Voices Crying In The Wilderness
The slow death of a culture can, however, lead to resurrection. In Oregon a group of Christian NGOs has sprung up, whose founders are theologically evangelical and socially conservative but have no links to politically conservative evangelicalism. The left-leaning state government is working enthusiastically with them. Ben Sand runs a group called Every Child, which mobilises communities to work with Oregons Department for Human Services . Three-quarters of the 1,500 families who became certified for fostering children in 2020 have come through Every Child.
Evangelicals look at Oregon and say this is where God goes to die, says Mr Sand. But having no cultural power can be helpful to the spiritual message, he says. The best thing for the evangelical movement is for it to lose its cultural influence, because only in that context of humility, of going back to what matters most in the ethics of Jesus, will the church find its soul again. The detachment of faith from right-wing politics appeals to Fariborz Pakseresht, director of the states DHS: Perhaps this is what true Christianity looks like.
This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline “Two nations under God”
Why Do Us Evangelicals Support Trump Theyre Giving Christianity A Bad Name
In the UK, the United States president is dismissed or condemned from almost all quarters, and most of us struggle to get our heads around the idea that millions of people voted for Donald Trump. One significant group of these voters were white evangelical Christians. According to the exit polls from the 2016 US election, white evangelical Christians voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by 81% to 16%.
It has not been unusual for presidential candidates to court the so-called evangelical Christian vote in recent history. If you vote for a president, it doesnt necessarily mean you support everything they stand for. I recognise that: the 81% represents a whole host of motivations and degrees of support rather than a united mass gathering under Trumps banner. But its still a big number.
What matters more, the identity of the person in the White House or the promotion of the good news about Jesus Christ?
One story I stumbled across seemed laughable at first. There is a group in the US who brought out a film shortly before the 2018 midterm elections called The Trump Prophecy. This film likened the US president to Cyrus, the first emperor of Persia a pagan used by God to bring about his purposes.
So not only is it wrong to support Trump on this basis, it is also dangerous. Dangerous because it contributes to the tribal politicisation of evangelical Christians.
Why Trump Is Reliant On White Evangelicals
Since Ronald Reagans 1980 victory over Jimmy Carter, Republican presidential candidates have benefitted from enthusiastic support of evangelical Christian voters, specifically white evangelicals. As demographics in the United States continue to shift, election analysts must understand the scale of evangelicals role in the Republican coalition, especially in swing states. Combining a few considerations about the size, demographic makeup, and voting behaviors of white evangelical Christians with an analysis of voters in an important swing state helps clarify why this electoral group is essential for any Republican coalition during the 2020 race to the White House.
Size, demographics and voting habits of white evangelicals
About one in four American adults belongs to an evangelical Christian denomination according to a Pew Research Center 2014 study, making evangelicals the most common religious group just ahead of those without a religious affiliation. This percentage is down very slightly from a prior study in 2007. The National Election Pool exit polls found 26% of voters self-identified as white evangelical Christians in 2016. Beyond their total numbers, 64% of Evangelicals reported church attendance at least weekly compared to 35% of other Christians, suggesting a potential for a higher frequency of politically relevant messaging.
The impact of white evangelicals on party preferences in a swing state
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‘clearly Trying To Save Face’: Trump Endorses Two Gop Rivals In Same Race
Over the weekend, Herschel Walker addressed the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a gathering of social conservatives in Nashville, Tennessee. His speech came just days after Walker’s campaign publicly acknowledged he had three children by women he was not married to in addition to his son by his ex-wife.
Was the crowd skeptical of the Georgia Republican Senate nominee? Quite the contrary. reported that Walker “received resounding applause from evangelical Christian activists on Saturday.”How to explain that seeming contradiction? Enter , a professor of history at Calvin University. Du Mez is the author of The New York Times bestseller “,” a book that has had a profound impact on how I understand the rise of Donald Trump and his acolytes, like Walker.I reached out to Du Mez to chat about Walker, Trump and the broader Republican Party. Our conversation — conducted via email and lightly edited for flow — is below.Cillizza: Herschel Walker was cheered by a social conservative crowd over the weekend, just days after he acknowledged he has four kids, not the one most people thought he had. What gives?Du MezCillizza: In your book, you write that the rise of Donald Trump fits into a long pattern within the evangelical community. Explain.Du MezbecauseDu Mez
It Is Not Clear That They Can Be Persuaded To Vote Democrat However
SET IN THE bucolic countryside on the edge of Nashville, Christ Presbyterian Church is a stately building where, in normal times, hundreds of evangelical Christians gather to worship. On a recent Sunday a smaller, socially distanced congregation assembled to hear the preacher speak on the eighth chapter of the gospel of Mark, in which Jesus asks his disciples: Who do people say I am? Such questions of identity are troubling many in the congregation, too. Chatting after the service, Samantha Fisher, a mother of two who works in public relations, sums up the current moment: I dont know any more what it means to be a Christian and an American.
