“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.

The Parallels Between Evangelicals and Pro-Nazi German Christians

While there are surely many good evangelical Christians in America, far too many are remaining silent and allowing themselves to be defined by the likes of Franklin Graham, James Dobson, Tony Perkins, Jerry Falwell, Jr., who not only are all in for Donald Trump, but are embracing his racist policies with enthusiasm and, more dangerously, legitimizing human rights abuse in the eyes of their gullible and racist followers.  A piece in Sojourners looks at the dangerous rhetoric of James Dobson which disturbingly parallels that of German pastors and theologians in Hitler's Third Reich.  

The ultimate problem is that these supposed "leaders" are racists - especially Tony Perkins for Family Research Council, a certified hate group - and their anti-immigrant animus is ultimately due to one factor: the immigrants at America's southern border have brown, not white, skin. Evangelicals who remain silent and fail to condemn such rhetoric in the end become complicit in the horrors that it legitimizes.   They will become no better than their counterparts in Germany 80 years ago. Here are column highlights:

Growing up in conservative evangelical churches in North Carolina, the name of Dr. James Dobson and his organization, Focus on the Family, were regularly cited by my pastors as authorities on what they considered the most pressing social issues. Dobson remains influential and, although he has not led Focus on the Family for 15 years, his latest organization, Family Talk, focuses on “marriage, parenthood, evangelism, and the sanctity of human life and encouraging righteousness in the culture.” . . . which is why his rhetoric concerning immigrants in his July 2019 newsletter is so disturbing.

The characterization of the men, women, and children in the camps includes several troubling phrases. They are described as carriers of “lice, scabies, and other diseases”; they sit silently with “plaintive eyes;” they are from “the lowest rung of many societies.” The most alarming rhetoric occurs in the closing paragraph:

What I’ve told you is only a glimpse of what is occurring on the nation’s border. I don’t know what it will take to change the circumstances. I can only report that without an overhaul of the law and the allocation of resources, millions of illegal immigrants will continue flooding to this great land from around the world. Many of them have no marketable skills. They are illiterate and unhealthy. . . . Their numbers will soon overwhelm the culture as we have known it, and it could bankrupt the nation. . . . we have met a worldwide wave of poverty that will take us down if we don’t deal with it. And it won’t take long for the inevitable consequences to happen.

The closing phrase is ambiguous. It won’t take long for the inevitable consequences to happen. Is Dobson referring to consequences for the U.S. if the problem is not solved? Is he describing the inevitable consequences migrants face at the U.S.-Mexico border, where they are placed into camps by border patrol agents? Or, is he suggesting there are worse consequences to come for those who are crossing the border or in detention?

As a student of the history of biblical interpretation, the rhetoric employed by Dobson and other evangelical leaders is frighteningly similar to that of German pastors and theologians in the Third Reich. It appears that Christians have either forgotten or are ignoring the dark history of Christianity’s marriage to partisan politics and nationalist agendas.

Comparing current figures and events with Nazi Germany is fraught with difficulties, but the similarities in the language and dehumanization of a people group from a leader within Christianity are too obvious to ignore. I am not saying anyone is a Nazi; however, Dobson’s rhetoric of xenophobia and nationalism in combination with Christianity is not unlike Christian pastors who supported the Nazi Party.

The closing paragraph of Dobson’s newsletter reminds me of a 1933 book by the German theologian Gerhard Kittel. The problem of the Jews living in Germany was, according to Kittel, based on the fact that they are a people perpetually in a foreign land and thus, as foreigners, they have brought decadence to Germany. In an effort to solve this “problem” from a Christian theological perspective, Kittel offers four possible solutions: 1) Extermination (which he rejects on practical, rather than moral grounds); 2) Deportation (which he also considers impractical on political grounds); 3) Assimilation (an idea abhorrent to Kittel); or 4) Separation (the only possible solution).

By advocating for the separation of the Jews in order to protect the German way of life, Kittel and other Christians were able to support the cruel and inhumane policies of the Nazi Party. They considered it their Christian duty to preserve their German way of life. Kittel even warned of becoming soft toward the Jews. Assimilation was the worst possible solution, further infecting the German culture, and was to be avoided at all costs, even if the cost was the loss of empathy and humanity. There is simply no other place to ‘house’ them.

