“Immoral Majority: Why Evangelicals Chose Political Power Over Christian Values.”

A new book by a writer and filmmaker with the title used for the heading of this post looks at the growing moral bankruptcy of evangelical Christians in the age of Trump.  The author argues that as long as evangelicals prioritize political power over true Christian behavior and persuasion by charitable actions, their pews will be continue to lose occupants and their national influence will dwindle in the long term. The author perhaps unrealistically argues given the lust for power of those like Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, Jr., and Tony Perkins, that if evangelicals hope to avoid cultural irrelevance in the years to come, they will have to value humility over ego, and resist the seduction of political power, no matter the cost. Nowhere does the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of evangelicals reveal itself more than in their cheering support of the Trump/Pence regime's brutality towards children of undocumented immigrants.  

Frighteningly, I suspect that many evangelicals would look at the image of the crying child above and not feel any remorse for the simple reason that the child is not white. The further irony, of course, is that while these evangelicals want to "take back their country," those against whom they target their hate are the descendants of the the original indigenous populations of the Americas  and who had their lands stolen from them by white European conquest.  Here are highlights from a column in the Washington Post by the author of “Immoral Majority: Why Evangelicals Chose Political Power Over Christian Values”:

As the debate about how to handle applicants for refugee status at the U.S. southern border gained urgency in recent months, Pew Research Religion waded into the social-media fray on July 7 with a tweet about the results of a poll the organization conducted last year. Pew reported, and online commentators quickly noted, that white evangelical Protestants were the least likely group — amid results sorted by age, race, education and religion — to say that the United States “has a responsibility to accept refugees into the country.” 

Sixty-eight percent of white evangelical Protestants said the country has no responsibility for refugees. No other demographic group came within 10 points of that result.

[S]ome evangelical leaders had been taken aback when the Pew results were originally released in May 2018, and urged their flocks toward change. But back then, the main question about refugees concerned those fleeing the brutal civil war in Syria. “When faced with a potential conflict between prominent evangelicals’ biblical pro-refugee arguments and [President] Trump’s opposition,” Brian Newman of Pepperdine University noted in The Post, “the vast majority of white evangelicals choose Trump.”

A year later, with the focal point on refugees from Central America, in much greater numbers and more likely to be vilified by the president, evangelical leaders are largely as one with their congregations.

Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the public-policy arm of the Southern Baptist Convention, ventured this observation on Twitter: “The reports of the conditions for migrant children at the border should shock all of our consciences. Those created in the image of God should be treated with dignity and compassion, especially those seeking refuge from violence back home. We can do better than this.”

Moore’s comments didn’t sit well with Jerry Falwell Jr., inheritor of his father’s Christian empire, president of Liberty University and a prominent evangelical figure.

Some were dismayed by Falwell’s response, but you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone paying attention the past few years who was surprised by it. 

Falwell is one of several leaders in the modern evangelical movement who have helped solidify Christian principles as synonymous with the Republican agenda, and specifically with the [Trump’s] president’s agenda.  Trump, of course, welcomes this way of thinking.

Yet the idea that without Republicans, Christianity is lost, is not unique to the Trump era. The merging of evangelicalism and Republicanism has been underway for decades. It is simply more visible and pronounced under this president — primarily because evangelical support for Trump requires a much higher degree of cognitive dissonance.

That is, fighting for conservative Christian values by unquestioningly supporting someone who not only doesn’t share them but has lived most of his life actively, and unapologetically, in opposition to them. 

Stomaching Trump’s behavior and rhetoric — which could generously be described as not characteristic of a Christian — has been rewarded with much-improved prospects for stricter abortion laws and achieving other long-sought goals in what conservative Christians regard as a desperate and escalating culture war.

The evangelical embrace of Trump has been an electoral positive for the Republican Party, but for those who would evangelize, the new reality is tragic.

[True Christians are] meant to speak the truth in a way that invites strangers in, welcomes them, makes them feel loved.  To care for the least of these is a Christian value. Expressing and demonstrating it is spreading the Word.

That’s called evangelizing. A movement that based itself on the term but now embraces its antithesis is becoming difficult to recognize.

Yes, there are good Christians, but until they loudly and continually condemn evangelicals on a daily basis, they are allowing evangelicals to be the face of Christianity and the result is the exodus of people, especially among younger generations, from religion entirely.  Meanwhile, being a Trump supporter and a true Christian are mutually exclusive.

George H.W. Bush: Failing on HIV/AIDS and Enabling the "Religious Right"

George H.W. Bush with Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Last week the media engaged in an orgy of overkill in the coverage of the funeral of George H.W. Bush which at times seemed more like a royal funeral than that of an American politician.  Yes, compared to the current occupant of the White House, Bush 41 looks almost saintly, but in their rush to gush over Bush, many in the media completely ignored Bush's failings and the lives harmed and the political damage done to the nation.  One huge failing was on Bush's policies during the HIV/AIDS crisis, first under Reagan and then later under his own administration.  The second major failing (which dovetails with the first) was his enabling the rise of the perversely labeled "Religious Right" and its ultimate takeover of the Republican Party.  Learning from history requires that both good and bad be remembered so that previous errors do not repeat themselves. This was utterly lacking in most of the funeral coverage.  First a piece in Huffington Post looks at Bush's failure to those with HIV/AIDS.  Here are excerpts:

It’s no surprise that after the death of former president George H.W. Bush we’re seeing media pundits, advocates and popular historians promote a rosy view of his tenure as president. In the era of Donald Trump, there’s a tendency to portray every Republican leader of the past in a nostalgic, sugar-coated way. I saw a tweet from Yahoo News with a quote from the well-known historian Jon Meacham, describing Bush as a man who “believed that he was not a Republican president — he was a president,” noting that “there’s something very old-fashioned about that.” Perhaps that was what Bush “believed,” but it was far from the truth. Bush was as captive to the evangelical right on social issues — and thus a decidedly Republican president — as was his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, who cultivated religious conservatives as a potent political force and bowed to their anti-LGBTQ agenda as the AIDS epidemic mushroomed in the 1980s.  Reagan’s history of callously ignoring the epidemic while thousands died is well-documented. Bush, at the outset of his term, promised a “kinder, gentler” presidency than the man he’d served under as vice president. He even gave a speech on the AIDS epidemic in 1990, which was long on compassion but short on strategy and commitment to funding. During the speech, in fact, Urvashi Vaid, an invited guest and then the executive director of the prominent National Gay and Lesbian Task Force, now the National LGBTQ Task Force, took the unprecedented and heroic act of standing up and holding a sign, “Talk Is Cheap. AIDS Funding Is Not.” 

