Hearing Frank Schaeffer talk about the deplorable nature of the Religious Right is always a treat since he and his father are as responsible as anyone for helping create it. He has an insider’s perspective on what’s going on in evangelical Christendom, and he held nothing back this morning on AM Joy.
Schaeffer called out evangelical Christians’ racism, how they’re not bothered by Donald Trump‘s bigotry, and Tony Perkins‘ recent claims that religious people like him were “kicked around by Barack Obama” and now they’re backing Donald Trump because “there’s somebody on the playground that is willing to punch the bully.”
… Tony Perkins has forgotten his own theology and instead replaced it with a theology of revenge on people he disagrees with politically. And that is what is going on here. It’s revenge of White America, it is revenge of evangelical right-wingers. And who they want to punch in the mouth is not just Black Americans, people, to put it in the President of the United States’ words, who live in “shithole” countries, but anybody who disagrees with them.
So they’re willing, apparently, to put up with anything when it comes to moral degradation to see those ends achieved. And I’m glad he put it in terms of revenge. At least there, he misspoke from his point of view, but told the truth.
Schaeffer went on to point out how the Religious Right used to be okay with abortion and the culture wars, too, before they threw their lot in with the Republican Party. Their allegiance to Trump allow us to witness their own demise in real time.
… evangelicals switched from being people who advocated for traditional morality to the chief American defenders of, not only relativistic morality, but all that used to be considered sacred being trash. They’re defending a man who has trashed fidelity in his own life and with the words he speaks nationally. They have trashed truth-telling and have embraced this idea of everything being “fake news” that they disagree with. They have even trashed common decency.
So, what we’re now watching, Joy, as kind of an appendage of the Trump presidency is one of the greatest downfalls of a religious order, if you want to put it that way, we’ve ever known. It’s only comparable with the first breaking news of the vast international phenomena of child abuse inside the Roman Catholic Church, but at that time, the leaders themselves, at least, were saying “Yes, this is bad” and pretending not to go along. Now the evangelicals have gone to the next step. They have become the instigators of evil themselves…
I could listen to that man sermonize all day.