The rhetoric of evangelicals like Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Jr. or [Franklin] Jack Graham, legitimizes the dehumanizing policies of the Trump administration at the border in the name of protecting their version of American “culture.” The characterization of migrants at the border as disease-carriers, criminals, swindlers, and uneducated provides further legitimization that these are the type of people that American culture must be protected from. Thus, the policy of family separation is no longer inhumane or immoral, but, according to Dobson, the only practical solution. Evangelical Christianity has sided with the oppressor, not the oppressed.

Dobson’s views on immigration are based on his militarized evangelical masculinity. White, American, evangelical men are to protect family values at all costs. Migrants from Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, or El Salvador are perceived as a threat to these “family values.” The violence committed against these people is justified because the men at the border are assumed to be “hardened criminals and drug runners,” or even terrorists.

During this period in American history, Christians do well to remember the history of the church during the Nazi era and avoid the mistakes they made. Vocal supporters of the Nazis from Christian thinkers like Kittel, Walter Grundmann, or Emmanual Hirsch, are condemned from all sides for their support of the brutal treatment of the Jews.

The atrocities committed against asylum seekers are well-known and new stories are being published daily documenting the horrors of life in the camps. A recent ProPublica story uncovered a Facebook group of Border Patrol agents and documented their vile jokes about Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his daughter, Valeria, who drowned in an attempt to cross the Rio Grande. Christians who see no alternatives to putting people into camps, not only lack political and theological imagination, they make these policies, behaviors, and language theologically permissible.

One can only hope decent Christians will rise up and oppose these policies and deliberate acts of cruelty. Meanwhile, one can also hope that Dobson and those like him will accelerate the extinction of evangelical Christianity in America. 

Hate Group Leader Will Now Lead a Major U.S. Religious Freedom Body

Perkins addressing a white supremacy group before moving to FRC.

The Trump/Pence regime and its self-prostituting GOP allies are continuing its efforts to make far right evangelical Christianity the preferred religion in the United States.  While Pence is a true believer and, in my view down right frightening given his fanaticism, Trump has zero moral compunctions and it's all about keeping the now dominant Christofascist/white supremacist base of the GOP loyal through the 2020 elections.  Molded out of the same moral vacuum is Mitch McConnell who appointed a leading hate merchant/professional Christian who has helped rally evangelicals to Trump's support and the GOP's support is Tony Perkins - head of the certified hate group, Family Research Council ("FRC") - to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.  McConnell, like Trump, faces a potentially difficult re-election campaign in 2020 and is willing to sell his soul (if he has one) to secure Christofascist support. Sadly, in Perkins' world view, only his fellow evangelicals deserve religious freedom. The rest of us simply do not matter or are deemed deserving of marginalization.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at Perkins' ugly record and agenda, but sadly omits Perkins' strong and documented white supremacist ties (Perkins hails from Mississippi, perhaps the most racist state in America).   Here are article highlights:

One of the most vitriolic anti-LGBT, anti-Muslim activists in the U.S. will now lead the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom. Tony Perkins, who was first named to USCIRF by Senator Mitch McConnell in 2018, will head the group for a year. Perkins is also the president of the Family Research Council, a far-right organization that lobbied against marriage equality and continues to work against anti-discrimination laws that cover LGBT people.

Established by the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998, USCIRF is a bipartisan body. Commissioners are appointed by members of Congress and serve limited terms. As the commission explains on its website, it’s charged with tracking the status of religious freedom around the world, advocating for prisoners of conscience, and producing reports that contain policy prescriptions. . . . But Perkins’s chairmanship will likely undermine USCIRF’s mission, and his hostility toward LGBT people and Muslims mirrors the Trump administration’s positions in the worst possible ways.

Like USCIRF itself, Perkins isn’t much of a household name. But he has for years worked toward a definition of religious freedom that maximizes First Amendment rights for conservative Christians, while minimizing the rights of Muslims, nontheists, and members of other minority traditions.