Bush, in the end, bowed to the same extremists Reagan did when it came to AIDS and LGBTQ rights. As The Washington Post noted, Bush allowed evangelicals to mature as a movement within the GOP after Reagan brought them in, rather than pushing back.

[I]t took years of work by the indefatigable Democrats Sen. Edward Kennedy and Rep. Henry Waxman, and was too little, too late. By that point, nearly 10 years into the epidemic, 150,000 cases of people with HIV had been reported in the U.S., and 100,000 people had died due to AIDS.

Infamously, Bush had said in a television interview that if he had a grandchild who was gay he would “love” the child but would tell the child he wasn’t normal. And like Reagan, he stocked his Cabinet with anti-gay zealots. Health Secretary Louis Sullivan, also protested by ACT UP for his terrible response to HIV, joined forces with evangelical leaders to cover up a government-funded study on teen suicide that found LGBTQ teens were at much higher risk.  

And after Buchanan, who Bush offered a prime slot at the Republican National Convention in Houston, gave his infamous “culture war” speech, declaring there is a “religious war” in this country, and attacking, among others, the “militant homosexual rights movement,” Bush refused to denounce the speech and instead publicly denounced same-sex marriage, which was nowhere near a reality at the time. 

If Bush had come into office with perhaps a vague ambition that he might move away from the harsh Reagan years, with its religious morality crusade, he left the presidency having paved the way for his own son’s even more anti-LGBTQ administration, firmly ensconcing religious conservative power within the Republican party.  And that, of course, is the same party that now proudly claims Donald Trump as its leader.

As this above quote notes, the Washington Post looked at Bush's role in cementing the rise of Christofascists within the GOP - the same GOP now dominated by hate-filled Christofascists and white supremacists.  Here are article excerpts:

Unlike his son George W. Bush, the elder Bush, a lifelong Episcopalian, was less known for his religious faith. He was certainly not thought of as a champion of the religious right, the powerful political movement most associated with his predecessor, Ronald Reagan.

Yet it was Bush, the moderate establishment Republican whose family helped found Planned Parenthood, who secured the religious right’s permanent place in American politics. While historians largely credit Reagan’s presidency with helping religious conservatives move from the shadows of American public life into its spotlight, it was the Bush presidency, particularly its disappointments and defeat, that entrenched the religious right as the center of the Republican Party and guaranteed its ongoing influence.

Shortly after Reagan’s win in 1980, the conservative activist and key architect of the religious right Paul Weyrich told the incoming vice president that he better become a stronger advocate against abortion and for school prayer once in office. “I am not intimidated by those who suggest I better hew the line,” Bush shot back. “Hell with them.” Political reality, however, soon curtailed Bush’s independent streak. . . . . [Bush] They also made clear to Bush his need to realign his positions with the conservative wing of the party, which was ascendant, in part because of the rise of cultural issues that were scrambling the party coalitions. At the 1992 Republican National Convention in Houston, 300 of the 2,200 delegates belonged to the Christian Coalition, and more than 40 percent of the delegates identified as evangelical Christians. With that presence, the GOP’s platform committee produced one of its most conservative platforms ever, with absolutist positions against abortion and homosexuality. While Bush never fully embraced the religious right, he did cater to it from time to time, understanding how essential members were to his political fortunes. His choice of the conservative evangelical Dan Quayle as his vice president and his nomination of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court were both intended to appease religious conservatives. . . .  But Bush’s strategic courting of the religious right also laid the groundwork for its eventual takeover of the party.

When Bush lost his reelection bid in 1992, critics pointed to the tent revival feel of the Houston convention as the reason that moderate and independent voters had fled the GOP. But for the religious right, the defeat was a victory of sorts. . . . . And they ambitiously planned to recruit more conservative candidates for office and bury the moderate wing of the party by continuing to build their control of the GOP from within.

By 1994, a study found that the religious right had become “dominant” or “substantial” in 21 of the GOP’s state parties. Two years later at the Republican National Convention in San Diego, Christian Coalition members made up more than half of the convention’s delegates.

Evangelicals: The Last Temptation

Trump and evangelical "Christian" leaders.

Easter was yesterday and few days of the year could better highlight the how evangelicals no longer are witnesses for the Gospel message and instead have embraced everything the Christ advocated for if one believes the New Testament.  Indeed, the hypocrisy and meanness of the Pharisees depicted in the New Testament pale compared to what now is on display virtually on a daily basis.  Protesting abortion, maligning and denigrating gays, seeking to force their ugly beliefs on all of society,  and now idolatry towards Donald Trump, are all that defines today's evangelicals.  Loving others, doing to others as you would have unto you, caring for the poor, homeless and hungry, welcoming the stranger or foreigner  are all utterly absent from the evangelical Christian agenda, especially as evidenced by their allegiance to Donald Trump who might be better compared to the Anti-Christ than a messiah for Christians as depicted in the New Testament.  In The Atlantic in an expanded version of a much shorter column, former Bush White House operative, Michael Gerson rightly calls out evangelicals who have embraced Trump and hate, racism, and fear of anyone different in the process.  Here are highlights:  

Trump’s background and beliefs could hardly be more incompatible with traditional Christian models of life and leadership. Trump’s past political stances (he once supported the right to partial-birth abortion), his character (he has bragged about sexually assaulting women), and even his language (he introduced the words pussy and shithole into presidential discourse) would more naturally lead religious conservatives toward exorcism than alliance. This is a man who has cruelly publicized his infidelities, made disturbing sexual comments about his elder daughter, and boasted about the size of his penis on the debate stage. His lawyer reportedly arranged a $130,000 payment to a porn star to dissuade her from disclosing an alleged affair. Yet religious conservatives who once blanched at PG-13 public standards now yawn at such NC-17 maneuvers.

