Ted Cruz, the Empty Evangelical

[applegrove]

Ted Cruz, the Empty Evangelical

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells at the New Yorker

http://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/ted-cruz-the-empty-evangelical

"SNIP............

Last Monday, Bardwell got a call at home from a woman working for a polling firm, testing out attacks on Trump. Intrigued, Bardwell started writing them down. (After the call ended, he tweeted out his notes, which briefly made him a figure in press coverage of the campaign.) One was a tepid version of a culture-war line, that Trump was a “New York liberal.” Another one, Bardwell thought, was sharper: that the billionaire had confessed “to a Christian audience in Iowa that he had never asked God for forgiveness.” There were enough questions mixed in about Cruz that Bardwell was pretty sure that the Texan was behind the call.

The next day, Cruz issued a general attack on Trump’s “New York values,” which the billionaire effectively muted by talking about the heroism of New Yorkers on 9/11. But to Bardwell there was a lingering mystery: With an avowedly evangelical electorate in Iowa, why had Cruz, a man who launched his campaign at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, not attacked Trump for his lack of faith, or his faithless acts? His campaign had seemingly considered the line, and then decided against it. Bardwell said, “I was surprised.”

............

Hunter’s observation is that, seen with cold eyes, the project of Christian persuasion has not worked. No matter how many hearts Christian conservatives have claimed, they have not changed the culture. Even during Republican Presidential administrations, the cause of gay rights advanced, and social liberalism continued gaining momentum. America is still, demographically, a Christian country, but since the election of 2004 there has been little discernible energy to Christianize it. The right has swung to the anti-government movements, and to the Tea Party. “ ‘We can’t persuade, so now we’re just going to take over’—the ethos is close to that,” Hunter said. “I think they have come to realize that there has been a loss of a common public philosophy that could unite Americans, so now their strategy has become, in my view, a pretty clear-cut manifestation of the will to power.”

There is a husk-like quality to Ted Cruz’s movement: it is a fight for Washington that is not in any specific way a fight for the country. Cruz has the partisan ferocity of the culture warrior—the purist politics, the overriding will to power—but he is a warrior without a war. It makes sense that Cruz passed up the chance to point out to evangelical voters that Trump is not one of them. His campaign is not really about summoning believers to a banner. It has the structure of the culture wars, the sketched outlines, but not the substance. Cruz is gesturing at a ghost



.............SNIP"

[world wide wally]

1. I have come to the realization that "Evangelical" has absolutely nothing to do with religion.

It is simply another faction of the Republican party. The people who claim to be evangelicals simply need to use God to rationalize their votes. Hence they can support the likes of Trump and feel justified by claiming God wants them to because they have lost either brain power or anything that resembles a set of balls. The only litmus test is to say you oppose abortion.

[applegrove]

2. It is the ones who don't walk the walk that worry me.