What law enforcement officer, by the way, announces that he is going to conduct a search before even obtaining a warrant?
.. Was Comey acting out of pure concern for the law? Or did he relish the chance to assert that he, and not the president, was right? We can’t know for sure, but Comey has always enjoyed flexing his power.
.. And now Comey is telling his staff that he felt compelled to tell Congress about the extra set of emails (which the F.B.I. most likely already saw in its original investigation) because, well, golly, he promised he would keep Congress informed.
.. The idea that he wanted to help his political party is pretty terrifying. But the idea that he acted out of moral self-righteousness is not much more reassuring, given the immense powers of his office.
.. Barry Goldwater, a real conservative if there ever was one, was outraged by the rise of morality politics in the Republican party.
“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem,” Goldwater once said, according to John Dean’s book “Conservatives Without Conscience.” “Frankly, these people frighten me.”
.. Was Comey setting out to change the election results to benefit his own party and its leaders in Congress? Or was he posing as the owner of the moral high ground?
Neither option is comforting. And neither changes the fact that Comey had to know that his actions were not justified by government procedure or lawyerly protocol
Episode 223: How Did We Get Here? A History of the Religious Right
What really birthed the religious right? Why have black and white Christians swapped political parties over the last 60 years? Based on a class he’s teaching, co-host Skye Jethani takes us deep into the surprising history of 20th-century Christian political involvement. It’s a fascinating journey you won’t want to miss!
In 1976 Ford Adminstration threatened to revoke Bob Jones’s University’s Non-profit status, which started the religious right.
Background: 22:55
Bob Jones: 40:55
In Defense of the Religious Right
The older culture warriors favored Ted Cruz; younger Christians wanted Marco Rubio (Falwell Jr.’s Liberty University voted decisively for the Florida senator); the naïve wanted Ben Carson. Iowa, the evangelical stronghold whose first-in-the-nation status makes every sophisticated G.O.P consultant groan, gave Trump one of his worst early-state showings, while more secular Northeastern states handed him landslide wins.
.. The bottom line is that if it weren’t for the religious right, the Trump takeover would have been far easier, the G.O.P.’s surrender that much more abject
.. Asking Christian conservatives to accept a Clinton presidency is asking them to cooperate not only with pro-abortion policy-making, but also their own legal-cultural isolation.
.. For every Carson, murmuring on cable about how “sometimes you put your Christian values on pause to get the work done,” there is a Russell Moore or an Erick Erickson or a Beth Mooreattacking their co-religionists for making a fatal moral compromise.
.. America needs a religious right. Maybe not the religious right it has; certainly not the religious right of Carson and Falwell Jr. But the Trump era has revealed what you get when you leach the Christianity out of conservatism:
A right-of-center politics that cares less about marriage and abortion, just as some liberals would wish, but one that’s ultimately far more divisive than the evangelical politics of George W. Bush.
.. without the pull of transcendence, the future of the right promises to be tribal, cruel, and very dark indeed.
God Loves Donald Trump. Right?
Trump has boasted of infidelities, profited off gambling, mocked the handicapped, cheered and offered financial assistance for his supporters who fight protesters, supported abortion (until his fortuitous change of heart before the election), called for war crimes against innocent people,demonized minorities and immigrants, knowingly played upon racist fears, promoted open racists through social media, promoted conspiracy theories, and crudely treated women.
..Among religious groups, white evangelical Protestants stand out as the only one in which a majority, 53 percent, agree that society has become too soft and feminine.
.. 68 percent of Trump supporters agree that society is too soft and feminine, far more than supporters of any other candidate, Republican or Democrat.
.. Among religious groups, white evangelical Protestants voiced the highest levels of distress, 64 percent, when they find themselves around immigrants who speak little or no English,.
.. “Today discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.”
A solid 57 percent majority of white Americans whom P.R.R.I. surveyed agreed, but two groups stood out: Trump supporters at 81 percent and white evangelical Protestants at 68 percent.
.. Yet another area of commonality between Christian conservatives and the Trump campaign is their shared belief in the duty of the strong to lead the weak — the importance of leadership built on strength, authority and discipline.
.. Dobson’s thinking on the topic of strength and authority is dominated by a single theme:
If the strong-willed child is allowed by indulgence to develop “habits” of defiance and disrespect during his early childhood, those characteristics will haunt him and his parents for the next twenty years.
.. Dobson describes his own method for dealing with a six-year-old pet Dachshund, Siggie, who refused Dobson’s order to go to sleep in “a permanent enclosure.”
The only way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me “reason” with Mr. Freud.
What developed next is impossible to describe. That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt. Inch by inch I moved him toward the family room and his bed. As a final desperate maneuver, Siggie backed into the corner for one last snarling stand. I eventually got him to bed, only because I outweighed him 200 to 12!
.. Dobson’s story about Siggie gives us a glimpse of how the views on authority of some on the right match up with Trump’s views on what it takes to be an effective leader.
.. For years, secular progressives have said that evangelical social action in America is not about religious conviction but all about power.
This year, Moore noted, Christian leaders who in the 1990s
gave stem-winding speeches about “character” in office during the Clinton administration now minimize the spewing of profanities in campaign speeches, race-baiting and courting white supremacists, boasting of adulterous affairs, debauching public morality and justice through the casino and pornography industries.
In backing Trump, Moore concluded, “a group of high-profile old-guard evangelicals has proven these critics right.”
.. Rev. Robert Jeffress in Dallas, who has said that if offered a candidate modeled on Jesus:
I would run from that candidate as far as possible, because the Sermon on the Mount was not given as a governing principle for this nation.
In practice, Jeffress said:
Nowhere is government told to forgive those who wrong it, nowhere is government told to turn the other cheek. Government is to be a strongman to protect its citizens against evildoers. When I’m looking for somebody who’s going to deal with ISIS and exterminate ISIS, I don’t care about that candidate’s tone or vocabulary, I want the meanest, toughest, son of a you-know-what I can find, and I believe that’s biblical.
Randall Balmer, a professor of religion at Dartmouth, who wrote ..
.. The religious right was never about the advancement of biblical values. The modern, politically conservative evangelical movement we know is a movement rooted in the perpetuation of racial segregation, and its affiliation with the hard-right fringes of the conservative movement in the late 1970s produced a mutant form of evangelicalism inconsistent with the best traditions of evangelicalism itself. Since then, evangelicals have embraced increasingly secular positions divorced from any biblical grounding, and supporting Donald Trump represents the logical conclusion of that tragic aberration.