From
electoral-vote.com:
In any case, we are not the only ones to notice that many evangelical Christians do not appear to be practicing what they preach. The
Washington Post's Michael Gerson, himself an evangelical, published an
op-ed on Tuesday taking his fellow white evangelical Protestants (WEPs) to task. He observes that their embrace of violence, hatred of immigrants, tolerance for corruption, and willingness to treat the Ten Commandments as optional for some people are all quite un-Christian. What these things are, however, is very Trump-like. "Rather than shaping President Trump's agenda in Christian ways, they have been reshaped into the image of Trump himself," Gerson says. He continues:
The result has properly been called cultlike. For many followers, Trump has defined an alternative, insular universe of facts and values that only marginally resembles our own. According to the PRRI poll, nearly two-thirds of WEPs deny that Trump has damaged the dignity of his office. Ponder that a moment. Well over half of this group is willing to deny a blindingly obvious, entirely irrefutable, manifestly clear reality because it is perceived as being critical of their leader. Forty-seven percent of WEPs say that Trump's behavior makes no difference to their support. Thirty-one percent say there is almost nothing that Trump could do to forfeit their approval. This is preemptive permission for any violation of the moral law or the constitutional order. It is not support; it is obeisance.
The most staggering number, perhaps, is the one that Gerson closes with: 99 percent of WEPs oppose impeachment in all circumstances.
The choice that the WEPs have made here—a devil's bargain, if you will—is yet another case of prioritizing short-term gain over long-term pain. With Trump in the Oval Office, they will get their judges, and they will get their funding cuts for things like Planned Parenthood. They might even be able to curtail abortion rights (though that may not be so easy, after all, as a
federal judge just struck down Alabama's draconian abortion ban). But someday soon, and maybe very soon, Donald Trump will leave office. His executive orders will be overturned, his funding priorities reversed. His judges will pretty quickly be a small minority in the federal judiciary, and then will fade away entirely. Meanwhile, older members of the evangelical movement
are dying off and are not being replaced by younger ones. Most young evangelicals are either abandoning religion entirely, or else are embracing an inclusive, tolerant, charity-based interpretation of the New Testament. You know, something that sounds kinda like Jesus' ministry.
Above is only part of the article. But I think that bottom part, about the demographics, is the interesting part. The evangelicals better enjoy this ride, speaking on behalf of everyone else we are going to have even less interest in what they say going forward. Imagine if "thirty-one percent say there is almost nothing that Trump could do to forfeit their approval" had the word Trump replaced by the word Obama and was about liberals?