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For every evangelical I meet who supports what happened on January 6th, I meet 5,000 who do not, says Scott Sauls, senior pastor at Christ Presbyterian. Leaders like him are trying to shift the focus of their churches, warning that putting too much faith in politics is not only spiritually misguided, but also self-defeating. The culture wars are the greatest distraction from the mission of the church, he says.
Demography is having an impact, too. Robert P. Jones of PRRI, a think-tank, and author of The End of White Christian America, says that 22% of American pensioners are white evangelicals but only 8% of millennials are. Between a quarter and a third of evangelicals are not white, and many vote Democrat. Some of these shifts could start to influence politics.
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Opinionwe Want To Hear What You Think Please Submit A Letter To The Editor
All of this has made a mockery of white evangelical protestations about morality and the family. Moral issues once drove white evangelical votes but, first when Obama was elected and then when the Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on same sex marriage in June of 2015, what remained was their fear. Trump promised justices and a return to a time when they felt less fear, and he delivered, at least on the former. White evangelical fealty to him is firm. Evangelicals in America are not simply a religious group they are a political group inexorably linked to the Republican Party.
Trump delivered evangelicals from the shame of losing, and they will back him again in 2020 to avoid losing again. So perhaps we should take evangelicals at their word that they will support Trump come hell or high water, rather than twisting ourselves into knots trying to figure out why.
Why Evangelicals Support Donald Trump
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WHO IS AN EVANGELICAL?The History of a Movement in CrisisBy Thomas S. KiddWhy Evangelicals Chose Political Power Over Christian ValuesBy Ben Howe
How 81 percent of evangelicals could have voted for Donald Trump, given his flouting of their traditional values, has been a question for many Americans since 2016. Thomas S. Kidd and Ben Howe, both evangelicals, try to answer this question in different ways.
Kidd, a professor of history at Baylor University, finds an explanation in the history of the relationship between evangelicals and political power. It was, he tells us, a myth that the Puritans favored religious freedom for all. Rather, they wanted the freedom to practice their own religion and brought a relatively harsh form of religious establishment to Massachusetts and Connecticut. It was the evangelicals in the Great Awakenings the religious revivals in the 18th and 19th centuries who spread the idea of religious liberty John Locke inspired in them. After the Revolution, evangelicals, mainly Baptists and Methodists, adopted the principle of separation of church and state and helped James Madison and Thomas Jefferson enshrine it in the first amendment to the Constitution.
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The Evangelicals Trump Obsession Has Tarnished Christianity
The recent death of Christian evangelist Luis Palau, the Billy Graham of Latin America, has me thinking about how the Trump era has affected the ability of Christians to share the good news about Jesus salvation with a diverse and skeptical world. According to his New York Timesobituary, Palau was especially aware of the common assumption that evangelicals are rabid right-wingers, so he sought to compensate by holding festivals in progressive cities. In New England, when you say Christian, they think those maniacs on the right, Palau told the Times in 2001. I want to show that we are not maniacs but that we are well educated. This is a rational faith, but a faith that fires you up. If you believe, as Palau did , that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life, then it makes sense to share the good news with everyone you canyes, including college-educated urbanites and progressives. Thats what Palau did.
But what happens when so many of Christs messengers have sacrificed their credibility and moral high ground by allying with a controversial political figure such as, say, Donald Trump? What happens when Jesus brand ambassadors to a lot of Americans are Donald Trump and Jerry Falwell Jr., not Billy Graham and Pope Francis, much less Jesus himself? In todays climate, you might be forgiven for thinking that Christians are, as Palau worried we would be perceived, maniacs.
Jeff Sessions Explains Why Christians Support Trump
The former attorney general compared the president to a Middle Eastern strongman.
About the author: David A. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
In Christ there is no east or west / In him no south or north, / But one great family bound by love / Throughout the whole wide earth, goes the old hymn.
But in Donald Trump, there is division among American Christians. On one side are those who insist that the president is a Christian hero who is standing up for religious rights. On the other are critics who counter that white evangelical Christians have struck a corrupt but convenient bargain with an immoral leader whose inclinations are dictatorial, not religious.
Into this debate strides former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who, despite his excommunication from Trumps good graces, remains a die-hard backer of the president and his ideological agenda. Yet in a masterful profile in The New York Times Magazine by Elaina Plott, he comes down solidly, if unwittingly, on the side of the skeptics. Sessions suggests that the presidents own religious convictions are irrelevant, compares him to the dictators Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and Bashar al-Assad, and makes the case for choosing a strongman who can defend Christians over democratic politics.
