my evangelical community were the legalization of abortion and the supposed banning of prayer in school — ‘supposed’ because the right-wing evangelicals I grew up with usually failed to note that the Supreme Court had only ended officially school-sponsored prayer, and had not outlawed private prayer in schools. Extreme exaggeration of the ostensible persecution we supposedly faced as Christians was prevalent in my childhood milieu.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The attempt to reverse that imagined persecution can have real damaging effects, as Stroop notes. In examining the goal of requiring "In God We Trust" to be displayed in public schools, he said, "I cannot help but associate this goal with evangelical resentment over legal limitations on prayer in school, and to see it as an attempt to take a step toward the Christianization of public schools. On its own, posting the motto 'In God We Trust' in schools would already embolden Christian nationalists present in those schools, leading Muslim, Jewish, Buddhist, Hindu, liberal and atheist children to feel alienated and pressured to conform.”&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">paul r</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/belief/fear-nostalgia-and-power-primarily-account-trumps-appeal-evangelicals</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/liberty-university-is-making-a-movie-about-trump-loving-firefighter-prophet-mark-taylor/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/mike-cernovich-says-social-media-censorship-is-a-warm-up-for-christian-persecution</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mike Cernovich, a self-described “New Right” pundit who gained notoriety for peddling a variety of conspiracy theories such as “Pizzagate,” warned Christians that the effort by social media websites to crack down on conspiracy theories and extremist rhetoric was not actually aimed at people like himself, but rather at people who declare their Christian faith.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a live stream video aired this afternoon, Cernovich brought up reports that Facebook had threatened to suspend a Christian satire site after fact-checking nonprofit Snopes flagged its articleclaiming that CNN purchased an industrial washing machine to “spin” the news. Facebook apologized for the error, but Cernovich used the event to tell listeners that social media companies want to “destroy” Christian ways of life.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Don’t defend me. I don’t need you to defend me. Here’s what I need you to say: ‘Facebook and Snopes, they hate Christians. If you let them get rid of Cernovich, we are next.’ And that’s the truth. It’s proven now,” Cernovich said. “So rather than let people drag you into the weeds about Cernovich and this and that, just say, ‘They are only going after Cernovich because the real target is Christians like us.’”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Cernovich urged viewers to download and reupload his warning on their own social media accounts because “none of us are going to be here much longer.” He declared, “If you’re a Christian, Facebook—they hate you. There’s no other way to put it.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“They want you to be afraid of the gospel. If you preach the gospel, or you even profess your love of Christ and then just make jokes, if all you say now is ‘I’m a Christian’ and then you make jokes, you will be targeted by Snopes, you’ll be targeted by CNN, you’ll be targeted by Facebook,” he said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He went on to warn that the battle against Christians will not end with social media censorship.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“If you think this is going to end when they ban you from social media, if you think they aren’t going to make it so you can’t have a job if you’re a Christian, that you can’t run a business if you’re a Christian—this is just a warm-up,” Cernovich said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">He added, “They want to destroy your entire way of life. They want to put you in a predicament that you’ll never be able to escape.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/lori-bakker-liberals-want-to-lock-christians-away-in-mental-illness-centers/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/carl-gallups-mass-shooting-are-a-demonic-attempt-to-weaken-america-through-gun-control-in-preparation-for-the-antichrist/</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Carl Gallups: Mass Shooting Are A Demonic Attempt To Weaken America Through Gun Control In Preparation For The Antichrist</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Kyle MantylaBy Kyle Mantyla | February 16, 2018 11:46 am</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Carl Gallups, a right-wing pastor and conspiracy theorist who spoke at Trump campaign rallies in 2016, appeared on TheDove TV’s “Focus Today” program yesterday to discuss the mass shooting at a Florida high school earlier this week, which he said was part of a demonic attack aimed at weakening America through gun control in preparation for the rise of the Antichrist.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“This has it’s origins in the spiritual realms,” he said. “There is a concerted demonic attempt to undermine the United States of America, to bring it down, to destroy the most precious among us. Why is that such a demonic attempt? Because we know the scriptures say that there will arise a generation that will see this Antichrist system, this one-world order … The bottom line is we are headed that way.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“The United States is the largest Christian nation the planet has ever seen,” Gallups continued. “It’s the number one military superpower, it’s the number one economic superpower and so there is a demonic attempt to destroy it, to bring it down, to break the culture into some kind of submission. One of those ways is to take away our ability to defend ourselves, so every time something like this happens, the leftists start screaming—you can almost hear it from the pits of hell—’Take away all the guns, take away all the guns.’ That’s not the solution and we all know it’s not and we know why, but we hear that, so this is very spiritual, it’s very deep, it’s very dark.