This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It is excerpted from “The Useful Idiot: How Donald Trump Killed the Republican Party with Racism and the Rest of Us with Coronavirus
The ‘evangelical Christian’ movement has been hijacked just as fully as the Republican Party. It is big money with charlatans as ‘leaders’…Franklin Graham rides on the coattails of ‘Daddy’ while grifting the gullible. Jerry Falwell Jr.? Well we’ve seen HIS fall. The doctrine they teach has nothing to do with the Bible and everything to do with ‘LISTEN TO ME! I am the ‘voice’ of God…and I’ll tell you all you need to know!’ When questioned by actual Christians they turn on them, tout them as ‘non-believers’ (kind of like RINOs) and ‘shun’ them. Their followers are ripe for fleecing.
Genius article. Had to be said.
Alex, I’ll take “cults” for $1,000.
Couldn’t agree more.
And Shirish is nothing if not thorough.
Putin did the exact same thing with the Russian Orthodox Church back in the early '00s and it paid HUGE dividends for him.
He directly paid off the church elders (million in secret foreign bank accounts) and then they campaigned hard for him in his elections in the '00s, holding him up as the “Great White Christian Hope” against the “Islamist Extremists” in the southern break-away states. Now, he has them firmly under his control, with the ROC being just another Oligarchy for him to manipulate against the “unwashed masses” and trot out in support of his every move.
Trump is doing the exact same thing here with the “Evangelical Rubes”. Setting himself up as the “Great White Christian Leader” to protect the poor White Christians from the evil “secularists and islamists”, and they are swallowing it hook, line, and sinker.
Really well-written article.
I wonder how the Evangelicals feel about Regeneron’s monoclonal antibody cocktail for COVID-19 patients containing, among many other things, embryonic stem cells?
Racism has been the foundation of the Republican Party since skinny Nixon’s southern strategy.
You won’t see this article in the Corporate Controlled Conservative Press and we know why.
Nah, the unifying principle is a profound hatred for science and intellectuals. A trait they share with Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, and every other cult leader that made it into government.
For false messiahs and false prophets will appear and produce great signs and omens, to lead astray, if possible, even the elect.
— Matthew 24:24
You have to understand that they believe “do unto others” means to “do unto others as you perceive them having done (or will do) to you.” The parenthetical is a very important part of it too, because it allows them to watch Faux News and the rest of the right wing cultural resentment propaganda machine and absorb a list of impending horribles and affronts that they WILL suffer at the hands of “the others” in order to justify doing those things to those people PRE-EMPTIVELY.
It’s happened before. In 1940 Conservative Catholics collaborated with the Nazis to end divorce and abortion in France. Faith at the point of a gun is the professed end game for America’s Protestant Dominionists.
The overwhelming support by WHITE (as though Jesus is different for BLACK) Evangelicals for Donald “grab her by the …” Trump proves that “values” in front of the word voter is and has always been code for race.
That said, below is a suggested Biden campaign ad:
In his pocket Joe Biden always carries a Rosarie,
Donald Trump always wants to grab her by the pee,
Your values, your choice.
If values is not code for race, the choice is obvious.
If values is code for race, the choice is equally obvious.
Thanks for the article. Surprised that the prosperity doctrine was not included in the discussion. This doctrine has been running rampant in Christian circles for decades and essentially says that one can demonstrate how much God reward them by their prosperity in the here and now…not later in Heaven as Jesus’ teachings made clear. This has created a “worship of the rich” that is now playing out on our national stage.
The so-called “Religious Right” has never been religious, nor has it ever, ever been right about anything!
Two excellent articles here:
One thing to add: however Johnny-come-lately American evangelicals were to the anti-abortion movement, 40 years later the folks in the pews really believe they’re “pro-life.”
But 2020 has demonstrated that even they don’t mean a word of it. When over 200,000 Americans die while this Administration looks on and does nothing, and they continue to wholeheartedly support Trump, it’s clear that “human life” isn’t something that matters much to them.
They adopted abortion as their issue, as Date says here, as a way of reclaiming the moral high ground they’d lost in their defense of segregation. But the argument for opposing abortion is that their regard for human life extends to fetuses in the womb - but for it to extend there, that regard has to apply strongly in the first place to those of us who’ve already been born. There’s no argument that the life of a fetus is worth more than my life or yours; the pro-life argument is that it’s worth as much.
So their lack of concern for the lives - and premature deaths - of the already-born says: their antiabortion advocacy is not about life. It’s always just been a device for claiming moral high ground. And this year of all years, they continued to be so wrapped up in the unborn baybeez while hundreds of thousands of adults died, and they didn’t realize they’d given away the game: that life meant nothing to them.
A really great write up! Kudos to Date for nailing most of the important points about White Evangelicals support for Trump. It’s refreshing to see the vail finally being lifted on what White Evangelicals realy are.
I have said it for a while now that White Evangelicalism is really a religion of right-wing economics (the ‘true’ way to order society) based on white grievances/identity politics and a fervent ’anti-liberalism’ that has nothing to do with the biblical Jesus anymore. I have literally heard them ‘preach’ on major christian radio networks that the minimum wage is ‘communist’ and thus democrats are anti-christian. Over on Patheos, one of the largest religion portals, the White Evangelicals have been waging a jihad against the BLM movement and the very idea that black people’s complaints are valid. Hell one of the major White Evangelical bloggers all but declared black evangelical churches not Christian.
The important thing I think that really needs to be done is to make sure that when a Dem does get back in office, the MSM doesn’t just give white evangelicals a platform to make their disingenuous claims of ‘personal morality’ against the next Dem president. They’ve proved they don’t care about that now, so they shouldn’t get media attention when they complain latter!
John Hagee, prominent megachurch pastor, ill with COVID-19
“Prominent Texas megachurch pastor and conservative activist John Hagee has been diagnosed with COVID-19”
Open the gates, not the gates of heaven but the gates of hell, Hagee is on the way down!