Friday, April 28, 2017

White Christian Right "Over the Moon" About Trump Presidency: News Worth Noting Today



Some "in the news" items I've noticed in the last day or so, which have to do with matters we often discuss here, and to which I want to draw your attention:


Deborah Jian Lee, "Betrayed at the Polls, Evangelicals of Color at a Crossroads": 

But this new administration has changed everything for George [Mekhail, previously pastor of Seattle's Eastlake Community church, a white evangelical megachurch] and evangelicals of color across the nation. The fact that 81 percent of white evangelicals supported a candidate who channeled white nationalism is not lost on minority believers. Nor is the unending news of travel bans, appointments of white nationalists, mass deportations and racial hate crimes. It has forced a reckoning. 
Today, believers of color are redefining their relationships with white evangelicalism in ways that could dramatically shift the landscape. Already, people of color make up a larger portion of the entire American Christian population than before, and church growth experts predict they will make up the majority of the Christian population after 2042. And their values are largely at odds with the white evangelical support for Trump; pre-election surveys showed that nonwhite evangelical Protestant voters, which included black, Hispanic and Asian-Pacific Islander Protestants, supported Clinton over Trump by a very wide margin (67% vs. 24%), according to the Public Religion Research Institute.




Bruce Stokes, "What It Takes to Be One of Us" (this Pew Research Center report dates from February, but was tweeted out again by Pew a day or so ago): 

About a third (32%) of Americans say it is very important for a person to be a Christian in order to be considered truly American. . . .A majority (57%) of white evangelical Protestants say it is very important to be Christian to be a true American. Just 29% of white mainline Protestants and 27% of Catholics agree. Only 9% of people who are unaffiliated with an organized religion say it is very important for a person to be Christian in order to be truly American.




Tim Alberta, "Social Conservatives Are 'Over the Moon' About Trump": 

"In my experience over the last 30 or so years of political life, there’s hardly any group in American politics that is as easily won over or seduced by power as Christians," [Pete] Wehner [a high-ranking evangelical who served in the George W. Bush White House] tells me. "The fact that the Trump people are paying attention to them makes them feel very, very good, and especially because they didn’t expect to be paid attention to very much. So they're just over the moon."




Margaret Atwood, Handmaid's Tale (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1986): 

Better never means better for everyone, he says. It always means worse, for some (p. 211).

Atwood's statement brilliantly encapsulates the bottom-line Republican philosophy shared by the right-wing white "Christian" enablers of the Republican party:

Better never means better for everyone, in the Republican world promoted by its right-wing "Christian" enablers. It always means better only for the wealthy, for white people, for males, for heterosexuals.

For everyone else, it means worse, much worse.

In the Republican "reform" of the tax system and the Affordable Care Act, which is being enabled by "pro-life" white "Christians," better means better only for rich people.

For everyone else, it means worse, much worse.





Andrew Foreshew-Cain is tweeting the preceding comment in response to this Christian Today report:





Kyle Mantyla, "Rep. Randy Weber Tearfully Begs God to Forgive American for the Sins of Legal Abortion and Marriage Equality": 

Texas GOP Representative Randy Weber prayed, with tears in his eyes, at the annual "Washington — A Man of Prayer" gathering in DC this week,

Father, we have endeavored to take the Bible out of classrooms, the Ten Commandments off the walls.

I think Randy Weber's prayer needs to be fixed:

Father, we have endeavored to rip healthcare from millions of poor people. 
Father, we have endeavored to deny legal rights to LGBT human beings and their families, to make them and their families as miserable as possible. 
Father, while pretending to to be "pro-life," we have cheered killing sprees in states dominated by white evangelical Christians; we have reveled in state killings and celebrated the shedding of blood. 
Father, we have trampled the poor into the ground as we have promoted tax cuts favoring only the super-rich. 
Father, we have treated women like dirt, electing to office a man who brags about sexually molesting women. 
Father, we have told women that their purpose in life is to obey and serve men. 
Father, we have made idols of ourselves, straight white powerful men, and have pretended that you, God, are made in our image — which is idolatry.

There, fixed it for Randy.





Jax Hidalgo is tweeting the preceding comment in response to this tweet by the Values and Voices group:


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