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/comeuppance-evangelicals-who-sold-their-souls-trump-coming</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...I don’t wish to engage the “No True Scotsman” fallacy; conservative Christians presumably arrived at their faith and their conclusions for their own reasons, and the fact that I disagree with them on a litany of issues theological and political, from abortion to taxes, does not invalidate the legitimacy of their own faith. But there is something undeniably strange and supremely hypocritical in seeing the embarrassing spectacle of religious leaders bow to such a spiritually illiterate man, a moral midget. Jerry Falwell Jr., cognizant enough of the disjuncture between personal piety and support of Trump but apparently not cognizant enough to avoid uttering inanities like the following, has compared the president to King David. That is to say that he acknowledges Trump’s copious personal failings (and steadfast refusals at contrition for any of them) but sees the president as a tool of the Lord meant to enact Christian policy, and so it behooves evangelicals to support him. One imagines that whatever makes it easier for the good Rev. Falwell to sleep better at night, but perhaps he is the sort of man whose sleep is untroubled, for hypocrisy has a handy ability to cleanse the conscience.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Currently evangelical Christianity in the United States is certainly still classifiable as a flavor of orthodox Nicene Christianity. But it’s not like there isn’t precedent for the church to contort itself to the heresies of a totalitarian regime. Consider the promulgation of an Aryan “Positive Christianity” in the Third Reich, in which all Jewish elements of the faith were expunged, and the gospels rejected in favor of a deadly and noxious blood-and-soil ideology, where the “Fuehrer is the herald of a new revelation.” This consolidation of all the Protestant denominations of Germany featured no Apostle’s Creed, or Nicaean, rather only allegiance to the state, a complete capitulation to the Prince of this World and an ascent to the temptation upon that desert mountaintop. We must remind ourselves of such compromises, bargains, and contracts as a perennial threat to the inner life of the faithful. While there is certainly no corollary to such a phenomenon in the United States today – yet – one must be vigilant and on guard to those like Rev. Falwell who see no blasphemy in comparing a president to the Anointed One.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump is arguably the logical culmination of some strains of right-wing evangelical Christianity in America, from the political theology of dominionism to the hermeneutics of presuppositional apologetics, dogmas which see no inconsistency to rendering all to a Caesar whom they have declared to be a Christ. We may have yet to see the arrival in the United States of a type of powerful, theocratic, fascistic Protestant Falangism enabled by the opportunism of a Trump, and which makes the traditional Christian Right look positively liberal. And with the global rise of the new nationalism there is a disturbing degree of collaboration between rightest religion and racist ideology, from the Orthodox mysticisms of those in the Kremlin who follow the crackpot historian Aleksandr Dugin to Stephen Bannon who wishes to preserve his understanding of Christendom not because all of us are children of God but because only some of us are white. Christianity, when allied to the powers of the world, has a way of promulgating distinctly anti-Christian beliefs. Do not read me as hyperbolic, the threat is global, powerful, interconnected, and real. When 60,000 Polish fascists marched in November, promoting a Poland without Muslims and Jews, they chanted “We want God” – a phrase from a speech delivered in Warsaw by Trump earlier that year.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Nazi “Positive” Christianity was countered by the resistance of the Confessing Church, the underground network of pastors and parishioners who operated in opposition to the glorification of worldly power as represented by the regime. One of the greatest of souls and theological intellects was the Confessing Church minister Dietrich Bonhoeffer, martyred by the Nazis at Flossenbürg Concentration Camp in 1945. Witness to the rise of compromised fascist Christianity in his own country, he aptly diagnosed the equivocations and capitulations some Christians were willing to make in order to sup at the table of power, but he also understood that from a theological perspective there should be nothing surprising about this. He explained that for “evil to be disguised as light… is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on our traditional ethical concepts, while for the Christian who based his life on the Bible, it merely confirms the fundamental wickedness of evil.” But even while acknowledging the fundamental wickedness of that evil, Bonhoeffer stood in opposition to it, and lived a life testament to that gospel.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">nancy mcL booktv 1017 sez koch libtards stuck at 3-4% and many of those did not even understand philos; had to get other ppl eg xians</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/belief/evangelical-christianity-facing-political-crisis-it-will-need-more-makeover</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">post moore</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">end times embassy jerusalem</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/human-rights/theological-scholar-explains-horrifying-reason-trumps-supporters-celebrated-armageddon</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In&nbsp; a Pensacola, Florida rally Friday evening, Republican state Senator Doug Broxson suggested to supporters of Donald Trump that the president’s controversial decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem may usher in the biblical end times.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Now, I don’t know about you, but when I heard about Jerusalem — where the King of Kings [applause] where our soon coming King is coming back to Jerusalem, it is because President Trump declared Jerusalem to be capital of Israel,” Broxson predicted. The crowd cheered.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This week, theological scholar Dr. Diana Butler Bass wrote a Twitter thread explaining the link between recognition of Jerusalem, evangelical Christians, and the apocalypse. That is important because rebuilding the Temple is the event that will spark the events of the Book of Revelation and the End Times.