Thursday, March 17, 2016

Raymond Arroyo on Why (White) Evangelicals and (White Republican) Catholics Love Trump: They're "Keep[ing] Their Faith Out of Politics"




As a companion piece to the tweet of EWTN's Raymond Arroyo that I posted yesterday, here's a video clip FOX recently tweeted, in which Arroyo is interviewed by FOX and Friends about why (white) evangelicals and (white Republican) Catholics are choosing Donald Trump, despite his . . . should we call it a disconnect from? . . . what one would imagine to be core Christian values: Arroyo explains that these conservative Christian voters are choosing Trump because "they're voting to in some ways keep their faith out of politics. They don't want this tilt towards some of these issues that they just feel aren't in tandem with the gospel as they understand it."

Enter facepalm emoticons in response to the claim that, by choosing Donald Trump, (white) evangelicals and (white Republican) Catholics are keeping their faith out of politics!




Oddly (since the churches to which these white evangelicals and many of these white Republican Catholics belong are far from liberal), Arroyo proposes that these voters are voting Trump to stick it to the "establishment" in their churches. Translation: they do not intend to be preached to by Pope Francis or anyone else about issues of social justice, about treating those on the margins of society with dignity and making political choices on the basis of the preferential option for the poor, about racism, about loving and affirming LGBT human beings.

It's payback time for all that talk confusing liberal "political" issues with the gospel message.

All those issues are political issues. They're distortions of the gospel, which is about oh, I suppose, hard work and its reward, the punishment of the lazy and immoral, triumph over enemies, judgment piled on judgment.

In their minds and hearts . . . .

In the case of Catholics, we have the U.S. Catholic bishops (and the lay intellectual leaders of the U.S. Catholic church, who have allowed the bishops to do this to their church) to thank for all of this non sense.

The photo of Henri Vidal's "Caïn" statue is from the Wikipedia entry for the term "facepalm," and was uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Alex E. Proimos; the statue is in the Tuileries Garden, Paris.

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