Chosen By God: Donald Trump, The Christian Right And American Capitalism

John Newsinger

Description

One of the most obscene spectacles of the Trump presidency has been that of evangelical pastors crowding round him to give him their blessing. But this is only a very public acknowledgement that he is very much their man. The 81 percent of white evangelical Christians, who made up a third of those voting for him, effectively put him in the White House. Not only did a large majority of evangelical Christians vote for him, but tens of thousands of them actively campaigned for him. How did they come to support an individual as saturated in sin as Trump?

Informations

• Publié par: Bookmarks
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781912926756
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 3 Mo

Extrait

Chosen by God: Donald Trump, the Christian Right and American Capitalism
John Newsinger
Chosen by God: Donald Trump, the Christian Right and American Capitalism
John Newsinger
First published edition published by Bookmarks in 2020
Bookmarks Publications Ltd
c/o 1 Bloomsbury Street, London WC1B 3QE
www.bookmarksbookshop.co.uk
ISBN 978-1-912926-73-2 paperback
ISBN 978-1-912926-74-9 Kindle
ISBN 978-1-912926-75-6 epub
ISBN 978-1-912926-76-3 pdf
Typeset by Bookmarks Publications
Cover design by Ben Windsor
Printed by Halstan Co Ltd, Amersham, England
Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1 Christian America
Chapter 2 God and the Cold War
Chapter 3 The Politics of Billy Graham
Chapter 4 The Emergence of the Christian Right
Chapter 5 The World of the Christian Right
Chapter 6 The Televangelists
Chapter 7 Ronald Reagan, George W Bush and the Christian Right
Chapter 8 The New Cyrus