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to Bass, the counsel of evangelical adviser that Trump surrounds himself with take such “End Times” prophecies literally</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Of all the possible theological dog-whistles to his evangelical base, this is the biggest,” she continued. “Trump is reminding them that he is carrying out God’s will to these Last Days. They’ve been waiting for this, praying for this. They want war in the Middle East. The Battle of Armageddon, at which time Jesus Christ will return to the Earth and vanquish all God’s enemies.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">She warned that for some evangelicals this is considered a “climax of history.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“And Trump is taking them there. To the promised judgment, to their sure victory. The righteous will be ushered to heaven; the reprobate will be banished to hellfire,” Bass went on. “People believe this. Really believe this. Have given their lives to these ideas, sing about them in their churches, evangelize others, teach them in Sunday schools. And, this morning, with the news of Jerusalem, these people are ecstatic. This is the fulfillment of biblical prophecy. And Donald Trump is not only acting on a campaign promise, but enacting a theological one.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">She went on to explain that the reason many white evangelicals supported Trump to the tune of 80 percent is more than an abortion issue. Many actually believe that Trump is unfolding God’s purpose.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“They believe that Donald Trump is God’s instrument to move us closer to the Rapture, the Judgment, and the End,” she wrote. “Because to them, that’s actually the beginning — the beginning of their reward and heavenly bliss.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Other religious groups might raise hell about the disruption of peace and stability, but Bass explained that evangelicals don’t care because they’re anticipating peace in another world than the Earth.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“What matters is that Jesus comes back in Judgement,” she continued. “To these sorts of Christians, that Judgment is the only true peace. Everything is phony, deceptive, even evil. Millions of American Christians believe all this. Millions of Trump voters. Sacred history is unfolding right now because of Donald Trump and God. They’ve based their faith, their identity, their purpose, their eternal lives on these ideas. Trust me. There’s no arguing with any of it.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Dr. Robert Jeffress, the senior pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas celebrated Jerusalem officially becoming the capital of Israel because it will be where Jesus Christ returns.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“It is the place where Jesus, a Jew himself, was crucified and where he was resurrected. It is the place where he will set foot again on earth at his second coming,” he said in a statement.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">1. The human race would have the ability to exterminate itself (nuclear weapons)The United Church of God names the 7 prophecies that foretell the second coming of Christ.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">2. A Jewish homeland had to be reestablished in the Middle East (Trump has now proclaimed Jerusalem the capital)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">3. There must be two leaders: The end-time king of the North and king of the South</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“At the time of the end the king of the South shall attack him; and the king of the North shall come against him like a whirlwind, with chariots, horsemen, and with many ships; and he shall enter the countries, overwhelm them and pass through. He shall also enter the Glorious Land [the Holy Land], and many countries shall be overthrown” (Daniel 11:40-41).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">4. An end-time union of European nations (European Union)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">5. End-time rise and fall of Israel and Judah</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">6. The gospel will be preached in all the world (YouTube)</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">7. Instant worldwide communications and God’s final witnesses (The internet).</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/right-wing/blowing-democracy-and-charities-one-fell-swoop</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There’s a great deal wrong with the House-passed tax overhaul bill, but its most heinous provision may be one that effectively blows up both the campaign-finance laws and the charitable sector at the same time.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By essentially repealing the so-called Johnson Amendment, a tax provision that bars charities from engaging in partisan politics, the House legislation frees up big donors to funnel even more unlimited, undisclosed money into campaigns, and, for the first time, to deduct that money from their taxes. The bill also threatens the credibility and viability of charitable groups, and would drastically reduce charitable giving—even as it robs education, housing, and health-care assistance from working families who invariably will turn to charities for help.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Senate tax bill does not repeal the Johnson Amendment, enacted in 1954 at the urging of then–Senate Minority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson, and thousands of charitable and religious leaders are now lobbying to ensure that it stays in the final legislation. The list of those lined up against the repeal is impressive: 5,500 charities and foundations, 4,200 faith leaders, and more than 100 religious and denominational organizations.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">So who wants it? Far-right Christian groups were the first to convince authors of the House bill to let churches alone engage in endorsements. But that measure was expanded at the last minute to include all charities, suggesting that big GOP donors, who would like nothing better than to deduct the big donations they funnel through nonprofits to influence elections, are gunning for it, too.