Tag: evangelical Christians

An Evangelical Battle of the Generations: To Embrace Trump or Not?

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As Liberty University plots its post-Falwell future, young people want to steer clear of politics. The trustees aren’t buying it.

For years, there was an adage around Liberty University that if God split Jerry Falwell in half, you would have his sons Jerry and Jonathan.

Jerry Jr. inherited his father’s desire to be a force in American politics, and his post as Liberty University president, while Jonathan inherited his father’s gift for evangelical uplift and became pastor of his church.

Now, 14 years after Jerry Falwell Sr. died and nine months after Jerry Jr. was ousted in a scandal, Liberty is enmeshed in a debate that could have profound implications for the nation’s religious right: Whether it should keep nurturing Jerry Jr.’s focus on politics and maintain its high-flying role in the Republican Party, or begin to change its culture and back away from politics, an approach increasingly favored by younger evangelicals. Continue reading.

Evangelical Christians are trying to reinvent purity culture as ‘pro-women’

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The anti-Asian shootings at three massage parlours in Atlanta, Ga., in March 2021 have complex religious elements. Eight people, including six Asian women, were killed in the attacks. The alleged shooter emerged from an evangelical “purity culture” that teaches a narrow view of sexuality, often with racial undertones.

Purity culture has both specific and broad meanings. It directly refers to a 1990s wave of practices of “extreme abstinence,” mainly directed at women. But it also incorporates decades of broader evangelical teachings restricting sexuality to within heterosexual marriage. 

While some argue that purity culture only refers to the narrow 1990s practices that even many evangelicals now distance themselves from, there is no clear distinction and the underlying ideas are the same. According to Bradley Onishi, an American professor of religious studies, women are taught to “hate their bodies” and men to “hate their minds.” This is the mindset that led the accused Atlanta perpetrator to claim he was plagued by a “sexual addiction,” because he felt unable to manage his sexual thoughts and urges through purity culture’s hardline approach of denial and self-loathing. Continue reading.

Trump Ignites a War Within the Church

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After a week of Trumpist mayhem, white evangelicals wrestle with what they’ve become.

“Over the last 72 hours, I have received multiple death threats and thousands upon thousands of emails from Christians saying the nastiest and most vulgar things I have ever heard toward my family and ministry. I have been labeled a coward, sellout, a traitor to the Holy Spirit, and cussed out at least 500 times.”

This is the beginning of a Facebook post from Sunday by the conservative preacher Jeremiah Johnson. On Jan. 7, the day after the storming of the Capitol, Johnson had issued a public apology,asserting that God removed Donald Trump from office because of his pride and arrogance, and to humble those, like Johnson, who had fervently supported him.

The response was swift and vicious. As he put it in that later Facebook post, “I have been flabbergasted at the barrage of continued conspiracy theories being sent every minute our way and the pure hatred being unleashed. To my great heartache, I’m convinced parts of the prophetic/charismatic movement are far SICKER than I could have ever dreamed of.” Continue reading.

For a growing number of evangelical Christians, Trump is no longer the lesser of two evils

It has long been taken for granted that the majority of evangelical Christians in the United States will vote for Donald Trump.

That may well be the case. But there are recent signs that fewer evangelicals will support Trump this time around than in 2016. 

In an August 2020 poll for Fox News, Trump registered a 38-point advantage over Joe Biden among among white evangelical voters. That is impressive, but it pales in comparison with his 61-point advantage over Hillary Clinton among evangelicals in the 2016 election. 

Meanwhile, a Pew survey on Oct. 13 found that white evangelical support for Trump had slipped since August, from 83% to 78%. Continue reading.

Evangelical explains how the movement swooned for Donald Trump — and betrayed its own ideal of masculinity

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Four years in, people are still struggling to understand the overwhelming support for Donald Trump that has come from what should have been its least likely source: American evangelicals. They belong to a socially conservative movement that embraces traditional Christian morality and family values. Their leaders have loudly insisted, especially during the Clinton years, that the moral character of our president deeply matters. They take as their highest infallible authority a Bible whose central themes include God’s love for the poor and the vulnerable, and a demand to love one’s neighbor — even one’s enemies — to the point of great personal sacrifice.

He, by contrast, is a man whose lifestyle displays little regard for Christian morality or family values. His dishonesty and infidelity have been almost daily news items since before he took office. His reputation for sexual predation, bullying, narcissism and a host of other sins and vices antithetical to Christianity has only continued to grow since he took office. His most notable advice for interacting with half the human population is “grab ’em by the pussy”. Who could have predicted such an alliance?

In 2003, philosopher Daniel Dennett wrote an op-ed in The New York Timeslamenting the discrimination faced by atheists in the United States, particularly in politics. Dennett’s lament could be echoed by members of a variety of religious minorities. But within evangelical circles Dennett’s lament seemed bizarrely disconnected from the truth. For the dominant narrative among evangelicals is just the opposite: Christians are persecuted; religious freedoms are being curtailed; discrimination against Christians and their faith is rampant; their values are under siege by hostile forces in American culture aiming to promote an anti-Christian agenda. (Dennett himself had said in print elsewhere that “safety demands that religions be put in cages … when absolutely necessary,” and he wrote as if theologically conservative Baptists, among others, were prime candidates for caging. This was just fuel for the fire.) Continue reading.