The Christian right has grown in power and influence over the decades, giving expression to conservative and reactionary views on race, gender and sexuality, while consistently opposing movements that demand social justice.
Introduction
One of the most obscene spectacles to accompany the Trump presidency has been that of evangelical pastors crowding round him to lay their hands on him and to give him their blessing. But this is only a very public acknowledgement that he is very much their man. Donald Trump was after all only elected to the US presidency in 2016 by the votes of the Christian right. The 81 percent of white evangelical Christians, who made up a third of those voting for him, effectively put him in the White House. Not only did a large majority of evangelical Christians vote for him, but tens of thousands of them actively campaigned for him. They canvassed, fasted and prayed for his victory, a victory which they welcomed as a veritable miracle. The triumph of their man against all the odds was clearly the result of divine intervention. Even though he had decisively lost the popular vote, God had still installed him in office. A miracle indeed! God had decided to save America! As Pastor Robert Jeffress, one of Trump s court evangelicals , put it: the election of President Trump represented God giving us another chance - perhaps our last chance to truly make America great again We thank God every day that he gave us a leader like President Trump . 1
This raises two questions. First, how did the Christian right come to have such a powerful voice in US politics, more particularly in the Republican Party, and second how was it that they came to support someone like Donald Trump? Certainly the influence of the Christian right in the Republican Party has been growing since the 1970s so that today anyone seeking office has to conciliate them, to bring them on board. Even John McCain, someone who despised the Christian right, felt obliged to placate them during his 2008 presidential campaign, among other things installing the appalling Sarah Palin as his running mate. This was the devout evangelical Christian who could casually remark that waterboarding is how we baptise terrorists . Although McCain, in retrospect, looks positively normal compared to Trump, it is important to remember that he was, in fact, a warmongering right-wing conservative who at rallies entertained his audience by singing Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran to the tune of the Beachboys Barbara Ann and on one occasion made clear that he would not have a problem if US troops were to remain in Iraq for a hundred years. 2 And during the campaign for the Republican presidential nomination in 2015, when asked not one of the candidates publicly affirmed that he or she believed in evolution and a number of them urged that creationism should be taught in public schools . 3 This is in the twenty-first century in the most scientifically advanced country in the world, but paradoxically, by many measures of religiosity, also the most religious country in the industrialised world . 4 The political influence of the Christian right is firmly rooted in an evangelical subculture which we need to understand.
As for Trump, not only did he promise the Christian right everything they wanted, in particular control of the federal judiciary up to the Supreme Court, but he also installed one of their number, Mike Pence, a former Congressman and Governor of Indiana, as his running mate. Even so, how did they come to support an individual as saturated in sin as Trump. A bullying sexual predator and misogynist, a crook and a conman, a racist and an authoritarian, a compulsive liar, someone both profoundly ignorant and at the same time convinced of his own genius, a man without a Christian bone in his body! According to Omarosa Manigault Newman, who was for a while one of his aides and who is herself an ordained preacher, Trump has no knowledge of the Bible at all. It might as well be a paper brick to him . He even seriously suggested to her before his inauguration that he should take the oath of office using his own ghost-written book, The Art of the Deal , rather than the Bible: just think how many copies I d sell . 5 And as one conservative critic, Max Boot, has put it: these supposed champions of morality were willing to support a candidate who regarded the sins proscribed in the Ten Commandments as his personal to-do list . They were so much theological silly putty twisting their supposed convictions to support whatever political outcome they favoured . Indeed their devotion to him was so total and unshakeable that Trump might as well have been the Messiah . 6 When the veteran televangelist, Pat Robertson, interviewed Trump on his 700 Club show in July 2017, one of his former evangelical employees at the Christian Broadcasting Network commented in disgust that it was less an interview than a reverential hand job . 7 This has pretty much been the nature of the relationship between Trump and the Christian right ever since. Indeed, it sometimes seems that it would take Trump announcing he was gay, that he was marrying Mike Pence and that Melania Trump was having an abortion to undermine evangelical support, and even then
It is worth remembering, at this point, that the Christian right was the driving force behind the attempt to impeach Bill Clinton over his White House affair with Monica Lewinsky! Someone with his morals was apparently unfit to be president! Pastor John Hagee published a book in 2000, God s Candidate for America , endorsing George W Bush s candidacy for the presidency. Here he insisted that Christians should only vote for candidates that Jesus would support there is no reason to tolerate adulterers or liars or crooks in our government offices Vote Like Jesus Would . 8 The contrast between the lying adulterer Bill Clinton and the born-again George W Bush could not have been clearer as far as Hagee was concerned. This man is today one of Trump s leading court evangelicals .
In sharp contrast to their earlier moral stance regarding Bill Clinton, the Christian right overwhelmingly supported Trump through the so-called Pussy-gate episode. Indeed, a good case can be made that their support was essential to his campaign even continuing considering that no previous presidential candidate caught boasting of how he had routinely sexually assaulted women would ever have survived such a revelation. Whereas in 2011 polling showed that 61 percent of white evangelicals believed that an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life could not be trusted to behave ethically and fulfil their duties in their public and professional life , in the aftermath of Pussy-gate , 72 percent now thought that personal immorality was not a problem in public or professional life . This quite incredibly made them the most tolerant of unethical conduct of all religious groups and even of all Americans in general . 9 America s most devout Christians were almost overnight the most tolerant of personal immorality ! The hypocrisy on display here is staggering, indeed positively glowing as one critic has put it, and moreover they don t care . 10
More recently, when Trump refused to condemn the white supremacists and neo-Nazis taking part in the Unite the Right demonstrations called by the alt-right in Charlottesville in August 2017, demonstrations in which one anti-racist protester, Heather Heyer, was killed and many others were seriously injured, while many CEOs resigned from their various business advisory boards in disgust, not one pastor or preacher resigned from their spiritual advisory board over this issue. Indeed, as one of their number, Eric Metaxas, made clear: We re going to stand up for Trump a hundred times more . 11 And white evangelical support for Trump, at the time of writing, is holding up and likely to continue through to the 2020 presidential election.
One important point to remember here, of course, is that while the great majority of white evangelicals supported and still support Trump, many did not and still do not. One of them, John Fea, professor of History at Messiah College, five days after Trump s victory, sat in the megachurch that he had been a member of for sixteen years, appalled at the thought that eight out of ten people in that sanctuary - my brothers and sisters in my community of faith - had voted for the new president-elect . They had voted for someone who denigrated women even bragged about the size of his genitals . He was overcome with shock, sadness and anger at the result and at how an overwhelming majority of white evangelicals, men and women, had voted. As for those pastors who had blessed Trump and celebrated him as having been chosen by God, the so-called court evangelicals , they had, as far as he was concerned, traded their Christian witness for a mess of political pottage and a few federal judges . 12
More generally, it is important to remember that throughout US history, there have been evangelical Christians