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The repeal’s backers say it protects free speech and religious liberty, but these are red herrings. Churches and charities are perfectly free to endorse candidates, they just can’t do it with tax-free money. The government’s bargain with such groups is: We will exempt you from taxes and let you raise tax-deductible contributions, if you stay out of partisan politics. This protects charities from government meddling, and ensures that taxpayers aren’t forced to subsidize endorsements of candidates they oppose.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Campaign-finance watchdogs hate the repeal because it would create incentives for all political money to flow into unrestricted, secret channels. Right now, super PACs may raise unlimited money, but they at least must disclose its sources. Social-welfare and trade groups may raise limitless contributions, which they need not disclose, and they spend hundreds of millions on campaigns under the guise of promoting issues—but at least that money is not tax-deductible.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The House bill creates the very real possibility that political players will create sham “charities” and “churches” to rake in massive, undisclosed, and now tax-deductible campaign donations that will become the new normal in American elections. The campaign-finance system may seem like a world without rules today, but the freewheeling realm of super PACs and politically active social-welfare groups will look like a paragon of accountability and transparency if charities become the new vehicles of choice for political spending.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even worse, say nonprofit-sector leaders, the bill would erode the public’s trust in charities, lumping them in with unpopular parties and candidates, and driving down contributions. “Charitable nonprofits don’t want to be dragged into the toxic political wasteland,” declared Tim Delaney, president and CEO of the National Council of Nonprofits, when the House unveiled its revised tax proposal earlier this month. Delaney and his allies warn that the House plan would also make churches and charities vulnerable to pressure from politicians.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The House tax bill purports to limit abuses by requiring charities to engage in politics only minimally and “in the ordinary course” of their normal activities. But this ill-defined standard would force the Internal Revenue Service, which has done virtually nothing to enforce political abuses by tax-exempts in any case, into the impossible role of charitable referee. If voters begin to see charities as quasi-political groups, moreover, Congress could face pressure to eliminate the deductibility of charitable contributions altogether.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">All this comes on top of several other provisions in both the House and Senate tax bills that are expected to substantially reduce charitable giving. Both bills expand the standard tax deduction, which nonprofit sector advocates say would reduce charitable giving incentives for all but the wealthiest families. The House bill removes the estate tax, which has historically spurred charitable giving. The Senate bill retains the estate tax, but doubles the exemption amount—still threatening charitable donations, but to a lesser degree. The House bill would reduce charitable giving in 2018 by $12 billion to $20 billion, estimates the Tax Policy Center.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This year marks the centennial of the charitable tax deduction, which was first written into the tax code in 1917. Instead of celebrating, the nation’s charities are fighting for their lives. The GOP tax plan not only slashes services to average Americans to underwrite tax cuts for the super-rich, but also makes it harder for churches and other charities to pick up the slack. By erasing the firewall between charity and politics, the House bill doubles the damage. As Delaney, of the National Council of Nonprofits, told The American Prospect: “This is dangerous for democracy, and very harmful to the 501(c)(3) community.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Eliza Newlin Carney is The American Prospect's senior editor.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">djt 1st pres to spk; sez ff used god 4x in doc/const?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/democratic-strategist-says-extreme-right-wing-evangelical-christians-made-deal</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">pfaw weekly wignuttery</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.rightwingwatch.org/post/these-people-got-helicopters-they-got-cocaine-alex-jones-wants-your-megachurch-tithe</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Alex Jones, the conspiracy theory architect behind Infowars, asked his listeners to consider giving money to his operation rather than donating to large megachurches because he uses the money to fight the globalist world order instead of spending it on prostitutes, helicopters and cocaine.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a typical fundraising pitch posted on YouTube yesterday, Jones stressed how important it is to financially support his organization and the local stations that carry his broadcast. He even suggested that financially supporting Infowars was better than donating to churches.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Is your local church fighting the globalists?” Jones asked listeners. “Is it exposing the pedophile rings? Is it exposing the new world order?”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“These churches want to play it safe right into hell,” Jones said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jones went on to explain that he grew up near many prominent megachurch pastors in Dallas, Texas, and was exposed to “some of the biggest names out there” while growing up.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“I know about these preachers behind the scenes. Let me tell you, I’ve never seen hookers that look so good,” Jones said. “So you just need to understand these people got helicopters, they got cocaine, and they are partying.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Everyone worships these stupid preachers and they’re not doing anything to fight the world government,” Jones said.