First Fault Lines in Unified Evangelical Support for Trump Arise
October 15, 2019
As the impeachment inquiry proceeds and Trump’s ghastly Syria decision impact the public, evangelical support for Trump is showing slight signs of slippage (Joe Shlabotnik)
MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH
Although it’s not a surge, recent polling indicates that some evangelicals are abandoning their support for Trump the first time. An October 11 Washington Post cites,
A Fox News poll released Wednesday, [shows that ] 51 percent of Americans want Trump impeached and removed from office — including nearly 3 in 10 white evangelicals….
The majority of white evangelicals — 71 percent — continue to support Trump, according to the poll, but that’s 10 points lower than the 81 percent that backed him over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
The Post article points to evangelical ministers who are critical of Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds and Christians who live in northern Syria. It also cites some concern, among a still relatively modest group of evangelicals, with the evidence arising from the impeachment inquiry.
However, it would be wrong to assume that this represents a trend in evangelical dissatisfaction with Trump. Evangelicals have been perhaps his most loyal group of supporters, particularly through their leadership that includes Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell Jr. and Ralph Reed, among a multitude of others.
It has been dismaying to progressives and secularists as to how evangelicals could be so hypocritical in supporting a libertine spewer of hate and violence such as Trump, while avowing that they want the United States to abide by “Christian values.”’
In a December, 2018, opinion piece in The New York Times, Katherine Stewart states that it,
comes down to the belief that he is a miracle sent straight from heaven to bring the nation back to the Lord. I have also learned that resistance to Mr. Trump is tantamount to resistance to God.
This isn’t the religious right we thought we knew. The Christian nationalist movement today is authoritarian, paranoid and patriarchal at its core. They aren’t fighting a culture war. They’re making a direct attack on democracy itself.
Stewart also notes that evangelicals compare Trump to King Cyrus in the Old Testament who “is the model for a nonbeliever appointed by God as a vessel for the purposes of the faithful.”
The Hill reported in April of 2019 that former Congresswoman Michele Bachmann told a Christian broadcast interviewer:
“He has stood up where most Republicans wouldn't dare to stand up,” Bachmann went on to say of Trump. “Donald Trump has had the courage and the fortitude, and I will say to your listeners in my lifetime I have never seen a more biblical president than I have seen in Donald Trump.”
Bachmann upped the ante of Trump’s Godliness when she avowed, “We should stand by Trump because he was placed in the White House by God.”
Faith and Freedom Coalition founder Ralph Reed has a new book coming out. According a recent Politico article, Reed will state that “American evangelicals ‘have a moral obligation to enthusiastically back’ Trump.” The original name of the book, now changed, was Render to God and Trump.
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Still, the bestowal of a mantle from God upon Trump the con artist, philanderer, peddler of hate, sadistic abuser of migrants, con man, denigrator of the poor, and chronic liar, still is baffling to many non-evangelicals.
However, Jeff Sharlet, author of the book The Family, which recently appeared on Netflix as an original series, notes that many evangelicals believe in an elite vanguard of Christian leaders. They are, like high-level political members of The Family, often sinners and unscrupulous. Nevertheless, they are forgiven their transgressions because they are the generals in the army implementing Christian “values” throughout the US government.
Sharlet argues that such leadership does not, contrary to biblical homilies in church, value the sheep of the flock. Rather, what is needed to advance God’s kingdom on earth is an authoritarian “wolf king” The “wolf king” is forgiven all his (remember this is a patriarchal model) sins and venality in exchange for his authoritarian strength and cunning. Thus Trump becomes an agent of God because in the end he ruthlessly implements Christian “values” in the government. Remember, as Katherine Stewart wrote in the NYT, the evangelicals are “making a direct attack on democracy itself.” Who embodies that more than Trump?
It is within this context that in August Trump retweeted a description of himself as the second coming of God and the King of Israel. Shortly later, he gazed at the sky in front of the DC press corps and mused that he might be the “Chosen One.” This was language that had great resonance to evangelicals, since so many of them believe he was selected by God to transition democracy into a Christian state.
In this context, Trump is a flawed but chosen vessel of God to achieve what is called Christian Dominionism:
Christian Dominionists believe that God desires Christians to rise to power through civil systems so that His Word might then govern the nation. The belief that “America is a Christian nation” is sometimes called “soft dominionism”; the idea that God wants only Christians to hold government office and run the country according to biblical law is called “hard dominionism.”
Understand this, as long as the vast majority of evangelicals continue to see Trump as fulfilling the mandates of a biblical God, they will continue to back the sinner as president and pray for his continued dismantling of the US government and transition to a white Christian state.
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