What We Learned from the Donald Trump-Marco Rubio Screamfest

Trump went even further, raising the possibility, to CNN’s Chris Cuomo, that he was being audited because he was a “strong Christian.”)

.. Cruz, with leading questions and prosecutorial zeal, forced Trump to acknowledge that he does not, indeed, want people to die “on the sidewalks and the streets.” Cruz made it clear that he considered this a damning admission.

.. Although he likes to portray himself as a successful entrepreneur who created a vastly profitable business, many people in the business world have long regarded him as a self-promoting huckster who emblazons his name on properties that don’t belong to him and habitually overstates his net worth.

.. During the debate, he claimed that tax returns don’t give any indication of a person’s wealth, which is nonsense. If Trump’s various businesses are worth as much as he claims they are, they must generate a great deal of revenue and income, at least some of which would be reflected on his tax returns.

.. Back in the nineteen-seventies, Johnston points out, New York City Mayor Abe Beame gave Trump a four-hundred-million-dollar tax abatement to facilitate his first big real-estate deal, the conversion of a hotel next to Grand Central Terminal. During the nineteen-eighties, when the city refused to give Trump seven hundred million dollars in tax breaks for his controversial Riverside South development, he had a bitter dispute with Mayor Ed Koch.

The Culture Of Trumpening

It is because of the increasingly large portion of evangelicals who believe the culture wars are over, and they lost.

.. Evangelicals tried for years to fight for the culture—to win the argument for their traditional views regarding marriage, family, and the value of human life. Now they want to fight on different ground: political correctness.

.. Evangelicals (and Catholic conservatives) may have concluded that by now, the deck is stacked against them, and the only thing standing between them and liberal authoritarianism that is going to demolish their (our) institutions is a combative SOB who doesn’t care what Enlightened Opinion thinks of him.

Reconstructionism

In what key ways did Christian Reconstruction contribute to the making of the contemporary religious right?

Reconstructionists had a lot to do with the widespread view among conservative Christians that every sphere of life—both public and private—is religious.

.. Similarly, because Reconstructionists believe that economic activity is a function of the family’s call to dominion, economic regulation by the government is considered unbiblical—a fundamental tenet of what is known as biblical economics.

.. Out of presuppositionalism, then, arises Rushdoony’s view that a biblical worldview was fundamentally incompatible with any other—an idea that has manifested itself in education more than almost any other area.

.. What Reconstructionists envision is a multi-generational transformation that starts in families: families need to be reconstructed in terms of biblical patriarchy. Women need to be in submission to men; children need to be educated in the home to fulfil their specific roles in terms of the exercise of dominion. Churches should be comprised of godly patriarchal families in submission to church authority.

.. Whenever I write about homeschooling and Christian Reconstruction there is a chorus of homeschoolers who want to distance themselves and point out that not all homeschoolers are Reconstructionists. That is certainly true. However, Christian Reconstructionists have been crucial to the character of the home schooling movement.

.. Many of the early Reconstructionists had ties to the John Birch Society and, as a solidly middle-class white movement they maintained the fiction that most African-Americans were happy until tensions were “stirred up” by agitators.

.. Rushdoony and the Reconstructionists helped build a resurgence of interest in and affection for, a pre-civil war vision of society. They did this, in part by promoting the work of Southern Presbyterian theologian R. L. Dabney and the view that the civil war was not about slavery but was a religious war to preserve a godly southern culture from the tyranny of a secularizing North.