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/why-evangelicals-believe-theyre-most-persecuted-group-america</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">mike davis:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But if visceral nationalism and white anger gave him the nomination it was not enough to ensure that the big battalions of the GOP, especially the evangelicals who had supported Ted Cruz, would actively campaign for him. Trump’s stroke of genius was to let the religious right, including former Cruz cheerleaders David Barton and Tony Perkins, draft the Republican program and then, as surety, to select one of their heroes as his running mate.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">At the same time, Rebekah Mercer, whose family super-PAC had been Cruz’s chief backer, seconded Trump her crack political team: pollster Kellyanne Conway, Citizens United head David Bossie, and Breitbart chair Stephen Bannon. (“It would be difficult to overstate Rebekah’s influence in Trump World right now,” one insider told Politico after the election.) This fusion of the two anti-establishment Republican insurgencies was the crucial event that many election analysts overlooked.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">They exaggerated the blue-collar “populist” factor while underestimating the equity acquired by the right-to-life movement and other social-conservative causes in Trump’s victory. With the Supreme Court at stake and Pence smiling from the dais, it was easier for the congregation to pardon the sinner at the head of the ticket. Trump, as a result, received a larger percentage of the evangelical vote than Romney, McCain, or Bush, while Clinton underperformed Obama among Catholics, especially Latinos (down 8 points). Against all expectations, Trump also improved on Romney’s performance in the suburbs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But – and this is a very important qualification – he did not increase Romney’s total vote in either the South or the Midwest; indeed he fell slightly shy in both regions. Clinton, however, received almost one million fewer votes than Obama in the South and almost three million less than the president in the Midwest. (See tables one and two.) Abdicating any serious effort in smaller industrial towns and cities, she focused almost entirely on major metropolitan counties and media markets.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Furthermore, in contrast to Obama, she had no outreach strategy toward evangelicals and her position on late-term abortion, even if misrepresented, alienated untold numbers of Obama Catholics. Likewise she ignored Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s urgings to invest campaign resources in rural areas. While Trump was factory-hopping in the hinterlands, her itinerary skipped the entire state of</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Wisconsin as well as major contested centers such as Dayton. The Clinton camp obviously believed that aggressive campaigning in the last weeks by the Obamas and Sanders, reinforced by celebrities such as Springsteen and Beyonce, would ensure strong turnouts by African Americans and millennials in the urban cores while she harvested votes from irate Republican women in the suburbs.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/real-reason-evangelicals-are-so-worshipful-donald-trump</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Why would anyone support such a leader? More specifically, why would any supposed “Christian” support Donald Trump, who appears to represent the antithesis of Christian virtues in so many ways?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Writing at Talking Points Memo, editor Josh Marshall offers the following insights:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But Trump is able to take people of some apparent substance and attainment and destroy them as well. The key though is that he doesn’t destroy them. In his orbit, under some kind of spell, he makes them destroy themselves. It is always a self-destruction. He’s like a black hole. But for this there’s no ready explanation. Because what is the power? The force?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I puzzled over this for some time. Eventually I sensed that Trump wasn’t inducing people’s self-destruction so much as he was acting like a divining rod, revealing rot that existed already but was not apparent. … The rot was there but hidden. Trump is the moonlight. Perhaps better to say, to invert our metaphor, Trump is the darkness. …</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This seems most palpably the case with the political evangelical community with which Trump has maintained, since early in his campaign, a profound and profoundly cynical mutual embrace. Here I use the term advisedly: I don’t mean evangelical Christians or even conservative evangelical Christians but the evangelical right political faction, which is distinct and different. Nothing I have seen before has more clearly revealed this group’s moral rot than the adoration of Trump, an unchurched hedonist with the moral compass of a predator who is lauded and almost worshipped purely and entirely because he produces political deliverables.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Despite his strong words, Marshall does not go far enough. Christian evangelicals (“Dominionists” and Christian nationalists especially) support Trump because he shares their most important values.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump and the Republican Party are waging a crusade to take away women’s reproductive rights and freedoms.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump and the Republican Party want to remove constitutional and other legal barriers that limit the ability of churches and other religious organizations to engage in overt political lobbying while retaining their tax-exempt status.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump and the Republican Party want to destroy the social safety net and believe that wealth and money are indicators of human worth and value. A belief in the “prosperity gospel” and a crude form of Calvinism where money and wealth are signs of being among “the elect” and of God’s blessing has been endorsed by many Christian evangelical leaders.