Trump's Christian Apologists Are Unchristian (William Saletan, Slate)

[highplainsdem]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/11/trumps-christian-apologists-are-unchristian.html

Stetzer and other evangelical leaders are in the business of saving souls. But today, the souls in peril are in their own flock. Nationalism, tribalism, and a corrupt, ruthless Republican president are reviving old demons and summoning new ones. The “family values” concerns of 10, 20, or 30 years ago—homosexuality, premarital sex, women in the military—have been overtaken by a different set of moral issues, often derided by the right as “social justice.” On these emerging issues, white evangelical Protestants—for simplicity’s sake, I’ll call them WEPs—are, more than any other religious constituency, standing on the wrong side. The problem isn’t that they’re imposing their morality on others. The problem is that what they’re imposing isn’t morality. It’s wickedness.

This isn’t true of all white evangelicals, much less all Christians. It would be false and reckless to condemn all WEPs, just as it’s false and reckless to condemn all Muslims or Jews. The people doing the best work against perversions of Islam are Muslims, and the people doing the best work against perversions of evangelical Christianity are evangelicals like Stetzer. I’ve met some of them through the Faith Angle Forum, a project of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. At a conference last week, I sat with them as we studied surveys of religious voters. Stetzer is right to worry. The numbers are bad.

WEPs are one of Trump’s most loyal constituencies. Eighty-one percent of them voted for him in 2016. That’s 20 percentage points higher than Trump’s vote share among any other religious group. It’s higher than the percentage of WEPs who voted for George W. Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney. The wide gap between WEPs and other faith communities in support for Trump persists to this day. Every other group, on balance, views Trump unfavorably. WEPs, by a ratio of 2 to 1, view him favorably.

Many Americans reject Trump because of his meanness, his misogyny, his ethnic demagoguery, and his squalid and abusive personal behavior. But most WEPs don’t. In a September poll for the Public Religion Research Institute, two-thirds of white Catholics and white mainline Protestants agreed that Trump had “damaged the dignity of the presidency.” Most WEPs said he hadn’t. In an ABC News/Washington Post survey taken in August, most whites agreed that Trump was guilty of a crime if it was true that he had directed his then-lawyer Michael Cohen to “influence the 2016 election by arranging to pay off two women who said they had affairs with Trump.” Trump’s core constituency, white men without a college degree, also agreed. But most WEPs didn’t.

To accommodate Trump, white evangelicals have retreated from moral judgment of him.
In 2011, a PRRI survey asked whether “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.” At that point, two years into Barack Obama’s presidency, only 30 percent of WEPs said yes. But in October 2016, after the release of Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood tape, 72 percent of WEPs said yes. The reversal among WEPs was twice as big as similar shifts among Catholics and white mainline Protestants. In a May poll commissioned by the Billy Graham Center, nearly half of black evangelicals said personal character had influenced their voting decisions in the 2016 presidential election. Fewer than 30 percent of white evangelicals said the same.

Many WEPs haven’t just surrendered moral judgment. They’ve abdicated social responsibility. Compared with other whites, they’re more resistant to federal spending on poor people. The charitable explanation for this gap is that white evangelicals are skeptical about federal spending, not about helping the poor. But even when survey questions focus on help, not on spending, they’re unmoved. The BGC poll asked respondents to choose, from a list of 12 issues and traits, which was most important in determining how they voted in 2016. Among black and Hispanic evangelicals, a candidate’s “ability to help those in need” was the second or third most commonly named factor. Among white evangelicals, it ranked almost dead last.

-snip-

Initially, when Stetzer diagnosed race and ethnicity as sources of the white evangelical backlash against immigration, he was talking about gaps between white and nonwhite evangelicals on poll questions that were open to interpretation. But PRRI, in its 2018 survey, proved that race and ethnicity were factors. The survey informed respondents that “by 2045, African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and other mixed racial and ethnic groups will together be a majority of the population.” Then came the query: “Do you think the likely impact of this coming demographic change will be mostly positive or mostly negative?” After listening to this question, most white Catholics and most white mainline Protestants said the change would be positive. Most WEPs said it would be negative. A PRRI/Atlantic poll taken in June found the same result.

In his warning on Election Day, Stetzer faced the bitter truth: “It is hard not to conclude that far too many white evangelicals are motivated by racial anxiety and xenophobia.”

-snip-

[EndGOPPropaganda]

1. Of course they are un-Christian. They're really authoritarian personalities in Xian clothing.

They're motivated by their authoritarian personality traits, which both make them likely to believe in the Christian church, and also make them likely to believe in the Republican authorities.

[BootinUp]

2. Damn it, had to stop listening to pink floyd to respond to this important thread

This is the kind of article that needs to get more exposure. So read it pass it around. Thanks.

[BootinUp]

3. Can't get 5 recs?

[flying_wahini]

4. Great article, thanks.

[TlalocW]

5. I've enjoyed telling conservative white evangelical preachers

Both online and in person, that if they want to see the reason so many people are declaring themselves as "nones" or as outright atheists, all they have to do is look in the mirror. Their hypocrisy on how they treated an incredibly decent family man like Obama to a scumbag like Trump tells us all we need to know about their "morals." And their behavior is captured and available for all to see forever.

TlalocW

[Mariana]

6. If they aren't Christian, what are they, exactly?

Obviously, if they aren't Christian, they must be some kind of non-Christian. Are they atheists? Are they followers of some other religion?