The problem is the distinctly non-Christian substance of his values. Trump’s unapologetic materialism—his equation of financial and social success with human achievement and worth—is a negation of Christian teaching. His tribalism and hatred for “the other” stand in direct opposition to Jesus’s radical ethic of neighbor love. Trump’s strength-worship and contempt for “losers” smack more of Nietzsche than of Christ.

And yet, a credible case can be made that evangelical votes were a decisive factor in Trump’s improbable victory. Trump himself certainly acts as if he believes they were. Many individuals, causes, and groups that Trump pledged to champion have been swiftly sidelined or sacrificed during Trump’s brief presidency. The administration’s outreach to white evangelicals, however, has been utterly consistent.

Loyalty to Trump has involved progressively more difficult, self-abasing demands. And there appears to be no limit to what some evangelical leaders will endure. Figures such as Falwell and Franklin Graham followed Trump’s lead in supporting Judge Roy Moore in the December Senate election in Alabama. These are religious leaders who have spent their entire adult lives bemoaning cultural and moral decay. Yet they publicly backed a candidate who was repeatedly accused of sexual misconduct, including with a 14-year-old girl.

The moral convictions of many evangelical leaders have become a function of their partisan identification. This is not mere gullibility; it is utter corruption. Blinded by political tribalism and hatred for their political opponents, these leaders can’t see how they are undermining the causes to which they once dedicated their lives. Little remains of a distinctly Christian public witness.

Evangelical’ used to denote people who claimed the high moral ground; now, in popular usage, the word is nearly synonymous with ‘hypocrite.’ . . . . The corruption of a political party is regrettable. The corruption of a religious tradition by politics is tragic, shaming those who participate in it.

[T]the primary evangelical political narrative is adversarial, an angry tale about the aggression of evangelicalism’s cultural rivals. In a remarkably free country, many evangelicals view their rights as fragile, their institutions as threatened, and their dignity as assailed. The single largest religious demographic in the United States—representing about half the Republican political coalition—sees itself as a besieged and disrespected minority. In this way, evangelicals have become simultaneously more engaged and more alienated.

After shamefully sitting out (or even opposing) the civil-rights movement, white evangelicals became activated on a limited range of issues. They defended Christian schools against regulation during Jimmy Carter’s administration. They fought against Supreme Court decisions that put tight restrictions on school prayer and removed many state limits on abortion. The sociologist Nathan Glazer describes such efforts as a “defensive offensive”—a kind of morally indignant pushback against a modern world that, in evangelicals’ view, had grown hostile and oppressive. This attitude was happily exploited by the modern GOP.

[M]odern evangelicalism has an important intellectual piece missing. It lacks a model or ideal of political engagement—an organizing theory of social action. Over the same century from Blanchard to Falwell, Catholics developed a coherent, comprehensive tradition of social and political reflection. . . . . Catholic social thought includes a commitment to solidarity, whereby justice in a society is measured by the treatment of its weakest and most vulnerable members. . . . American Catholics routinely ignore Catholic social thought. But at least they have it. Evangelicals lack a similar tradition of their own to disregard.

Lacking an equivalent to Catholic social thought, many evangelicals seem to find their theory merely by following the contours of the political movement that is currently defending, and exploiting, them. The voter guides of religious conservatives have often been suspiciously similar to the political priorities of movement conservatism. Fox News and talk radio are vastly greater influences on evangelicals’ political identity than formal statements by religious denominations or from the National Association of Evangelicals. In this Christian political movement, Christian theology is emphatically not the primary motivating factor.

Individual Christians and evangelical ministries fight preventable disease, resettle refugees, treat addiction, run homeless shelters, and care for foster children. But such concerns find limited collective political expression.

Part of the reason such matters are not higher on the evangelical agenda is surely the relative ethnic and racial insularity of many white evangelicals. Plenty of African Americans hold evangelical theological views, of course, along with a growing number of Latinos. Yet evangelical churches, like other churches and houses of worship, tend to be segregated on Sunday. Nearly all denominations with large numbers of evangelicals are less racially diverse than the country overall.

Evangelicals also have a consistent problem with their public voice, which can be off-puttingly apocalyptic. “We are on the verge of losing” America, proclaims the evangelical writer and radio host Eric Metaxas, “as we could have lost it in the Civil War.” . . . . the attribution of depravity and decline to America also reflects a consistent and (so far) disappointed belief that the Second Coming may be just around history’s corner.

The difficulty with this approach to public life—other than its insanely pessimistic depiction of our flawed but wonderful country—is that it trivializes and undercuts the entire political enterprise. Politics in a democracy is essentially anti-apocalyptic, premised on the idea that an active citizenry is capable of improving the nation.

Moreover, in making their case on cultural decay and decline, evangelicals have, in some highly visible cases, chosen the wrong nightmares. Most notable, they made a crucial error in picking evolution as a main point of contention with modernity. “The contest between evolution and Christianity is a duel to the death,” William Jennings Bryan argued. “If evolution wins … Christianity goes—not suddenly, of course, but gradually, for the two cannot stand together.” Many people of his background believed this. But their resistance was futile, for one incontrovertible reason: Evolution is a fact. It is objectively true based on overwhelming evidence. By denying this, evangelicals made their entire view of reality suspect. They were insisting, in effect, that the Christian faith requires a flight from reason. . . . . Evangelicals have placed an entirely superfluous stumbling block before their neighbors and children, encouraging every young person who loves science to reject Christianity.

The consequences, especially for younger generations, are considerable. . . . More than a third of Millennials say they are unaffiliated with any faith, up 10 points since 2007. Count this as an ironic achievement of religious conservatives: an overall decline in identification with religion itself.

Trump consistently depicts evangelicals as they depict themselves: a mistreated minority, in need of a defender who plays by worldly rules. Christianity is “under siege,” Trump told a Liberty University audience. “Relish the opportunity to be an outsider,” he added at a later date: “Embrace the label.” Protecting Christianity, Trump essentially argues, is a job for a bully. . . . evangelicals regarding themselves, hysterically and with self-pity, as an oppressed minority that requires a strongman to rescue it. This is how Trump has invited evangelicals to view themselves. He has treated evangelicalism as an interest group in need of protection and preferences.