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump and the Republican Party embrace racism and white supremacy. Southern Baptists and other white Christian evangelical faith communities have a long and deep history of racism against people of color — especially African-Americans.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There is also a biblical-mythological dimension for why Christian evangelicals support Trump. Many right-wing Christians have convinced themselves that he is a leader in the tradition of Cyrus the Great or King David who, while being deeply flawed, can be used as an instrument of God’s will.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">There is another factor, rooted in emotion and irrationality, that also helps explain evangelical Christians’ support for Donald Trump.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The studies, based on surveys of more than 900 people, also found some similarities between religious and non-religious people. In both groups the most dogmatic are less adept at analytical thinking, and also less likely to look at issues from other’s perspectives. … The results showed religious participants as a whole had a higher level of dogmatism, empathetic concern and prosocial intentions, while the nonreligious performed better on the measure of analytic reasoning. Decreasing empathy among the nonreligious corresponded to increasing dogmatism.New research published in the Journal of Religion and Health explains it this way:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Professor Anthony Jack highlights the implications of this research for American politics: “With all this talk about fake news, the Trump administration, by emotionally resonating with people, appeals to members of its base while ignoring facts.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jared Friedman, a co-author of this new research, concludes, “It suggests that religious individuals may cling to certain beliefs, especially those which seem at odds with analytic reasoning, because those beliefs resonate with their moral sentiments.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Christian evangelicals’ rejection of empirical reality and their habituation into believing the absurd and the fantastical mates perfectly with the zealotry of the broader American right, which views politics as a form of religious fundamentalism.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Faith, after all, is a matter of believing in that which cannot be proven by normal or empirical means. This definition is a perfect description of both movement conservatism and the Christian right.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ultimately, Christian evangelicals and Donald Trump are united in an imperfect marriage because they share mutual goals. This is an unholy alliance and, as such, a perfect emblem of today’s Republican Party.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Chauncey DeVega is a politics staff writer for Salon.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">http://www.alternet.org/right-wing/donald-trump-chrisian-fascists</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump’s ideological vacuum, the more he is isolated and attacked, is being filled by the Christian right. This Christianized fascism, with its network of megachurches, schools, universities and law schools and its vast radio and television empire, is a potent ally for a beleaguered White House. The Christian right has been organizing and preparing to take power for decades. If the nation suffers another economic collapse, which is probably inevitable, another catastrophic domestic terrorist attack or a new war, President Trump’s ability to force the Christian right’s agenda on the public and shut down dissent will be dramatically enhanced. In the presidential election, Trump had 81 percent of white evangelicals behind him.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trump’s moves to restrict abortion, defund Planned Parenthood, permit discrimination against LGBT people in the name of “religious liberty” and allow churches to become active in politics by gutting the Johnson Amendment, along with his nominations of judges championed by the Federalist Society and his call for a ban on Muslim immigrants, have endeared him to the Christian right. He has rolled back civil rights legislation and business and environmental regulations. He has elevated several stalwarts of the Christian right into power—Mike Pence to the vice presidency, Jeff Sessions to the Justice Department, Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, Betsy DeVos to the Department of Education, Tom Price to Health and Human Services and Ben Carson to Housing and Urban Development. He embraces the white supremacy, bigotry, American chauvinism, greed, religious intolerance, anger and racism that define the Christian right.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Click here for a 2007 video of Chris Hedges speaking about his book “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">More important, Trump’s disdain for facts and his penchant for magical thinking and conspiracy theories mesh well with the worldview of the Christian right, which sees itself as under attack by the satanic forces of secular humanism embodied in the media, academia, the liberal establishment, Hollywood and the Democratic Party. In this worldview, climate change is not real, Barack Obama is a Muslim and millions of people voted illegally in the 2016 election.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The followers of the Christian right, like Trump and his brain trust, including Stephen Bannon, are Manicheans. They see the world in black and white, good and evil, them and us. Trump’s call in his speech in Poland for a crusade against the godless hoards of Muslims fleeing from the wars and chaos we created replicates the view of the Christian right. Christian right leaders in a sign of support went to the White House on July 10 to pray over Trump. Two days later Pat Robertson showed up there to interview the president for his Christian Broadcasting Network.