At America’s largest Christian college today, Donald Trump promised to protect Christians while Jerry Falwell Jr. praised the presidential candidate as a visionary whose “life has borne fruit” a la Matthew 7:16.
“In my opinion, Donald Trump lives a life of loving and helping others as Jesus taught in the Great Commandment,” said the president of Liberty University during the school’s thrice-weekly convocation.
.. Another sign of The Donald’s popularity: He drew five times more admiration than Billy Graham on Gallup’s latest list of the Most Admired Men in America.
.. “I would say that Ted Cruz is leading in the ‘Jerry Falwell’ wing, Marco Rubio is leading the ‘Billy Graham’ wing, and Trump is leading the ‘Jimmy Swaggart’ wing,” Moore recently told Roll Call.
.. The Capitol Hill newspaper went on to explain:
Cruz has largely followed the classic Moral Majority model that was the face of the conservative movement—he has received endorsements from figures such as Focus on the Family founder James Dobson—while Trump ‘tends to work most closely with the prosperity wing of Pentecostalism’ which tends to believe that God would financially reward believers. As far as Rubio’s outreach to the ‘Billy Graham’ wing, this week the presidential hopeful announced a religious liberty advisory board that includes Rick Warren, the founding pastor at the influential Saddleback Church.
.. Indeed, about 40 Pentecostal pastors laid hands on Trump and prayed for him in October.
“Part of it is the fire,” explained Darrell Scott, an Ohio pastor who attended the meeting, to The Christian Science Monitor. “Pentecostal preachers are probably the most fiery preachers, and we appreciate directness, we appreciate bluntness, we’re more in-your-face.”
.. However, poll numbers from Reuters show a close but fairly steady unfavorable view of Trump by those who attend religious services weekly. The latest numbers show that about 52 percent of those who attend worship services weekly disapprove of Trump, compared to 48 percent who view him favorably.
Donald Trump Means Business in Iowa: Night in Motel, and a Day in Church
And on Sunday, no doubt mindful that Mr. Cruz is counting on conservative Christians to carry him to victory in this state’s caucuses, Mr. Trump showed up for church here in eastern Iowa, with photographers trailing, sat quietly through the 60-minute service, left two crisp $50 bills in the collection plate and shook hands all around, before resuming his attack on Mr. Cruz at a news conference and rally nearby.
.. Classic rapid response, pragmatic logistics and overt shows of faith are all basic parts of the job of running for president. For Mr. Trump, they have been only sporadically employed. Yet with each day, evidence accumulates that the master of the New York tabloids now grasps what it will take for him to win in Iowa, and beyond — and that he is laser-focused on doing it.
.. Since he entered the race, a few benchmark moments have fueled Mr. Trump’s confidence, according to three people close to him who insisted on anonymity to avoid antagonizing him. Two of the moments came in August: getting through the first Republican debate, then drawing tens of thousands of people to a stadium in Mobile, Ala., where another New York politician would most likely not have received a comparable welcome. Signing a pledge to support the party’s nominee, whoever it was, amounted to a kind of psychological point of no return, the people close to him said.
.. Earlier that night, he was introduced warmly at a rally in Pella by Senator Charles E. Grassley, the popular Iowa Republican. (Mr. Grassley did not offer an endorsement, but Mr. Trump cannily pulled him back onstage for a photo that could suggest otherwise.)
Opinions The gospel according to Donald Trump
The front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination drew laughter from the evangelical students at Liberty University when he bungled the Bible verse he attempted to read to them, introducing it not as “Second Corinthians” but as “Two Corinthians.”
But it doesn’t seem to matter that Trump wouldn’t know a Corinthian from a craps table. Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty and son of the late televangelist,bestowed lavish praise Monday on the thrice- married head of a gambling empire who talks about the need to kill members of terrorists’ families. Trump, on his way to getting a sizable chunk of the evangelical vote, promised: “If I’m president, you’re going to see Merry Christmas in department stores, believe me — believe me.”
The Undead Religious Right: Why I Cannot Support Ted Cruz
.. James Davison Hunter’s To Change the World argued that the Religious Right’s political approach has been shaped by a Nietzschean will to power, which aims to enforce its will through “legal and political means or to threaten to do so,” rather than persuading others or negotiating compromises.
.. For evangelicals,“injury—real or perceived—leads the aggrieved to accuse, blame, vilify, and then seek revenge on whom they see as responsible.”
.. Such an anti-politics of resentment, alienation, and disenfranchisement is at the heart of Trump’s appeal, even if the issues that he has been most vocal on are not traditional social conservative concerns.
.. In Cruz, conservative evangelicals have the embodied promise of a younger, chaos-light candidate who is firmly and securely one of their own—that is, one who shamelessly subordinates the religious life to the pursuit of political power.
.. Cruz’s unsavory use of the religious life for his own advancement, however, is the playbook that the Religious Right has written for itself, creating a vicious cycle that identifies the evangelical world with such shameless politicking.
.. Pandering is the litmus test for politically conservative religious ‘authenticity.’
.. But electing Falstaff or the politician most eager to imitate him would be an apocalyptic, anti-political judgment that our political order is beyond repair. That is hardly the ‘good news’ that the name ‘evangelical’ is meant to signify—but then, evangelicals are some of the only American’s remaining who use ‘apocalyptic’ non-metaphorically.
.. The only small consolation the Religious Right might have is that the exhausted, cynical anti-politics that Cruz has so effectively tapped into may at last finally die with a bang this cycle, and not with a whimper.