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The Problem Is The Culture
We may not know exactly what has led to the rise of anti-Christian attitudes, but we do know the arguments used to support it. Many of those with such attitudes envision Christians as bigoted, intolerant, racist, unthinking, and crude. These are also qualities that are tied, with good reason, to President Trump. To have Christians seen as supportive of Trump is to reinforce some of the Christianophobic stereotypes. Support of Trump will ironically reinforce many of the cultural stereotypes working against Christians in the long run. I do not doubt that in the short term there are protections gained by Trump. But that is shortsighted. In the long term any legal protection gained because of Trump will be overturned by a culture that is more anti-Christian because of current evangelical support of Trump.
The second major pushback I receive is that those who hate Christians will continue to hate us regardless of whether we support Trump or not. True. Some people have such hatred in their hearts that nothing we do short of capitulating to all their political and social causes will satisfy them.
Virginia Election Proves Voters Are Sick Of Hearing About Donald Trump
Hannah Chan is eagerly anticipating Easter Sunday, the most important date in the Christian calendar.
She, her husband Leo and their 16-year-old daughter plan to dress up, go to church and have an afternoon supper with friends.
This Easter we will be spending at a new church, so we are really looking forward to coming together with the community, she says with a smile.
Chan, 45, became a Christian growing up in Hong Kong, where she attended the citys Baptist University and met her husband before moving to the US in 2002. Eventually the family settled in Cary, NC, and Hannah said she has since enjoyed meteoric success as a real-estate agency owner, starting with a $600 course to get her license.
But first and foremost, Chan identifies as a Christian and that extends to every part of her life, including politics.
My beliefs go with me in the voting booth, she said. Christians want to support the leader who will have a backbone. And who will stand up for all others to protect religious freedom. That protection is why my family came to the United States.
For her, that meant a vote for Donald Trump in 2020, and she isnt alone. White evangelical and conservative Christian voters robustly supported Trumps reelection last November. Exit numbers show he earned 76 percent of their support just 5 percentage points less than in 2016, according to exit poll data.
So, in a post-Trump world, do faith voters like Chan and Doll worry theyve lost a champion for good?
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Opinionbilly Graham’s Legacy: Evangelicals’ Pursuit Of Politics Over Jesus
After 9/11, many evangelicals vilified Islam and created cottage industries and ministries promoting Islamophobia. And when Barack Obama was elected president, they regrouped, bought guns and became Tea Partiers who promoted fiscal responsibility and indulged in birtherism, promoted by no less than the son of Billy Graham, Franklin.
Still, evangelicals have worked to make a good show of repenting for racism. From the racial reconciliation meetings of the 1990s to today, they have dutifully declared racism a sin, and Southern Baptists have apologized again for their role in American slavery most recently in 2018 via a document outlining their role.
But statements are not enough. Proving how disconnected they are from their statements about atoning for the sin of racism, the 2019 Annual Convention of the Southern Baptists was opened with a gavel owned by John A. Broadus, a slaveholder, white supremacist and the founder of their seminary. In the meantime, the most visible Southern Baptist pastor, Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Dallas, recently said of Trump that he does not judge people by the color of their skin, but whether or not they support him, calling that “the definition of colorblind.”
Evangelical Christians In The Us
- Most common in southern states, including Tennessee, Alabama, and Kentucky
- Most evangelicals believe they have been “born again”
- Evangelicals also believe in spreading the gospel, and leading others to Christ
- Vice-President Mike Pence describes himself as an evangelical Christian
Jerusalem is important to all Christians. But the city, and Israel, is especially significant to some.
This is where the End Times comes in.
“There’s a segment of Christianity that believes the creation of the state of Israel was the fulfilment of prophecy,” says Prof Christopher Rollston from George Washington University.
“Not just a good thing – but the fulfilment of prophecy.”
The idea was popularised in a best-selling book called The Late, Great Planet Earth, released in 1970.
The slim paperback, by American author Hal Lindsey, said world events – including the creation of Israel – were proving the Bible correct.
To some Christians, the book validated their beliefs. It also meant the end of the world as we know it – which the Bible also predicts – was near.
The idea is older than Hal Lindsey, but he helped popularise it. The book sold millions of copies.
Not all Evangelicals share this apocalyptic view. But some do, including a group called premillennialists.
They believe in a Great Tribulation – that is, a period of war and destruction – before a thousand years of peace.
So what is the connection to End Times and Donald Trump recognising Jerusalem as Israel’s capital?
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