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If the alliance between these zealots and the government succeeds, it will snuff out the last vestiges of American democracy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On the surface it appears to be incongruous that the Christian right would rally behind a slick New York real estate developer who is a very public serial philanderer and adulterer, has no regard for the truth, is consumed by greed, does not appear to read or know the Bible, routinely defrauds and cheats his investors and contractors, expresses a crude misogyny and an even cruder narcissism and appears to yearn for despotism. In fact, these are the very characteristics that define most of the leaders of the Christian right. Trump has preyed on desperate people through the thousands of slot machines in his casinos, his sham university and his real estate deals. Megachurch pastors prey on their followers by extracting “seed offerings,” “love gifts,” tithes and donations and by selling miracle healings along with “prayer clothes,” self-help books, audio and video recordings and even protein shakes. Pastors have established within their megachurches, as Trump did in his businesses, despotic fiefdoms. They cannot be challenged or questioned any more than an omnipotent Trump could be challenged on the reality television show “The Apprentice.” And they seek to replicate their little tyrannies on a national scale, with white men in charge.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The personal piety of most of the ministers who lead the Christian right is a facade. Their private lives are usually marked by hedonistic squalor that includes mansions, private jets, limousines, retinues of bodyguards, personal assistants and servants, shopping sprees, lavish vacations and sexual escapades that rival those carried out by Trump. And because they run “churches,” in many cases church funds pay for their tax-free empires, including their extravagant lifestyles. They also engage in the nepotism found in the Trump organization, elevating family members to prominent or highly paid positions and passing on the businesses to their children.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Christian right’s scandals, which give a glimpse into the sordid lives of these multimillionaire pastors, are legion. Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker’s Praise the Lord Club, for example, raked in as much as $1 million a week before Jim Bakker went to prison for nearly five years. He was convicted of fraud and other charges in 1989 because of a $158 million scheme in which followers paid for vacations that never materialized. As the Bakker empire came apart, there also were accusations of drug use and rape. Tammy Faye died in 2007, and now Jim Bakker is back, peddling survival food for the end days and telling his significantly reduced television audience that anyone who opposes Trump is the Antichrist.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Paul and Jan Crouch, who gave the Bakkers their start, founded Trinity Broadcasting, the world’s largest televangelist network, now run by their son Matt and his wife, Laurie. Viewers were encouraged to call prayer counselors at the toll-free number shown at the bottom of the TV screen. It was a short step from talking with a prayer counselor to making a “love gift” and becoming a “partner” in Trinity Broadcasting and then sending in more money during one of the frequent Praise-a-Thons.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Crouches reveled in tasteless kitsch, as does Trump. They sat during their popular nightly program in front of stained glass windows that overlooked Louis XVI-inspired sets awash in gold rococo and red velvet, glittering chandeliers and a gold-painted piano. The network emblem, which Paul Crouch wore on the pocket of his blue double-breasted blazer, featured a crown, a lion, a horse, a white dove, a cross and Latin phrases among other elements. The Crouches would have been at home in Trump Tower, where the president has a faux “Trump crest”—allegedly plagiarized—and has decorated his penthouse as if it was part of Versailles.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Crouches were masters of manipulation. They exhorted viewers to send in checks for $1,000, even if they could not afford it. Write the check anyway, Paul Crouch, who died in 2013, told them, as a “step of faith” and the Lord would repay them many times over. “Do you think God would have any trouble getting $1,000 extra to you somehow?” he asked during one Praise-a-Thon broadcast. Viewers, many of whom struggled with deep despair and believed that miracles and magic alone held them back from the abyss, often found it impossible to resist this emotional pressure.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN) is home to many of the worst charlatans in the Christian right, including the popular healer Benny Hinn, who says that Adam was a superhero who could fly to the moon and claims that one day the dead will be raised by watching TBN from inside their coffins. Hinn claims his “anointings” have cured cancer, AIDS, deafness, blindness and numerous other ailments and physical injuries. Those who have not been cured, he says, did not send in enough money.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">&nbsp;These religious hucksters are some of the most accomplished con artists in the country, a trait they share with the current occupant of the Oval Office.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">I wrote a book on the Christian right in 2007 called “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.” I did not use the word “fascist” lightly. I spent several hours, at the end of two years of reporting, with two of the country’s foremost scholars on fascism—Fritz Stern and Robert O. Paxton. Did this ideology fit the parameters of classical fascism? Was it virulent enough and organized enough to seize power? Would it go to the ruthless extremes of previous fascist movements to persecute and silence dissent? Has our deindustrialized society replicated the crippling despair, alienation and rage that always feed fascist movements?</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The evangelicalism promoted by the Christian right is very different from the evangelicalism and fundamentalism of a century ago. The emphasis on personal piety that defined the old movement, the call to avoid the contamination of politics, has been replaced by Christian Reconstructionism, called Dominionism by some. This new ideology is about taking control of all institutions, including the government, to build a “Christian” nation. Rousas John Rushdoony in his 1973 book, “The Institutes of Biblical Law,” first articulated it. Rushdoony argued that God gives the elect, just as he gave Adam and Noah, dominion over the earth to build a Christian society. Their state will come about with the physical eradication of the forces of Satan. It is the duty of the church and the elect to “rescue” the world so Christ can return.