A prominent company of evangelical leaders—including Dobson, Falwell, Graham, Jeffress, Metaxas, Perkins, and Ralph Reed—has embraced this self-conception. Their justification is often bluntly utilitarian: All of Trump’s flaws are worth his conservative judicial appointments and more-favorable treatment of Christians by the government.

It is remarkable to hear religious leaders defend profanity, ridicule, and cruelty as hallmarks of authenticity and dismiss decency as a dead language. Whatever Trump’s policy legacy ends up being, his presidency has been a disaster in the realm of norms. It has coarsened our culture, given permission for bullying, complicated the moral formation of children, undermined standards of public integrity, and encouraged cynicism about the political enterprise. Falwell, Graham, and others are providing religious cover for moral squalor . . . Having given politics pride of place, these evangelical leaders have ceased to be moral leaders in any meaningful sense.

For some of Trump’s political allies, racist language and arguments are part of his appeal. For evangelical leaders, they should be sources of anguish. . . . Perpetuating racism indicted many white Christians in the South and elsewhere as hypocrites. Americans who are wrong on this issue do not understand the nature of their country. Christians who are wrong on this issue do not understand the most-basic requirements of their faith.

[E]very strong Trump supporter has decided that racism is not a moral disqualification in the president of the United States. And that is something more than a political compromise. It is a revelation of moral priorities. . . . . these evangelical leaders have associated the Christian faith with racism and nativism. They have associated the Christian faith with misogyny and the mocking of the disabled. They have associated the Christian faith with lawlessness, corruption, and routine deception. They have associated the Christian faith with moral confusion about the surpassing evils of white supremacy and neo-Nazism. The world is full of tragic choices and compromises. But for this man? For this cause?

Those leaders represent a clear majority of the movement, which remains the most loyal element of the Trump coalition. Evangelicals are broadly eager to act as Trump’s shield and sword. They are his army of enablers.

Democracy is not merely a set of procedures. It has a moral structure. The values we celebrate or stigmatize eventually influence the character of our people and polity. Democracy does not insist on perfect virtue from its leaders. But there is a set of values that lends authority to power: empathy, honesty, integrity, and self-restraint. And the legitimating of cruelty, prejudice, falsehood, and corruption is the kind of thing, one would think, that religious people were born to oppose, not bless.

Christianity is love of neighbor, or it has lost its way. And this sets an urgent task for evangelicals: to rescue their faith from its worst leaders.

Of Course the Christian Right Supports Trump

White evangelicals have been taking a much deserved beating over their support of thrice married, serial adulterer Donald Trump who now appears to have cheated on his third wife with at least one porn star.  The result is that evangelicals' have about as much moral authority as the Catholic Church that lectures people on the use of contraception while protecting the bishops and cardinals who protected thousands of predatory priests who preyed on children and youths for decades, if not far longer.   But the moral toxicity of the majority of evangelicals extends far beyond turning a blind eye towards repeated sexual infidelity - even as they rant about gay marriage - and extends to the racism that was a founding element of the so-called "Religious Right" as we know it today.  And because racism is the pillar of the political rise of evangelicals, as a column in the New York Times lays out, it should come as no surprise that evangelicals love the high priest of racism, Donald Trump.  Here are column excerpts:

In 1958, the Baptist preacher Jerry Falwell, who would go on to found the Moral Majority, gave a sermon titled “Segregation or Integration: Which?” He inveighed against the Supreme Court’s anti-segregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education, arguing that facilities for blacks and whites should remain separate.

“When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line,” he wrote, warning that integration “will destroy our race eventually.” In 1967, Falwell founded the Lynchburg Christian Academy — later Liberty Christian Academy — as a private school for white students.

The Lynchburg Christian Academy, in Virginia, was one of many so-called seg academies created throughout the South to circumvent desegregation. In the 1970s, these discriminatory schools lost their tax-exempt status. Feeling under siege as a result, conservative Christians started organizing politically. This was the origin of the modern religious right, and it helps explain why a movement publicly devoted to piety has stood so faithfully by Donald Trump.

Dartmouth historian Randall Balmer quotes the conservative activist Paul Weyrich: “What caused the movement to surface was the federal government’s moves against Christian schools. This absolutely shattered the Christian community’s notions that Christians could isolate themselves inside their own institutions and teach what they please.” (This should sound familiar to anyone who has heard Christian conservative outrage over being forced to accommodate gay marriage.)

In 1980, the nascent religious right overwhelmingly supported Ronald Reagan, a former movie star who would become America’s first divorced president, over the evangelical Carter. In doing so, it helped destigmatize divorce. “Up until 1980, anybody who was divorced, let alone divorced and remarried, very likely would have been kicked out of evangelical congregations,” Balmer, who was raised evangelical and is now a scholar of evangelicalism, told me.

Given this history, it is not surprising that the contemporary leaders of the religious right are blasé about reports that Trump cheated on his third wife with a porn star shortly after the birth of his youngest child, then paid her to be quiet. Despite his louche personal life, Trump, the racist patriarch promising cultural revenge, doesn’t threaten the religious right’s traditional values. He embodies them.

This week, Tony Perkins, leader of the Family Research Council, told Politico that Trump gets a “mulligan,” or do-over, on his past moral transgressions, because he’s willing to stand up to the religious right’s enemies.

On Wednesday, Jerry Falwell Jr., who inherited his father’s job as head of the evangelical Liberty University, defended Trump on CNN through an acrobatic act of moral relativism. . . . . To defend Trump, Falwell seems to be taking the position that no Christian has the right to criticize anyone else’s sexual behavior.

The people who are most disturbed by such theological contortions are earnest evangelicals who fear the disgrace of their religion. Trump’s religious champions, Michael Gerson writes in The Washington Post, are “associating evangelicalism with bigotry, selfishness and deception. They are playing a grubby political game for the highest of stakes: the reputation of their faith.”

