Trump's populism should enrage Christians. How come it doesn't?

[Nevilledog]

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Arick Wierson 🇦🇴🇧🇷🇺🇸
@ArickWierson
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⁦@MJGerson⁩ takes a 2,000 year old scribe’s knife and dissects the Christian Right’s embrace of #Trumpism, stripping it bare of the fat and sinews of Fox News and GOP political opportunists. A must read this long weekend.

washingtonpost.com
Opinion | Trump’s populism should enrage Christians. How come it doesn’t?
The MAGA faithful’s resentments, malevolence and violence are a form of moral ruin. So why have so many American evangelicals signed on?
3:55 PM · Sep 4, 2022

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/09/01/michael-gerson-evangelical-christian-maga-democracy/

No paywall
https://archive.ph/HztvL

In many American places on a pleasant Sunday afternoon it is possible, as I recently did, to have coffee in the city at a bohemian cafe draped with rainbow banners, then to drive 30 or 45 minutes into the country to find small towns where Confederate and Trump flags are flown. The United States sometimes feels like two nations, divided by adornments defiantly affirming their political and cultural affinities.

Much of cosmopolitan America holds to a progressive framework of bodily autonomy, boundless tolerance and group rights — a largely post-religious morality applied with near-religious intensity. But as a religious person (on my better days), what concerns me are the perverse and dangerous liberties many believers have taken with their own faith. Much of what considers itself Christian America has assumed the symbols and identity of white authoritarian populism — an alliance that is a serious, unfolding threat to liberal democracy.

From one perspective, the Christian embrace of populist politics is understandable. The disorienting flux of American ethical norms and the condescension of progressive elites have incited a defensive reaction among many conservative religious people — a belief that they are outsiders in their own land. They feel reviled for opposing gender ideology that seems to have arrived just yesterday, or for stating views on marriage that Barack Obama once held. They fear their values are under assault by an inexorable modernity, in the form of government, big business, media and academia.

Leaders in the Republican Party have fed, justified and exploited conservative Christians’ defensiveness in service to an aggressive, reactionary politics. This has included deadly mask and vaccine resistance, the discrediting of fair elections, baseless accusations of gay “grooming” in schools, the silencing of teaching about the United States’ history of racism, and (for some) a patently false belief that Godless conspiracies have taken hold of political institutions.

*snip*

[JI7]

1. Why should it enrage them ?

It assumes Being xtian makes someone a good person when the opposite is true in many cases.

[dchill]

2. Because they're NOT.

[Nevilledog]

3. Fascist "Christians"

[liberal N proud]

4. Long befor trump, the groundwork was laid by the republicans

They infused themselves in the Christian organizations. They created organizations called Christian right, Christian conservatives and others that made it look like they were doing this in unison with the churches.
They put people in places to influence church leaders and then over time conviced the church members that they needed to be as faithful to the republicans as they were to their god.

I remember watching it happen and being confronted by church leaders about politics. When they started preaching politics from the pulpit, I was done, stood up and made a proclamation that I was done. Never been back to church.

[keep_left]

5. It's pretty clear what's going on. Drumpf promised the religious right...

...whatever they wanted in return for a pathetic, fawning loyalty. The most important thing to the religious right was getting their "Neanderthal justices", as Ted Kennedy called them. Nothing else seems to matter to them. I remember that there were maybe one or two evangelical conservatives that warned their followers about Drumpf, and they were instantly thrown under the bus.

[thucythucy]

6. "The condescension of progressive elites.."

which means what, exactly?

It seems to me the culture continues to bend over backward to accommodate them. It sounds like anytime anyone questions--not their beliefs, but their right to impose their beliefs on everyone else--this comes across to them as "oppression" and "condescension."

No one is stopping them from going to church, praying silently in public or out loud in their churches and homes, reading what they want, saying what they want. Progressives aren't the ones trying to empty our libraries of books we don't like. Progressives aren't forcing them to have abortions or become gay or whatever other bugaboo is their flavor of the month.

They have their own TV and radio shows, their own tax exempt institutions. What they don't have--yet--is the power to force everyone else to bend to their will.

Which it seems to me is the crux of their complaint about "oppression."

[Gaugamela]

10. I have often wondered who exactly is expressing all

this condescension they are always complaining about. I don't hear it, except for the occasional late night talk show host. But do evangelicals pay attention to them, or to progressive elites for that matter? I doubt it.

Either they're hearing this from their "pastors" or from friends & family. It sounds like projection to me.

[Solly Mack]

15. Well said

[CanonRay]

9. Simply brilliant.

[msongs]

11. xtian values - prostitute loving serial adulterer who lies. cheats.,and steals

[Gaugamela]

12. Personally, I think there is a simple reason that evangelicals

follow Trump. What's called "conservatism" in this country is actually good old fashioned patriarchy. Republicans don't believe in democracy or equality (which in this country would be the conservative stance), they believe in white male patriarchy. The core belief system of the Christian right isn't the New Testament, it is patriarchy, and by extension, authoritarianism. And since the Bible is thousands of years old, they all assume that what the Bible stands for is patriarchy. This is why there is so much sexual abuse in these churches, as the article mentions later on, because patriarchy assumes male entitlement. And this is why they feel they can force their religion on everyone else — because patriarchal privilege assumes that right.

In short: they aren't Christians. They are patriarchal fascists (which is redundant, I know: patriarchy and fascism are essentially the same thing).

[BigDemVoter]

13. I am sure it does some.

There is a mistaken notion that these evangelical frauds are the "true Christians" Anyone who IS a true Christian IS horrified by the fascist canteloupe.

[Patterson]

14. Saying you're a Christian don't mean you're a Christian.

[czarjak]

16. He literally told 'em he was a snake too!

[Initech]

17. Because they're populist fascists themselves?

It’s crazy how far the church has steered in the wrong direction because of the nonstop barrage of GOP propaganda.