In 2009, the Manhattan Declaration, led by Chuck Colson and Robert P. George, reaffirmed the three primary goals of religious conservatives: to protect all human life, including that of the unborn; to reinforce the sanctity of marriage and the family; and to conserve the religious freedom of all persons. All three goals would be in jeopardy under a Trump presidency.
.. Beyond that, Trump’s vitriolic — and often racist and sexist — language about immigrants, women, the disabled, and others ought to concern anyone who believes that all persons, not just the “winners” of the moment, are created in God’s image.
.. Trump can win only in the sort of celebrity-focused mobocracy that Neil Postman warned us about years ago, in which sound moral judgments are displaced by a narcissistic pursuit of power combined with promises of “winning” for the masses. Social and religious conservatives have always seen this tendency as decadent and deviant. For them to view it any other way now would be for them to lose their soul.
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.
Can Donald Trump Take Up the Mantle of Jerry Falwell?
.. But perhaps the most surprising comparison came from Liberty University president, Jerry Falwell Jr., on Fox News Channel last week: “I think Trump reminds me so much of my father.”
.. If evangelicals held Trump to the same standard they have applied to leaders in the past, he would hardly pass muster. Russell Moore, leader of the Southern Baptist denomination’s political arm, recently described Trump as “unrepentant serial adulterer who has abandoned two wives for other women” and who has grown rich through “an industry that preys on the poor and incentivizes immoral and often criminal behavior.”
.. The fact that Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, and Ben Carson have also spoken at the evangelical college suggests that the Republican road to the White House passes through Lynchburg, Virginia. But if evangelical engagement with politics is driven by a politics and morality, Trump may be facing an impossible task.
.. Both Falwell and Trump have also made comments widely believed to be misogynistic. Trump has mocked the physical features of prominent women such as Rosie O’Donnell—and who can forget his comments insinuating that Fox News host Megyn Kelly was probably menstruating? Falwell often attacked feminists, once saying, “These women just need a man in the house.”