Presumably Trump and his campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, thought that picking Pence would please Midwesterners, Christians and hard-core conservatives. Certainly, Manafort knows a crazy right-winger when he sees one.
.. But did Trump really need to reassure the religious right? In a pollconducted last month by the Pew Research Center, 78 percent of white evangelicals said they would vote for Trump.
.. Viguerie said Pence’s “spineless retreat” under “pressure from the radical homosexual lobby is indicative of a problem we face throughout our culture, and especially in the conservative movement, and that is a lack of moral courage in the face of evil.”
Russell Moore: Trump is a 1980s Evangelical Preacher without any pretense of Gospel
Donald Trump is a 1980s television evangelist without any pretense of the gospel. He fits in the same mold.
Trump is distilled, concentrated version of evangelicalism celebrity culture.
Evangelicals are never at our best when we are the majority.
We need to stop thinking like a moral Majority and start thinking like a prophetic Minority. (16:15)
- lacking theology
- misunderstands who we are, and bears false witness to who America is
- We just got to get back to where we were before the culture fell apart. Genesis 3.
- Pelagian triumphalist are buying into a huge loss/fall.
- Evangelicals want to go to extremes, opposite of where they just were
It is increasingly difficult to hold the middle, predicting a divorce between progressives and fundamentalists.
We have to make a distinction between religious persecution and being offended (30 min)
Evangelicals believe that religious liberty is under threat, but want their beliefs given preference.
The Evangelicals and the Great Trump Hope
The former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, an ordained Baptist minister whose daughter, Sarah, is a senior adviser to Mr. Trump, checked the “family values” box by testifying to Mr. Trump’s closeness to his adult children.
.. Mr. Jeffress bluntly said that in the face of perceived threats facing evangelicals, “I want the meanest, toughest, son-of-a-you-know-what I can find in that role, and I think that’s where many evangelicals are.”
.. But the anger, anxiety and insecurity many contemporary white evangelicals feel are better understood as a response to an internal identity crisis precipitated by the recent demise of “white Christian America,” the cultural and institutional world built primarily by white Protestants that dominated American culture until the last decade.
.. When Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, white Christians (Catholics and Protestants) constituted a majority (54 percent) of the country; today, that number has slipped to 45 percent.
.. More than two-thirds believe that discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against other groups. For discrimination against Christians, that number is nearly eight in 10.
.. Mr. Cruz assured evangelicals that he’d secure them exemptions from the new realities, while Mr. Trump promised to reinstate their central place in the country. Mr. Cruz offered to negotiate a respectable retreat strategy, while Mr. Trump vowed to turn back the clock.
For white evangelical Protestants, Mr. Trump’s general vow to “make America great again” means something specific. Mr. Trump stepped into the spotlight just as the curtain was coming down on the era of white Protestant dominance.
Will Trump’s Nomination Be the End of the Religious Right?
Conservative Christians have long aligned with the Republican Party. But never before has a GOP nominee so flouted evangelical beliefs.
.. The breaking point came on June 21, when Trump—ironically in an effort to appease the religious right—met with nearly a thousand evangelical leaders and announced a 25-person “evangelical advisory board” to help him reach conservative Christian voters.
.. Almost all the members of that board have histories of being right-leaning, pro-life and pro-Israel—typical for conservative Christians. But as Ruth Graham noted at Slate, the group is really a who’s-who of former evangelical leaders: Ralph Reed, former leader of the Christian Coalition; Ronnie Floyd, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention; and James Dobson, former president of Focus on the Family. It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that the board is mostly older (average age: 64), mostly male and mostly white, with only four people of color. They are a remnant, in other words, of the old guard Moral Majority-era conservative evangelicals whose political influence, on issues like same-sex marriage, contraception and school prayer, was already waning.
.. Christian blogger Fred Clark called the advisory board a “B-list of second-tier religious right figures along with a handful of peaked-long-ago relics.” The Hispanic Baptist Pastors Alliance took offense too, in a statement warning that “joining this board is not the wisest way to be salt and light” and cautioning against “jumping into a crowded office where the weed and wheat are undistinguishable.” It was essentially a call to stay out of politics—a rejection of the basic premise of the Moral Majority, that Christians ought to influence politics to see God’s Kingdom come.
.. Russell Moore—an influential leader in the Southern Baptist Convention with a history of theologically and politically conservative views—immediately denounced the board’s “heretical prosperity gospel hucksters hailed as spiritual leaders.” Presumably he was taking aim at people like televangelists Kenneth and Gloria Copeland and Paula White
.. Some evangelicals, like Southern Evangelical Seminary president Richard Land—another member of Trump’s board, though he has not officially endorsed the candidate—continue to see their calling as being “salt and light” to those in positions of power. They believe Christians have a mandate to influence politics through whatever avenue is available to them, whether they like the candidate or not.
.. One member of Trump’s advisory board, Reverend Robert Jeffress, put it more bluntly in making the case to evangelicals for supporting a Trump presidency: “I want the meanest, toughest, son-of-a-you-know-what I can find in that role, and I think that’s where many evangelicals are.
.. “There’s never been infighting among Christian leaders about whether to support a serial adulterer… who lauds the work of Planned Parenthood, mocks the disabled, inflames racial tensions and vowed to order American military personnel to commit war crimes,” says Eric Teetsel, 32, one of the most prominent leaders of evangelicalism’s “new guard,” a subgroup committed to social justice issues.
.. rather than switch his allegiance to the presumptive GOP nominee, he hopes to convince his fellow evangelicals not to vote Trump. The same day of Trump’s meeting with evangelicals, Teetsel stood outside the Marriott Marquis in New York holding a homemade sign that read, “Torture is not pro-life. Racism isnot pro-life. Misogyny is not pro-life. Murdering the children of terrorists is not pro-life.” “When influential Christian leaders give cover to a man like Donald Trump we shouldn’t be surprised when our neighbors are uninterested in the Gospel,” Teetsel told me.