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This is an ideology of death. It promises that the secular, humanist society will be physically destroyed. The Ten Commandments will form the basis of our legal system. Creationism or “Intelligent Design” will be taught in public schools. People who are considered social deviants, including homosexuals, immigrants, secular humanists, feminists, Jews, Muslims, criminals and those dismissed as “nominal Christians”—meaning Christians who do not embrace the Christian right’s perverted and heretical interpretation of the Bible—will be silenced, imprisoned or killed. The role of the federal government will be reduced to protecting property rights, “homeland” security and waging war. Church organizations will be funded and empowered by the government to run social-welfare agencies. The poor, condemned for sloth, indolence and sinfulness, will be denied government assistance. The death penalty will be expanded to include “moral crimes,” including apostasy, blasphemy, sodomy and witchcraft, as well as abortion, which will be treated as murder. Women will be subordinate to men. Those who practice other faiths will become, at best, second-class citizens and eventually outcasts. The wars in the Middle East will be defined as religious crusades against Muslims. There will be no separation of church and state. The only legitimate voices will be “Christian.” America will become an agent of God. Those who defy the “Christian” authorities will be branded as agents of Satan.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Tens of millions of Americans are already hermetically sealed within this bizarre worldview. They are given a steady diet of conspiracy theories and lies on the internet, in their churches, in Christian schools and colleges and on Christian television and radio. Elizabeth Dilling, who wrote “The Red Network” and was a Nazi sympathizer, is required reading. Thomas Jefferson, who favored separation of church and state, is ignored. This Christian propaganda hails the “significant contributions” of the Confederacy. Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who led the anti-communist witch hunts in the 1950s, is rehabilitated as an American hero. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, along with the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya, is defined as part of the worldwide battle against satanic Islamic terror. Presently, nearly 40 percent of the U.S. public believes in Creationism or “Intelligent Design.” And nearly a third of the population, 94 million people, consider themselves evangelical.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Those who remain in a reality-based universe often dismiss these malcontents as buffoons. They do not take seriously the huge segment of the public, mostly white and working class, who because of economic distress have primal yearnings for vengeance, new glory and moral renewal and are easily seduced by magical thinking. These are the yearnings and emotions Trump has exploited politically.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Those who embrace this movement need to feel, even if they are not, that they are victims surrounded by dark and sinister groups bent on their destruction. They need to elevate themselves to the role of holy warriors, infused with a noble calling and purpose. They need to sanctify the rage and hypermasculinity that are the core of fascism. The rigidity and simplicity of their belief, which includes being anointed for a special purpose in life by God, are potent weapons in the fight against their own demons and desire for meaning.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty,” Simone Weil wrote.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">These believers, like all fascists, detest the reality-based world. They condemn it as contaminated, decayed and immoral. This world took their jobs. It destroyed their future. It ruined their communities. It doomed their children. It flooded their lives with alcohol, opioids, pornography, sexual abuse, jail sentences, domestic violence, deprivation and despair. And then, from the depths of suicidal despair, they suddenly discovered that God has a plan for them. God will save them. God will intervene in their lives to promote and protect them. God has called them to carry out his holy mission in the world and to be rich, powerful and happy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The rational, secular forces, those that speak in the language of fact and evidence, are hated and feared, for they seek to pull believers back into “the culture of death” that nearly destroyed them. The magical belief system, as it was for impoverished German workers who flocked to the Nazi Party, is an emotional life raft. It is all that supports them. The only way to blunt this movement is to reintegrate these people into the economy, to give them economic stability through good wages and benefits, to restore their self-esteem. They need to live in a society that is not predatory but instead provides well-funded public schools, free university education and universal health care, a society in which they and their families can prosper.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Let us not stand at the open gates of the city waiting passively for the barbarians. They are coming. They are slouching towards Bethlehem. Let us shake off our complacency and cynicism. Let us openly defy the liberal establishment, which will not save us, to demand and fight for economic reparations for the poor and the working class. Let us give all Americans a reality-based hope for the future. Time is running out. If we do not act, American fascists, clutching Christian crosses, waving American flags and orchestrating mass recitations of the pledge of allegiance, united behind the ludicrous figure of Donald Trump, will ride this rage to power.&nbsp;</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Chris Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, writes a regular column for Truthdig every Monday. Hedges' most recent book is "Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt."</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div><div style=""><font size="4" style="" face="Times New Roman"></font></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>