Vox - Trump coped with the Russia scandal by courting evangelicals. Here's why that's worrisome.

[TomCADem]

The Christian right makes a deal with the devil by willfully acting as a prop to distract from the hate and illegals acts of the Trump administration.

https://www.vox.com/2017/7/14/15968412/trump-russia-evangelicals-dog-whistle

Monday night, amid the intensification of scandal surrounding the Trump campaign’s potential collusion with Russia, President Trump made time to participate in the “ultimate selfie.” In the background of a photo taken by Baptist pastor Robert Jeffress, Trump is talking to two major evangelical leaders: prosperity gospel proponent Paula White and Baptist pastor Jack Graham, who prayed for Trump in a much-tweeted “laying-on of hands” earlier this week.

Jeffress’s selfie was taken during an impromptu meeting with Trump and a number of high-profile evangelical figures who were invited to the White House but not necessarily expected to meet the president.

* * *
One reading of Trump’s meetings with several evangelical leaders this week is that he’s simply playing to his base, as he always has, reminding evangelicals once more that he’s their “unwavering ally.”

Yet the optics here are far more extreme than they have been previously. It’s one thing for Trump to send Vice President Mike Pence to a Focus on the Family event. It’s another thing entirely to be pictured receiving the “laying-on of hands,” a prayer tradition that is particularly, though not exclusively, associated with Pentecostal traditions of faith healing (it is, for example, less far often associated with Trump’s own stated denomination of mainline Presbyterianism).

[malaise]

1. Which Christian right - those racists posing in megachurches

Spare me - the vast majority of them are snake oil salesmen who simply want state resources for their high flying lives.

[leftstreet]

2. Maybe the fundies think Loser 45 signals the end times?

Too bad they all weren't raptured the fuck outta there

[Zorro]

9. That is a primary reason for his support among evangelicals

They consider Trump as an instrument of God, who will instigate the rise of the Beast from the Mideast and hasten the Apocalypse.

They pray for the end of the world, so that the righteous are raptured and the rest suffer pain and death.

[njhoneybadger]

3. Is Paula White still banging Benny Hinn?

[roamer65]

4. Ask them to explain their support for a man who has had 3 wives...

and countless adulterous affairs.

If they pause, obfuscate or still defend him...they are fake Christians.

[Initech]

5. If Trump is religious, I'm Elvis Presley.

I mean really he couldn't have picked worse people if they were recommended by Satan himself.

[rockfordfile]

6. Conservative Christians are gullible

I remember Fox News spewing bs about the Dixie Chicks, and a church getting together to burn CDs. They will believe anything a right-winger on TV/Radio tells them.

[Ilsa]

7. I think it's time to bring in the snakehandlers.

Donald is so holy now, anointed by God, that it shouldn't be a problem for him to handle a few pit vipers. Or drink water and strychnine to show everyone how close to God he is.

[standingtall]

8. Trump was not a mainline Presbyterian

Technically he may have belongd to a mainline denomination, but his preacher Norman Vincent Peale did not have a mainline Presbyterian doctrine or any mainline doctrine of Christianity period.