The Huge Cultural Shift That’s Helping Trump Win Evangelicals

In Mississippi, where evangelicals turned out in record numbers—and white evangelicals accounted for a whopping 75 percent of Republican voters—Trump won by double digits.

.. He seems like he’d be more comfortable on Tinder than in a church pew.

.. America’s evangelicals just aren’t all that evangelical any more.

.. Even nominal churchgoers like Reagan have done what no European politician would ever do: pledge their prayerful allegiance to Christ. Along the way, they have repeatedly promised to restore school prayer or stop gay marriage or overturn Roe v. Wade.

What they have delivered, however, is defeat after defeat in the culture wars.

.. Moore has repeatedly whacked Trump—a man whose “attitude toward women is that of a Bronze Age warlord”—as a reprobate unfit for the presidency.

.. Moore essentially admits this: in a recent op-ed, he announced that until voting habits change, he won’t even to refer to himself as an evangelical anymore. He lamented how so many of his coreligionists “have been too willing to look the other way when the word ‘evangelical’ has been co-opted by heretics and lunatics . . . as long as they were on the right side of the culture war.”

.. the group that used to refer to itself as a “moral majority” is at best a tiny minority, and a shrinking one at that. “We have taken comfort in the fact that there have been millions and millions of us in America,” he told NPR recently. “Now we’re having to face the fact that, evidently, theologically-defined—defined by commitment to core evangelical values—there aren’t so many millions of us as we thought.”

.. During the civil rights era, Falwell denounced black ministers for their political activism. In a 1965 sermon—delivered the day the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. led marchers from Selma to Montgomery—Falwell criticized the “left-wing” leaders of the “so-called freedom movement” for stirring up hatred and violence. “Preachers are not called to be politicians but to be soul winners,” he said.

But Falwell had a change of heart. Today he is remembered as the fundamentalist who, by co-founding the Moral Majority in 1979, officiated at the marriage of economic and cultural conservatism—the birth of the New Religious Right. Christians did not live in isolation, he reasoned. So it was not enough merely to save souls. You had to save the nation. And who better to convert it than pastors like himself?

.. Back in 1976, Falwell had supported the born-again Christian Jimmy Carter for president. But Carter disappointed many of his fellow evangelicals by taking on the tax-exempt status of Southern “segregation academies” and refusing to fight the good fight on abortion. So Falwell and his friends cozied up to the Republican Party.
.. Its alliance with the GOP meant that its members would fight not only to overturn Roe v. Wade but also to oppose the SALT II treaty, teachers unions, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. In addition to calling the nation “back to biblical morality” he called it “back to patriotism.” And for him true patriots supported nuclear weapons, massive increases in military spending, a balanced budget amendment, tax cuts, and consumer capitalism. “The free-enterprise system is clearly outlined in the Book of Proverbs,” he said.

.. Though it’s common to talk about the Republican Party having been captured by white evangelical activists, if you really look at the way the two groups have interacted over the years, it’s more accurate to say that evangelicals have been captured by the Republican Party. They ape its talking points about welfare cheats rather than the Bible’s compassion for the poor and the oppressed.

.. Today, when born-again Christians hold up posters at rallies that read, “Thank you, Lord Jesus, for President Trump,” when they say they are sick of false promises from supposedly pious presidents on abortion or gay marriage and just want a strong man in the White House who can stop illegal immigration or keep us safe or just “smash things,” what are they saying? They are saying that their political identity has trumped their religious identity. They are saying that they are conservatives first and Christians second.

.. Cruz’s father is a traveling evangelist and a preacher of Dominionist theology who believes that Christians like his son must take dominion over “seven mountains”: family, religion, education, media, entertainment, business and government.

.. In fact, it is exceedingly difficult to find any moment when Reagan, Bush, or any of today’s Republican candidates put biblical faith over conservative principles.

.. When the Supreme Court handed down a decision in Roe v. Wade, in 1973, the Baptist Press praised it for “advancing the cause of religious liberty, human equality, and justice.” Jerry Falwell did not preach his first anti-abortion sermon until 1978—when the nascent Religious Right was casting about for ways to attack Democrats as moral relativists stuck in the “Bad Sixties.”

.. Views about abortion or gay marriage are more salient than beliefs about the Trinity or infant baptism.

.. The result is a population of self-identified “evangelicals” who find it harder and harder to see the difference between the teachings of the Bible and the policies of their beloved candidates.

.. Classically that narrative ran from sin in the Garden of Eden to redemption on the cross. Today it takes place in an America that has fallen from its founding glory yet will, by God’s grace and Trump’s hand, be made great again.

.. it can seem like there aren’t any evangelicals left in the Republican Party; there are just Republicans who happen to go to church.

Of Course Ted Cruz Would Make a Better President Than Donald Trump

I don’t know how a President Trump would respond if one of the other coequal branches of government challenged his authority. Indeed, I am somewhat afraid that Trump would ignore or move against that other branch, whether it’s Congress or the Court. But I don’t have that worry with Cruz. He may be an ideologue, but he’s an ideological constitutionalist. Trump is neither an ideologue nor a constitutionalist. His only principle is winning. And he’s not talking about you winning. He’s talking about Trump winning. That’s all that matters to him.

.. Who does Trump idolize? Himself. And his neutral and sometimes flattering attitude toward authoritarian governments ought to make you think twice about seeing him in the Oval Office.

Trump’s Political Philosophy: I Win, You Lose

To put this in perspective, Trump is now proposing a larger troop deployment than any other candidate has endorsed — not even the “neocon” Marco Rubio wants that many boots on the ground. And yet virtually no one seems to have noticed this apparently startling reversal. Why? Because Trump’s supporters don’t even believe anything he says about policy at this point. Keeping up with the substance of his ever-shifting pronouncements has exhausted the most dogged observers to the point that all anyone can do is marvel at his cult of personality.

.. But the Republican front-runner isn’t a Jacksonian populist. He’s a Trumpian Trumpulist. And his motto is “always be closing.” Weeks ago, when he declared that he could shoot a person on Fifth Avenue and not lose votes, he was signaling that he’d closed the deal with his base. He had their support sewed up, and now it was time to pivot back toward the center in search of the next deal. Because closers close.

Social-justice warriors taught us long ago that truth matters less than narrative, and millions of Americans have now piped up on cue to prove the point. The narrative they crave is chillingly simple — I win, you lose. It’s all will to power now.

.. Last week, after Mitt Romney laid out a point-by-point case detailing Trump’s business failures and his flawed policies, the response wasn’t a defense of Trump but rather insults such as, “Establishment!” or “Where was that passion against Obama?”

.. So get ready, Trump fans, to lose everything in a general election — everything except maybe victory. Trump is a closer. He’s closed on you. Now he’s got a bigger deal in his sights.

Video Destroys Trump Campaign Spin as Michelle Fields Files Criminal Charges

Fields claimed that Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, yanked her away from Trump when she tried to ask him a question about affirmative action, bruising her arm and almost causing her to fall. Fields tweeted a photo of the bruises, and a Washington Post reporter backed her account — as did an audio recording of the event. The Trump campaign responded with scorched earth. Not only did it release a statement falsely claiming that no other reporter witnessed the incident, Lewandowski himself spewed forth a vile series of tweets that not only implied Fields was a fabulist, he also implied that she’d made up a sexual harassment charge in the recent past. The campaign demanded to see video evidence.