Not keeping the faith: Donald Trump and the conning of evangelical voters

[applegrove]

Not keeping the faith: Donald Trump and the conning of evangelical voters

by Heather Digby Parton at Salon

http://www.salon.com/2016/06/27/not_keeping_the_faith_donald_trump_and_the_conning_of_evangelical_voters/

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This opinion piece in the New York Times by J.D. Vance explores just how unfortunate that decoupling with the actual church and its teachings has been for many members of the white working class who are so enamored of Trump and his “anti-PC” campaign. He discusses various studies that show kids who attend church regularly “perform better in school, divorce less as adults and commit fewer crimes.” And they are, on the whole, less prejudiced, exposed as they often are to people of other races and shown empathy and generosity by church leaders’ willingness to help people in need. Evangelicals who don’t actually go to church have lost an important stabilizing, social influence.

And he may have hit upon an important reason why this has happened — “the deinstitutionalization of the faith has occurred alongside its politicization.” He says this is one reason why some of these people may be relating to Trump despite the fact that they have very little in common:

While it’s hard to fault people for voting their conscience, this fusion of religion and politics necessarily forces people to look externally. The sometimes tough love of the Christian faith of my childhood demanded a certain amount of self-reflection and, occasionally, self-criticism. While faith need not be monolithic — it can motivate both voting behavior and character development — focus matters. A Christianity constantly looking for political answers to moral and spiritual problems gives believers an excuse to blame other people when they should be looking in the mirror.

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This brings us to Trump’s most recent “outreach” to the religious right which took place last week in New York when Trump met with a large group of Christian leaders to set their minds at ease about his candidacy. The big news that came out of that was that Trump bizarrely stated that nobody knows if Hillary Clinton has any religious beliefs at all. (They do, of course. She’s a devout Methodist.) But he also sold himself as someone who would protect “religious liberty”— the latest social conservative buzzword — with his Supreme Court picks which seemed to thrill the assembled church leaders. Some were so excited by this they lost their bearings a little bit. Cortney O’Brien of Townhall interviewed one of the participants:






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