Tag: evangelical Christians

Journalist leaves Christian Post amid its plans to attack Christianity Today

Washington Post logoThe decision by Christianity Today to publish an editorial describing President Trump as “immoral” and calling for his removal drew immediate rebuke from the president himself, who called the outlet “a far left magazine.” The piece drew nearly 3 million unique visitors to the magazine’s website and became the talk of TV news shows over the weekend.

At the same time, the longtime centrist-right evangelical magazine saw a rush of canceled subscriptions — and an even greater wave of new subscribers, magazine President Timothy Dalrymple said. Both he and the author of the editorial, retiring editor in chief Mark Galli, could also face personal and professional consequences, according to interviews with several other conservative Christian leaders and writers who in the past have spoken out critically about Trump.

They described losing book sales, conference attendees, donors, church members and relationships. Continue reading

White evangelical Protestants are fully disrobed. And it is an embarrassing sight.

Washington Post logoIt has always struck me as strange that a narrative about genocide — Noah and the ark — should be employed as a children’s story. As the other boys and girls in Sunday school focused on the cuteness of the rescued animals, I remember thinking about the mass of humanity desperately clawing to get into Noah’s boat. This exposed an early tendency to see the glass as half-empty — particularly when it contained so many floating corpses.

Now I understand that all the best stories have sharp edges of tragedy and danger. Even so, the story of Noah is an odd curricular choice for young children. Fresh off the boat, according to the biblical account, he plants a vineyard, gets drunk and lies naked in his tent. This is a source of consternation to Noah’s sons, who don’t want to see the dark side, much less the backside, of their father. So they cover him with a handy duvet.

Rabbinic and early Christian scholars — figuring that there must be more to the story than meets the eye — postulated that adultery, rape or castration were somehow involved. But there is an application closer at hand.

View the complete commentary by Michael Gerson on The Washington Post website here.

Trump is weaponizing evangelicals’ mistrust. And he’s succeeding.

Washington Post logoAre the dominant voices of white evangelical Christianity in the United States destined to be angry and defensive? Is President Trump making sure they stay that way?

I found myself asking these questions after I read my Post colleague Elizabeth Bruenig’s revealing and deeply reported essay about her journey to Texas to probe why evangelicals have been so loyal to Trump and are likely to remain so.

Hers was a venture in sympathetic understanding and empathetic listening. What she heard was a great desire to push back against liberals, to defend a world that sees itself under siege and to embrace Trump — not as a particularly good man but as a fighter against all of the things and people and causes that they cannot abide. Even more, they believe liberals and secularists are utterly hostile to the culture they have built and the worldview they embrace.

View the complete August 21 column by E.J. Dionne, Jr., on The Washington Post website here.

Evangelicals revolt against Trump as his rallies increasingly spiral into profane rants: ‘I might just stay home this time’

AlterNet logoAccording to a report in Politico, evangelical Christians who turned out in force for Donald Trump in 2016 are growing increasingly dismayed by his language during his raucous rallies and may turn away from him when the 2020 election rolls around.

As Trump has ramped up his rhetoric during his unscripted rants before adoring fans at his rallies, he has increasingly begun to use more profanity which has some Christians — who have accepted his adultery and un-Christian treatment of immigrants — deeply upset.

Of note was a West Virginia lawmaker who called out the president after  Trump told a recent rally crowd, “They’ll be hit so goddamn hard,” while boasting about bombing Islamic State militants.

View the complete August 12 article by Tom Boggioni from Raw Story on the AlterNet website here.

Evangelicals are naked before the world

Washington Post logo“There has never been anyone who has defended us and who has fought for us, who we have loved more than Donald J. Trump. No one!”

This recent statement by religious-right activist Ralph Reed is objectively true, at least when it comes to sloppy kisses for the president. Considered purely as a political transaction, religious conservatives have gotten two appointments to the Supreme Court who set their hearts aflutter. They, in return, have shifted from the language of political realism to the language of love.

Trump has not gone back on the conservative promises of his 2016 campaign. More than that, he has not let up in his attacks against liberal elites who disdain religious conservatives. Reed is correct that Trump has “defended us” and “fought for us.”

But this language itself should raise warning signs. Is this really how most conservative Christians view the political enterprise — as the vindication of their own interests rather than the good of the whole? Were Christian political activists of the 19th century — such as William Wilberforce , Frederick Douglass, Charles Grandison Finney and Harriet Beecher Stowe — primarily concerned with the respect accorded to their own religious community? No, they were known for taking the side of the oppressed and vulnerable.

View the complete June 27 column by Michael Gerson on The Washington Post website here.

The evangelical right wants you to pray for Trump — and forget their shameful smearing of Obama

Franklin Graham and several so-called Christian (religious right) leaders want Sunday to be designated as a day of prayer for Donald Trump under the guise that he is facing attacks like no president has before. The irony is that a  number of these “concerned folks” spent the last eight years smearing and demonizing President Barack Obama in some of the nastiest tones and untrue claims. From questioning his citizenship to claiming that he is paving the way for the Anti-Christ, their attacks had the same slanderous theme – that Obama was a Manchurian candidate who hated Christianity, hated America, and was doing everything in his power to destroy the country:

Franklin Graham once claimed that Russian president Putin’s persecution of his country’s gay citizens was more noble than Obama supporting LGBTQ equality?  Graham also helped to spread the nonsense that Obama wasn’t an American citizen?

Alan Keyes, who Obama defeated for the Senate seat from Illinois in 2004, once called Obama a “radical communist.” He also stoked the birther controversy regarding Obama to the point of pushing an unsuccessful lawsuit about it. In addition, Keyes said that Obama was destroying everything American.

View the complete June 2 article from the Daily Kos on the AlterNet website here.