Amazing Disgrace - How Donald Trump hijacked the religious right.

[BeckyDem]

By Sarah Posner
New Republic
March 20, 2017

Back in August 2015, when Donald Trump's presidential ambitions were widely considered a joke, Russell Moore was worried. A prominent leader of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation's largest Protestant denomination, Moore knew that some of the faithful were falling for Trump, a philandering, biblically illiterate candidate from New York City whose lifestyle and views embodied everything the religious right professed to abhor. The month before, a Washington Post poll had found that Trump was already being backed by more white evangelicals than any other Republican candidate.

Moore, a boyish-looking pastor from Mississippi, had positioned himself as the face of the "new" religious right: a bigger-hearted, diversity-oriented version that was squarely opposed to Trump's "us versus them" rhetoric. Speaking to a gathering of religion reporters in a hotel ballroom in Philadelphia, Moore said that his "first priority" was to combat the "demonizing" and "depersonalizing" of immigrants — people, he pointed out, who were "created in the image of God." Only by refocusing on such true "gospel" values, Moore believed, could evangelicals appeal to young people who had been fleeing the church in droves, and expand its outreach to African Americans and Latinos. Evangelicals needed to do more than win elections — their larger duty was to win souls. Moore, in short, wanted the Christian right to reclaim the moral high ground — and Trump, in his estimation, was about as low as you could get.

"The church of Jesus Christ ought to be the last people to fall for hucksters and demagogues," Moore wrote in Onward: Engaging the Culture Without Losing the Gospel, a book he had just published at the time. "But too often we do."

Excerpt.
In fact, it wasn't abortion that sparked the creation of the religious right. The movement was actually galvanized in the 1970s and early '80s, when the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University and other conservative Christian schools that refused to admit nonwhites. It was the government's actions against segregated schools, not the legalization of abortion, that "enraged the Christian community," Moral Majority co-founder Paul Weyrich has acknowledged.

By openly embracing the racism of the alt-right, Trump effectively played to the religious right's own roots in white supremacy. Richard Spencer, president of the National Policy Institute and the alt-right's most visible spokesman, argued during the campaign that GOP voters aren't really motivated by Christian values, as they profess, but rather by deep racial anxieties. "Trump has shown the hand of the GOP," Spencer told me in September. "The GOP is a white person's populist party."

http://www.theinvestigativefund.org/investigations/politicsandgovernment/2331/amazing_disgrace/?page=entire

[msongs]

1. it's easy to sucker people who need messiahs - fleecing the flock in the name of religion

is a multi-billion $$ business in the USA. gotta Harvest those souls for cash

[Fast Walker 52]

13. Most religion is a con, and true believers must be very suscetible to conmen

[luvMIdog]

2. first thing he did when he saw himself doing bad in the debates was meet with Jerry Falwell Jr.

need I say more?

[BeckyDem]

4. Trump uses anyone he can and these people don't care. They have a disturbing outlook and a

dangerous one.

Excerpt from the end.

Schenck fears that "Trump and his gang" have exposed an evangelical culture "that doesn't know itself." Sitting in his Capitol Hill townhouse, Schenck picks up his copy of Ethics, by the anti-Nazi theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer, he says, argued that because Jesus was a "man for others," Christians are called "not to hold the other in contempt, or to be afraid of the other, or contemptuous of the other." Yet when Schenck visited evangelical churches during the Obama years, he lost count of how many times he was asked, quite earnestly: "Is the president the Antichrist?"

Schenck still holds out hope, as does Moore, that a new generation of evangelicals will ultimately reject what Trump and the alt-right represent. "I do think something is going to emerge out of this catastrophe," he says. "It's going to help us to define what is true evangelical religion and what is not."

But for now, he concedes, the religious right has forfeited its moral standing by aligning itself with the alt-right's gospel of white supremacy. "Evangelicals are a tool of Donald Trump," Schenck says. "This could be the undoing of American evangelicalism. We could just become a political operation in the guise of a church."

[luvMIdog]

5. they're using each other

They're using him to get their hate agenda passed & he used them to get elected.

[BeckyDem]

7. They have emboldened each other at least for the time being.

This doesn't get much air time on the news cycles.

[Jonny Appleseed]

3. He's just mad that people are giving their money to con that isn't his

[PdxSean]

6. Not a hijacking.

Trump did not hijack the "religious" right, he IS the religious right and all the hypocritical, insincere, naive, arrogant, cold-hearted, mysogynistic, valueless, money-hungry, unChristian, racist glory it represents.

[BeckyDem]

8. Trump morphed into whatever he needed to in order to get votes.

[PdxSean]

9. I agree.

But they voted for him because they wanted him to be their president. If Christ had run against Trump they STILL would have voted for Trump because Trump is who they are.

[BeckyDem]

10. Yes. He told them what they wanted to hear. I was just saying to another poster, this kind of

scrutiny is lacking in the media. The Evangelical leader opposed to Trump's message is someone they should be looking to give air time to.

[sharedvalues]

11. "The GOP is a white person's populist party" - been true since 1968. (ie Atwater)

Spencer's claiming "The GOP is a white person's populist party" now? That's been true since Nixon in 1972 and arguably back to the Civil Rights Act's passage.
Nixon embraced racism
Reagan embraced racism
GWB embraced racism

Does Spencer think Trump has discovered some new way to get GOP votes?

Remember Atwater in 1981:

You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can't say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

[Permanut]

12. An Unholy Alliance..

of the Bible thumpers, the Wealthy and the racist government haters. Controlled by the wealthy. Great post, Becky.

[world wide wally]

14. That is when Trump realized that the 2 Corinthians were right about how stupid voters are