Worldly politics, not heavenly powers, inspire evangelicals to stick with Trump
Opinion: David Horsey at the LA Times
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/topoftheticket/la-na-tt-evangelicals-trump-20170829-story.html
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My own journey of faith began in the Free Methodist Church when I was a kid, and it has left me with a warm place in my heart for evangelical Christians. It is due to those sympathetic feelings that I am particularly disturbed that such a high number of evangelicals have hitched their hopes to the morally bankrupt man who is now our president.
Donald Trump has proven himself throughout his lifetime to be an adulterous, lecherous, mendacious, self-centered human being who has consistently abused and misused people to aggrandize himself. Of the medieval Seven Deadly Sins, he scores big on lust, greed, wrath, envy and pride — and the laxity in the way he carries out his presidential duties may also put sloth on the list. The only one of the seven sins for which he gets a pass is gluttony, unless one counts his ravenous hunger for high ratings and adoring crowds.
Yet, despite his appalling character, more than 80% of evangelicals voted for Trump in the 2016 election and, according to recent polls, that support has not significantly slipped. Why?
During the campaign and in the months since, the news media have generally made the assumption that evangelical antipathy to abortion and same-sex marriage explains this paradox. But an analysis published by the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion at the University of Chicago Divinity School finds that answer is too simple. Academic and writer Myriam Renaud, author of the analysis, looked at surveys of evangelical voters and found that, though pastors and other conservative religious leaders made a big deal out of the hot-button social issues and were determined to get solidly conservative justices appointed to the Supreme Court, the folks in the pews said they were far more driven to vote for Trump by fears of terrorism and concerns about their own diminished economic fortunes.
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