I sympathize with his distress. But the politicized sectors of conservative evangelicalism have been associated with bigotry, selfishness and deception for a long time. Trump has simply revealed the movement’s priorities. It values the preservation of traditional racial and sexual hierarchies over fuzzier notions of wholesomeness.

“I’ve resisted throughout my career the notion that evangelicals are racist, I really have,” Balmer told me. “But I think the 2016 election demonstrated that the religious right was circling back to the founding principles of the movement. What happened in 2016 is that the religious right dropped all pretense that theirs was a movement about family values.” . . . This is one reason I find it hard to take seriously religious conservatives who say they are being persecuted for their defense of traditional marriage.

Rod Dreher, a social-conservative Trump critic, wrote, . . . . sees a fundamental difference between Christians who thought their religious freedom was trampled by desegregation and Christians who think their religious freedom is trampled when their business and charities have to serve gay people.

But it seems absurd to ask secular people to respect the religious right’s beliefs about sex and marriage — and thus tolerate a degree of anti-gay discrimination — while the movement’s leaders treat their own sexual standards as flexible and conditional.

Christian conservatives may believe strongly in their own righteousness. But from the outside, it looks as if their movement was never really about morality at all.

Liberty University Students Angry with Falwell's Endorsement of Trump

Trump and modern day Pharisee Jerry Falwell, Jr.

Perhaps the day when evangelical Christians are social outcasts - a day I very much look forward to - is coming more quickly than some would have thought.  As noted in the previous post, Jerry Falwell, Jr., the head of the always toxic Liberty University has stood by his endorsement of Donald Trump, a man who has been accused of sexual harassment by numerous women and, indeed, has bragged abut it as documented by the 2005 "Entertainment Tonight" tape.  Now, students at Falwell's university are protesting the continued endorsement of Trump indicating that even hardcore evangelicals are coming to see the moral bankruptcy of their leadership and the hypocrisy that is the norm with them. The Advocate looks at the welcomed rebellion at Liberty University.  Here are highlights:

Students at Liberty University are standing against Jerry Falwell Jr. and Donald Trump.

Falwell, president of the conservative Christian university founded by his father, has stood behind the Republican nominee, despite the number of women who have come out accusing Trump of sexually assaulting them. Falwell also stood by Trump when his offensive and sexually aggressive comments about women in a 2005 video became public Friday.

“Donald Trump does not represent our values and we want nothing to do with him,” read the statement from Liberty United Against Trump, a campus group. “He has made his name by maligning others and bragging about his sins. Not only is Donald Trump a bad candidate for president, he is actively promoting the very things that we as Christians ought to oppose.”

The full statement was posted on Twitter by a student who is part of the group. 

A Liberty student went on CNN to defend the position of the students and why they oppose Trump.

The students ended their statement by saying, “While everyone is a sinner and everyone can be forgiven, a man who constantly and proudly speaks evil does not deserve our support for the nation’s highest office.”

The full statement can be found here.

Segregation, Not Abortion, Formed the Christian Right

FRC president, Tony Perkins addressing a White supremacy group

I have often said that if one scratches the surface of the misnamed Christian Right - including the hater merchants at The Family Foundation ("TFF"), Virginia's leading hate group - one will often find unreformed segregationists.  For the more than two decades that I have been following the "professional Christian class" and the various "family values" organizations, beneath the surface of feigned religiosity and piety there has always been an undercurrent of racism and bigotry.  Tony Perkins, the president of Family Research Council ("FRC"), a Southern Poverty Law Center certified hate group, has documented white supremacist ties, and the only time The Family Foundation seeming cares for blacks is when it seeks to manipulate black pastors into carrying TFF's political water by lobbying legislators as if they were trained circus dogs.   Once the political lobbying effort is over, the lily white TFF reverts back to its white exclusivity.  A piece in Slate looks at the real history of the Christian Taliban Right  and notes the research done by Dartmouth professor Randall Balmer (his article is a must read).  Here are article excerpts:

The modern religious right formed, practically overnight, as a rapid response to the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade. Or, at least, that's how the story goes. The reality, Randall Balmer, a Dartmouth professor writing for Politico Magazine, says, is actually a little less savory to 21^st century Americans: The religious right, who liked to call themselves the "moral majority" at the time, actually organized around fighting to protect Christian schools from being desegregated. It wasn't Roe v. Wade that woke the sleeping dragon of the evangelical vote. It was Green v. Kennedy, a 1970 decision stripping tax-exempt status from "segregation academies"—private Christian schools that were set up in response to Brown v. Board of Education, where the practice of barring black students continued. 

As Balmer shows, feelings about Roe v. Wade were mixed in the conservative Christian community in the early 1970s, with quite a few evangelical leaders agreeing with the court that abortion is a private matter. Desegregation, however, was a different issue altogether. Anger about forced desegregation of private schools galvanized conservative Christians. Bob Jones University stalled and resisted admitting black students, forcing the IRS to strip its tax exempt status in 1976, an event that spurred evangelical leaders to action. Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich, two conservative activists who had been seeking a way to marshal evangelicals into a Republican voting bloc, pounced. Balmer writes:

Weyrich saw that he had the beginnings of a conservative political movement, which is why, several years into President Jimmy Carter’s term, he and other leaders of the nascent religious right blamed the Democratic president for the IRS actions against segregated schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon, and Bob Jones University had lost its tax exemption a year and a day before Carter was inaugurated as president. Falwell, Weyrich and others were undeterred by the niceties of facts. In their determination to elect a conservative, they would do anything to deny a Democrat, even a fellow evangelical like Carter, another term in the White House.

The argument they used to defend school segregation will sound familiar to anyone following the lawsuits against mandatory contraception coverage in health insurance plans or the battles over whether businesses have a right to refuse gay customers: "religious freedom."

How did abortion eclipse pro-segregation as the rallying cause of the evangelical right? Balmer argues that Weyrich, in particular, was a sharp enough political thinker to realize that pro-segregation sentiment was enough to get the ball rolling, "but they needed a different issue if they wanted to mobilize evangelical voters on a large scale." They took their new coalition of evangelicals and pointed them in the direction of fighting abortion.

