It’s possible Donald Trump will swear one too many times and lose some of those white evangelical voters who make up a giant portion of his base, but the more likely outcome is that those Christians will rationalize his taking the Lord’s name in vain, just as they’ve rationalized his other odious traits, and continue supporting him anyway.
In an article for the Washington Post, reporter Julie Zauzmer spoke with 50 evangelicals in three battleground states and found that they’re almost certainly voting for Trump in 2020.
They just aren’t bothered enough by his racism, sexism, bigotry, ignorance, lies, scandals, policy failures, or whatever he’ll do in the next 24 hours to consider voting for someone who’s a decent human being.
In conversation, evangelical voters paint the portrait of the Trump they see: a president who acts like a bully but is fighting for them. A president who sees America like they do, a menacing place where white Christians feel mocked and threatened for their beliefs. A president who’s against abortion and gay rights and who has the economy humming to boot.
“You’ve just got to accept the bad with the good,” [Rickey] Halbert said.
So what if a couple dozen Hispanic people get murdered by a white supremacist? So what if a baby is permanently traumatized after being ripped away from her parents? So what if our planet is irreversibly damaged? As long as Trump pays lip service to white evangelicals, nothing else matters.
Never let Christians pretend they have a moral high ground ever again. They are perfectly fine watching the world burn (even literally) as long as they get to destroy the lives of more LGBTQ people first. Just like Jesus wanted.
Just look at what one Christian described as the “nightmare” of the Obama era:
For many, the eight years of the Obama administration felt like a nightmare. The indelible image for the Rev. Chris Gillott was the night the Supreme Court ruled gay marriage legal across the land and Obama flooded the White House in rainbow lights.
“I didn’t see it lit up in a rainbow this June,” the youth pastor at Christian Life Center in Bensalem, Pa., notes, with a hint of satisfaction.
The only thing that would make that “hint” more explicit is if Gillott said that line while standing on the dead body of a trans person.
This is what evangelical Christianity has become: a contest in which the cruelest people are declared the winners. The more suffering others face, the happier they are. There’s nothing in their Bible, apparently, that taught them to care for the poor, to turn the other cheek, or to treat people with kindness and humility. There’s nothing “good” about their Good Book when this is the end result of it.
There was never a “moral majority” because these people aren’t moral. There are no “values voters” because these people don’t have values. Just think of how weak you have to be to look at this president and see strength.
These evangelicals are making a better case against organized religion than any atheist ever could. If you’re attending these churches — after all this — you’re just as complicit as the pastors who go on the record to celebrate Trump’s disdain for humanity — at least the part of humanity that would never vote for him.
For decades, evangelical Christians have argued that they’re victims of nasty stereotyping — by the media, by atheists, by secular culture. But their own words and actions prove that the rest of us were right all along. There’s nothing in their culture worth admiring or saving, and if this is where believing in the divinity of Christ gets you, then Jesus is useless, too.
Roughly 81% of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016. He has a nearly 70% approval rating from them as of this year. The article suggests that his support among them will be the same (if not higher) in 2020.
It’s up to everyone else — sensible people with a heart — to outnumber them (in all the right states) in the next election. Consider it a vote against an evangelical culture that deserves to rot in peace.
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