Biden eyes inroads with evangelical voters

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Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is seeking to make inroads with evangelical voters, a demographic that overwhelmingly sided with President Trump during the 2016 election.

Team Biden doesn’t think it can win over all evangelicals or even a majority, but it does think it can slice off some of them from Trump’s coalition by emphasizing the former vice president’s personal faith and values.

At the Democratic National Convention, Biden’s campaign will hold an interfaith service on Aug. 16, and a Believers for Biden watch party ahead of the candidate’s acceptance speech is set for Aug. 20, according to a Biden adviser. Continue reading.

Evangelicals who gave Trump a pass on morality now share the consequences of his coronavirus response: Christian journalist

AlterNet logoIn an op-ed for The Dispatch this Monday, David French writes that Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary — a man who he respects deeply — declared amid a coronavirus-devastated economy that he’d support President Trump in 2020 and every Republican candidate to come thereafter.

While Mohler had initially declined to support Trump over questions about his “moral character,” previously saying that if he were to support, much less endorse Donald Trump for president, he “would actually have to go back and apologize to former President Bill Clinton” for all the critiques he leveled at him for his sexual improprieties.

“It’s well-established that a great number of white Evangelicals didn’t truly believe the words they wrote, endorsed, and argued in 1998 and for 18 years until the 2016 election,” French writes. “Oh sure, they thought they believed those words. If someone challenged their convictions with a lie detector test, they would have passed with flying colors.” Continue reading.

Nihilism-on-meth: This is the surprising key to understanding Trump and his Christian enablers

AlterNet logoLast night President Trump gave his State of the Union address, the night before his expected acquittal in a sham impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate. To paraphrase Dylan, you gotta belong to somebody, and I at least would like it to be someone better than a walking avatar of nihilism.

I’m not kidding. Nihilism in its most common philosophical sense means that nothing really matters in the end, and certainly Trump has given us no reason to think that he thinks anything beyond his own whims and appetites have any kind of meaning or value. Burnt steak with ketchup, golf, getting even with enemies, self-enrichment, sexualizing his daughter and ignoring his wife—these are the things that make Trump’s world go around, not any sense of history, purpose, or calling.

Meanwhile, Trump’s Republican enablers practice a kind of Randian political nihilism, in which nothing matters more than the constant struggle of all-vs.-all for dominance and self-realization. Alex Pareene pointed to one form of this nihilism last year in the transactionalist politics perfected by Mitch McConnell, who would set your dog on fire or enact Medicare for All, depending on the highest bidder. But of course, McConnell has plenty of help in the Senate from people like Lisa Murkowski, who boldly proclaimed that she would vote against witnesses in Trump’s impeachment because she was convinced a fair trial couldn’t be held.

Far-right white evangelicals love Trump for many reasons — including their terrifying obsession with the End Times: report

AlterNet logoThe Christian Right loves President Donald Trump for a variety of reasons, from his racist rhetoric and anti-immigrant views to all the far-right judges he has added to the federal courts. But journalist Stephanie Mencimer, this week in an article for Mother Jones, focuses on one of their most disturbing reasons for being so pro-Trump: an obsession with the End Times.

In Protestant Christianity, one finds both fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists. Mainline Protestants (Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, the African Methodist Episcopal or AME Church) study the Bible intensely, but they don’t have the obsession with the End Times and the New Testament’s Book of Revelation that the fundamentalist Christian Right has. And even though Trump himself is not a fundamentalist (he was raised Presbyterian), he is more than happy to pander to far-right white evangelicals — who, as Mencimer explains in her article, believe that Trump is important to the end of the world. The Christian Right welcomes the End Times because as they see it, Jesus Christ will return to Earth in the last days.

Mencimer, in her article, quotes religious historian Diane Butler Bass, who offers some insights on why the Christian Right believe Trump could play an important role in the End Times — and why the Christian Right has been applauding the killing of Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani. Bass told Mother Jones, “When Iran gets into the news, especially with anything to do with war, it’s sort of a prophetic dog whistle to evangelicals. They will support anything that seems to edge the world towards this conflagration. They don’t necessarily want violence, but they’re eager for Christ to return — and they think that this war with Iran and Israel has to happen for their larger hope to pass.” Continue reading.

A neuroscientist explains why Christian evangelicals are hardwired to believe Donald Trump’s lies

AlterNet logoPresident Donald Trump lies so often that it is no longer shocking when it happens, no matter how blatant or absurd the falsehood may be. Not only does Trump regularly exaggerate the truth, he frequently denies facts that can be observed directly from video or audio tapes. This has led some professionals to diagnose his lying as compulsive or pathological, and many psychologists have pointed out that he is constantly gaslighting his base—a term that refers to a strategic attempt to get others to question their direct experience of reality.

With so much evidence to contradict his claims, like having the largest inauguration crowd size despite pictures clearly showing otherwise, one must wonder how there are still people out there who believe anything the man says. But the fact of the matter is there are many who swallow it hook, line, and sinker. Most of his fervent supporters are convinced that Trump is the harbinger of truth when it comes to important issues like climate change—which is really just a “hoax perpetrated by the Chinese government”.

While this might sound laughable, it is a serious problem, as it has contributed to fake news and dangerous propaganda running rampant. Given its negative impact on society, it is important to understand why certain groups of people are more vulnerable to believing unsupported lies than others. For this, we must look to science for answers, and fortunately, the fields of psychology and neuroscience offer valuable insight. Continue reading