Balmer suggests that "the spike in legal abortions" after Roe was the shock to their system that made them realize that women really were going to use this new right they’d been granted. There was also a more concentrated effort to put out anti-abortion propaganda that framed the procedure as "murder" and suggested the next step was legal infanticide. 

Balmer doesn't mention it, but there was one other shift in the public consciousness going on at the time. The "Stop ERA" campaign, headed up by Christian right leader Phyllis Schlafly to kill the Equal Rights Amendment banning sex discrimination, got moving in 1972. By the time male Christian conservative leaders like Weyrich and Falwell decided to make abortion a centerpiece issue, Schlafly had done the yeoman's work of convincing huge numbers of evangelical Christians that feminists were a threat to the very fabric of society. 

Balmer notes at the top of his piece that it's common for anti-choicers to compare themselves to abolitionists. Once you know the pro-segregationist history of the religious right, however, it becomes clear that this comparison is not only obnoxious, but offensive. 

I strongly recommend a full read of Balmer's article.  Here is the shocking background of Green v. Kennedy, referenced above:

In May 1969, a group of African-American parents in Holmes County, Mississippi, sued the Treasury Department to prevent three new whites-only K-12 private academies from securing full tax-exempt status, arguing that their discriminatory policies prevented them from being considered “charitable” institutions. The schools had been founded in the mid-1960s in response to the desegregation of public schools set in motion by the Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954. In 1969, the first year of desegregation, the number of white students enrolled in public schools in Holmes County dropped from 771 to 28; the following year, that number fell to zero.

Yes, you read it correctly, NO white students attended public schools. The bottom line is that right wing Christians are offensive period.  In general, they are selfish, lie incessantly to further their theocratic goals, contemptuous toward the rights and beliefs of others, and, as was they case with their forebears, they use the Bible and claims of protecting "religious liberty" to discrimination and bigotry across society.  Decent, moral people need to shun them and cease giving religion undue deference.

Jeb Bush To Deliver Commencement Address at Anti-Gay Liberty University

As noted in the prior post, besides the albatross of his brother, Jebbie Bush has the additional problem that the Christofascists largely do not like him.  Since this deranged demographic holds undue sway in early GOP primaries, Jebbie seems to be doing all he can to prostitute himself to these extremists.  How else to explain Bush's decision to give the commencement address at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, a true blight on not only the City of Lynchburg, Virginia, but the Commonwealth of Virginia as a whole.   The New Civil Rights Movement looks at Jebbie's self prostitution.  Here are highlights:

Liberty University was founded by Jerry Falwell, a televangelist who has been dubbed "the founder of the anti-gay industry." It was Falwell who delivered possibly the most hateful remarks about the September 11 terror attacks ever. "I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America.

Falwell also claimed that "AIDS is not just God's punishment for homosexuals, it is God's punishment for the society that tolerates homosexuals."

Ted Cruz last month announced his run for the White House at Liberty University, and other famous anti-gay Republican politicians like Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Mitt Romney, and Bobby Jindal have all spoken there.

So perhaps it's no surprise that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush will be delivering the commencement keynote address at Liberty University next month.

Bush has been framed, however wrongly, as more of a moderate than most of the announced or likely to announce Republican field. Speaking at Liberty may help him win over some of the anti-gay religious right.

The University is strongly linked to Liberty Counsel, an anti-gay hate group and legal firm that has tried (and lost) several same-sex marriage and LGBT civil rights cases. Liberty University's former Dean is Mat Staver, who is the head of Liberty Counsel. Right Wing Watch notes Staver "has repeatedly called for a 'revolution' to protest gay equality and warned that gay rights laws will increase violent crime, kill people, lead to 'forced homosexuality,' and eventually destroy America and western civilization."

Gov. Bush, who has yet to formally announce his candidacy, will deliver his remarks on the morning of May 9.

Speaking at Liberty is the ultimate proof that Bush will stoop extremely low to win over the Christofascist vote.  Hopefully, sane, rational Americans are watching ans shaking their heads in disgust.

Fox News Host: How We Can Tell "Bad Guys" If We Can't See Their Skin Color?

Much of Teabagistan gets its news from Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, and if one wants a glimpse of the racist mindset that predominates the Christofascists/Tea Partiers, a Fox News host just provided it.  It's all about skin color.  The New Civil Rights Movement has details.  Note that the anchor is a Liberty University graduate who apparently doesn't realize that one of the murdered French police officers was a Muslim himself.  Here are highlights:

Ever since the horrific terrorist attack on the Paris offices of satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, Fox News has been busy at work trying to blame President Barack Obama for it, and trying to turn it into ratings gold by making it their next Benghazi.

On Fox's "Outnumbered" Wednesday, the cast got into a discussion about how Paris police didn't have enough weapons, which enabled – they claimed – the Islamic extremist terrorists to massacre 12 people.

Enter Fox News anchor Shannon Bream, a former corporate attorney and graduate of Jerry Falwell's Liberty University.

Bream, speaking unscripted, wondered how police would be able to identify "bad guys" if they had ski masks and couldn't "even know what color," what "the tone of their skin was?"

Her commentary – totally unquestioned by the four other Fox News hosts – was in response to co-host Kennedy Montgomery, aka "Kennedy," who had said, "sometimes bad guys don't look like bad guys."

"That's my question about these guys because if we know they were speaking unaccented French and they had, you know, ski masks on, do we even know what color they were?," Bream asked. "What the tone of their skin was," she tried to clarify – as if that were less racist. "I mean what if they didn't look like typical bad guys?"

Segregation, Not Abortion Formed the Religious Right

Jerry Falwell got his start fighting for segregation - Getty Images

I often note that most of the anti-gay "family values" organizations also have a strong undercurrent of racism, with many of the self-anointed leaders descended from active segregationists.  Indeed, Tony Perkins at Family Research Council has documented dealings with the KKK and has spoken at white supremacist gatherings.   These people only care about minorities, especially blacks, when it comes to suckering them into doing the bidding of the lily white family vales crowd.  Here in Virginia, one sees The Family Foundation play black pastors as if they were trained circus dogs.  A piece in Slate makes the case that what really caused the coalescent of the Religious Right wasn't a reaction to Roe v. Wade, but instead support for segregation and the Jim Crow laws. In Virginia during "Massive Resistance", many of the schools that whites fled to were so-called Christian academies, many of which still flourish today.  Here are excerpts from the Slate article:

The modern religious right formed, practically overnight, as a rapid response to the Supreme Court's landmark ruling in Roe v. Wade. Or, at least, that's how the story goes. The reality, Randall Balmer, a Dartmouth professor writing for Politico Magazine, says, is actually a little less savory to 21^st century Americans: The religious right, who liked to call themselves the "moral majority" at the time, actually organized around fighting to protect Christian schools from being desegregated. It wasn't Roe v. Wade that woke the sleeping dragon of the evangelical vote. It was Green v. Kennedy, a 1970 decision stripping tax-exempt status from "segregation academies"—private Christian schools that were set up in response to Brown v. Board of Education, where the practice of barring black students continued.

Desegregation, however, was a different issue altogether. Anger about forced desegregation of private schools galvanized conservative Christians. Bob Jones University stalled and resisted admitting black students, forcing the IRS to strip its tax exempt status in 1976, an event that spurred evangelical leaders to action. Jerry Falwell and Paul Weyrich, two conservative activists who had been seeking a way to marshal evangelicals into a Republican voting bloc, pounced. Balmer writes:

Weyrich saw that he had the beginnings of a conservative political movement, which is why, several years into President Jimmy Carter’s term, he and other leaders of the nascent religious right blamed the Democratic president for the IRS actions against segregated schools—even though the policy was mandated by Nixon, and Bob Jones University had lost its tax exemption a year and a day before Carter was inaugurated as president. Falwell, Weyrich and others were undeterred by the niceties of facts. In their determination to elect a conservative, they would do anything to deny a Democrat, even a fellow evangelical like Carter, another term in the White House.

The argument they used to defend school segregation will sound familiar to anyone following the lawsuits against mandatory contraception coverage in health insurance plans or the battles over whether businesses have a right to refuse gay customers: "religious freedom."

How did abortion eclipse pro-segregation as the rallying cause of the evangelical right? Balmer argues that Weyrich, in particular, was a sharp enough political thinker to realize that pro-segregation sentiment was enough to get the ball rolling, "but they needed a different issue if they wanted to mobilize evangelical voters on a large scale." They took their new coalition of evangelicals and pointed them in the direction of fighting abortion. The strategy worked.

[T]here was one other shift in the public consciousness going on at the time. The "Stop ERA" campaign, headed up by Christian right leader Phyllis Schlafly to kill the Equal Rights Amendment banning sex discrimination, got moving in 1972. By the time male Christian conservative leaders like Weyrich and Falwell decided to make abortion a centerpiece issue, Schlafly had done the yeoman's work of convincing huge numbers of evangelical Christians that feminists were a threat to the very fabric of society. With hostility to women's equality rising, making the anti-abortion pitch was probably much, much easier. 

Balmer notes at the top of his piece that it's common for anti-choicers to compare themselves to abolitionists. Once you know the pro-segregationist history of the religious right, however, it becomes clear that this comparison is not only obnoxious, but offensive. 

The bottom line?  Your Christian conservatives are not the nice people they pretend to be.  The truth is something quite different.

Quote of the Day: An America Losing Faith in Religion

Click image to enlarge

This blog has frequently looked at the phenomenon of the accelerating increase in  those with no religious affiliation, also known as “nones” (as in “none of the above”).  The Pew Research Center indicates that in the 1950s, these "none" represented about 2 percent of the population. By the 1970s, their numbers had increased to about 7 percent. Today, "nones" represent close to 20 percent of the population.  The causation for this phenomenon is under debate.  In a column, Michael Gerson, hardly a liberal, notes this:

One theory: The accelerated growth of the nones coincided with the rise of the religious right in the 1990s, leading some scholars to assert a connection. Though causality is hard to establish, many nones hold a very dim view of religious conservatives — asserting that churches are too focused on rules and money and too involved with politics. It is easy to imagine some of the unaffiliated looking at the movement led by Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and concluding: “If this is religion, I want no part in it.” 

I would add the Catholic Church hierarchy and supposed "family values" organizations like the American Family Association, Family Research Council and  Rick Santorum style GOP politicians to the list of those giving religion a truly foul name and image.   Gerson then tries to down play the role of conservatives in religion's decline, but I believe that the Christofascists are a prime cause.  Among my own children and their friends, when they think of Christianity, the images they see are of those preaching hate, fear and bigotry.  They, like other nones, want no part of it.  Over all, I see the rapid increase in the nones to be a positive development.

Liberty University and Others Hit with RICO Lawsuit

Click on images to enlarge

In the wake of the conviction of Kenneth Miller for aiding and abetting in the felonious kidnapping of Lisa Miller's daughter, things look to be getting interesting. Janet Jenkins has filed a RICO lawsuit against Lisa Miller, Kenneth Miller, Liberty University, Thomas Road Baptist Church and others under the federal statute typically used to go after organized crime entities and their principals.  The RICO Act (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) provides for civil lawsuits against ongoing criminal enterprises involving multiple parties under a criminal conspiracy theory.  The facts certainly suggest that Lisa Miller had many more accomplices besides the newly convicted Kenneth Miller.  Here are highlights from Right Wing Watch which include excerpts from the lawsuit:

Yesterday Kenneth Miller was convicted of aiding an international parental kidnapping for the role he played in helping Lisa Miller (no relation) flee the country with her daughter rather than abide by a court order transferring custody to her former partner, Janet Jenkins.

But that was not the only interesting development in the case, as Jenkins has now filed a civil RICO lawsuit [PDF] against Kenneth Miller and several others who allegedly played a role in helping Lisa Miller kidnap her daughter and leave the country, including Liberty University Law School and Thomas Road Baptist Church:

 41. Unbeknownst to Plaintiff Janet Jenkins, in 2009 Victoria Zodhiates (now Hyden) was an employee of Response Unlimited, Inc., and also a "student worker" at Liberty University School of Law. On information and belief, Victoria Zodhiates sent an email during this time period to her co-workers at the law school requesting donations for supplies to send to Lisa Miller to enable her to remain outside the country. Lisa Miller's attorney, Matthew Staver was the Dean of the Law School and Ms. Zodhiates's boss. Matthew Staver and Philip Zodhiates were also personal acquaintances at this time. On September 20, 2009, both Philip Zodhiates and Victoria Hyden called Lisa Miller's father, Terry Miller in Tennessee to assist in arranging her and Isabella's transportation from a Walmart parking lot in Lynchburg, Virginia, to Waynesboro, Virginia, from whence they would depart for Canada and Nicaragua the next day.

42. In early November, 2009, elders of the Thomas Road Baptist Church packed up the personal belongings of Lisa Miller in two bags. These bags were picked up from Lynchburg, Virginia by Philip Zodhiates who arranged to have the bags transported to Nicaragua by sending them with his son's school teacher who was taking some children on a mission trip to Managua. Philip Zodhiates arranged for the teacher, John Collmus, to deliver the bags at the airport to Timothy Miller. The bags also contained some supplies for Lisa Miller, such as peanut butter.
...
47. Lisa Miller's attorneys Mathew Staver and Rena Lindevaldsen also routinely instructed their Law School students that the correct course of action for a person in Lisa Miller's situation would be to engage in "civil disobedience" and defy court orders.

48. Also in 2009, TRBC Head Pastor Jonathan Falwell was among several religious leaders who made a call for "Christian civil disobedience" and published a public declaration, known as The Manhattan Declaration stating that they: "will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family."

49. Hence, Defendants TRBC and its related ministry Liberty University School of Law encouraged its agents to disregard state laws governing parental rights, particularly Vermont's law giving rights to members of same-sex families. The TRBC and Liberty University School of Law through its public declaration promoted, condoned and explicitly ratified its agent's tortious, racketeering activity. These agents and employees have followed this direction, making TRBC and Liberty University School of Law liable in respondeat superior for the consequences.

58. Lisa Miller's attorneys, Matthew Staver and Rena Lindevaldsen have at all times maintained that they did not know their client's location to various courts in Vermont (including in sworn testimony of Rena Lindevaldsen) and Virginia, and to the press that she simply stopped communicating with them and disappeared.

59. Meanwhile, Matthew Staver's acquaintance, Philip Zodhiates, and his daughter Victoria, an assistant in the Law School knew of Lisa Miller's whereabouts and solicited donations from other Law School employees for her aid. Upon information and belief, other law school employees who spoke to Victoria about Lisa Miller's whereabouts were too intimidated to come forward to law enforcement for fear of angering Dean Staver and losing their jobs. 

62. Based on the foregoing, all of the Defendants named herein, in both their individual capacities and as agents of TRBC, Liberty University Law School, Response Unlimited, Inc., and CAM are liable for conspiring with Lisa Miller and with each other to kidnap Isabella Miller-Jenkins, assure her continued detention outside the State of Vermont, and for conspiring with Kenneth Miller to participate in the affairs of the Beachy Amish-Mennonite Brotherhood through a pattern of racketeering activity .... Defendants are also liable for conspiring to violate Janet Jenkins' and Isabella Miller-Jenkins' rights to a parent-child relationship on account of Isabella having two mothers instead of a mother and a father, and Defendant Wright is liable under 42 U.S.C. 1986 for failing to prevent the violation of Plaintiffs' civil rights.

 I have long complained that Christianists see themselves as above the law.  I hope this lawsuit proves successful and perhaps reinforces the realty that far right extremist Christians do NOT get to ignore the laws or trample on the rights of others at will.  Of course seeing Matt Staver taken down would be ever so sweet.  Liberty University and Liberty Counsel continue to represent a foul stench here in Virginia.

Anti-Gay Liberty Counsel Challenges Marriage Equality In New York

Speaking of embarrassments to the Commonwealth of Virginia, Metro Weekly is reporting that Liberty Counsel - based at the late Jerry Falwell's foul boil Liberty University Law School - will be appealing a New York State court ruling that threw out claims that New York State's marriage equality law had been enacted illegally.   For newer readers, employees at Liberty University have stated that Christians need to violate laws that do not conform to their fear and hated based version of Christianity.  Moreover, employees have been implicated in Lisa Miller's kidnapping of her daughter Isabella notwithstanding Virginia and Vermont court orders directing her to surrender the child to her former same sex partner.   Equally disturbing is the fact that Matt Barber (pictured at left) - a professional gay hater who constantly disseminating anti-gay lies - is on the Liberty University Law School faculty.  Here are highlights from the Metro Weekly coverage:

An anti-gay group requested today that New York's highest court review a lower court's decision to dismiss their lawsuit against the state's marriage equality law.

Among other things, Liberty Counsel contends that the state's open meeting law, which requires public access to the deliberations of legislative bodies, was violated during closed-door negotiations between marriage equality supporters and state senators. As such, the law granting same-sex couples the right to marry in New York should be scraped completely.

 After marriage equality was signed into law in June 2011, Liberty Counsel took their case to court.   .   .   .   .   However, last month the Appellate Division of state Supreme Court in Rochester ruled unanimously to dismiss the case, ruling that the meetings between Republican senators and advocates for the bill, which included Cuomo and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, were lawful.

"In the event that we were to adopt plaintiffs' limited definition of 'guests,' it would be impossible for a Democratic member of a governor's office, such as a budget director, to speak to a majority Republican caucus," read the decision.

Now Liberty Counsel has asked the New York State Court of Appeals to consider the case. The group, which is well known for their anti-gay rhetoric, says "the remedy sought is the voiding of the law."

In statement, the founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel argued again that "arm-twisting and closed-door meetings used to pass this law redefining marriage violated the open meetings requirements" and that the legislative process must be transparent.

In my opinion both Matt Barber and Liberty Counsel head Matt Staver are certified assholes.  Moreover, given their unrestrained hysteria against gays, one has to wonder if they don't "protest too much."  No one is that homophobic in my view unless they have some serious issues of their own in terms of their sexuality.  Those who are comfortable with their own sexuality and don't have scarred psyches that need others to look down upon for self justification simply don't get this worked up over same sex CIVIL marriage laws.