At various points in his prolific career, Perkins has argued [lied] that there is “a disproportionate overlap” between homosexuality and pedophilia and that the legalization of same-sex marriage will lead inexorably to the persecution of conservative Christians. In a column on the Family Research Council’s website, Perkins linked the Supreme Court’s 2003 ruling in Lawrence v. Texas — which found sodomy bans unconstitutional — to a host of other supposed evils, including marriage equality, rights for trans people, and the alleged mainstreaming of polygamy and pedophilia.

Same-sex relationships remain illegal in much of the world, and LGBT people can face violence and death, meted out either by vigilantes or courts. They won’t have an advocate in Perkins, nor, for that matter, will many religious minorities.

Perkins has also shown particular antipathy toward Islam. . . . The Trump administration shares Perkins’s animus toward Islam. Its ban on immigration from some majority-Muslim countries indicated early the depth of its hostility for Muslims. As HuffPost reported after March’s mosque shootings in New Zealand, Trump once floated a national database to track Muslims, and has repeatedly and wrongly insisted that Muslims in Jersey City celebrated the September 11th attacks. The Trump administration isn’t any more tolerant of LGBT people. Trans people are among its favorite targets . . .

At the same time, the administration has consistently defended a definition of religious freedom that allows people of faith extreme leeway to discriminate. If the administration’s idiosyncratic definition of religious freedom has ever bothered Perkins, it’s not visible; as president of the Family Research Council, Perkins has committed himself wholly to the defense of Trump and his policy priorities.

Perkins’s term as chairman ends in 2020, but the rest of USCIRF’s membership tilts to the right as well. Of its nine commissioners, five have links to right-wing groups; at least one, Gary Bauer, has also worked for the Family Research Council. Though Perkins won’t be around for long, his tenure as chairman marks a grim turn in USCIRF’s history.

Virginians need to be aware that The Family Foundation, Virginia leading hate group, is closely aligned with FRC and its antecedents likewise trace to white supremacists.  

Evangelicals Furious Over Trump Plan to Decriminalize Homosexuality

Trump and Pence with hate merchant, Tony Perkins.

The spittle is flying and shrieks of outrage are echoing form evangelicals over the purported Trump/Pence regime play to push for the decriminalization of homosexuality across the globe.  Most in the LGBT community have yawned and discounted the legitimacy of purported effort in light of Trump/Pence's continuous attacks of LGBT Americans. At this point, most wonder where the purported effort is headed since Trump himself pleaded ignorance about it. If the plan proceeds, it will be one of the few times Trump has failed to deliver on promises to his loyal, misogynist evangelical base.  A piece in The Advocate looks at the evangelical melt down.  Here are excerpts: 

The Trump administration’s push to decriminalize homosexuality abroad — which the president seemed strangely unaware of when questioned by reporters this week —  is drawing the ire of the religious right.

Richard Grenell, the U.S. ambassador to Germany and the highest-ranking openly gay official in the administration, is leading the effort to persuade countries where homosexuality is illegal to change their laws, administration officials said Tuesday. Grenell wrote an article on the plan for a German newspaper, referring to Iran’s reported execution of a man believed to be gay as an example of the harm caused by such laws. The campaign has met with skepticism from LGBTQ advocates, given the administration’s homophobic and transphobic domestic policies.

Religious right activists, while not endorsing the death penalty for LGBTQ people, denounced the push for decriminalization.

“Let’s find common ground in calling for an end to all forms of physical violence against homosexuals —  but refrain from imposing the values of the sexual revolution on the rest of the world.” Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, a longtime supporter of Donald Trump, wrote in his Washington Update column Thursday.

Massachusetts minister and occasional political candidate Scott Lively, always a virulent homophobe, was even more pointed in a column for World Net Daily, a right-wing website. “Reasonable tolerance and sympathy for people who suffer from same-sex attraction disorder is warranted — as is protecting them from violence — but sanitizing homosexuality and transgenderism as if they were morally, psychologically and behaviorally equivalent to sexual and gender normalcy is PC-driven lunacy,” he wrote.
 In a commentary for BarbWire, another far-right site, Julio Severo denounced Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a conservative Christian, for supporting Grenell’s effort, and took the opportunity to accuse LGBTQ people of being a danger to children.

“Such push coming from the Trump administration is a shame.” Severo wrote. “Coming from an evangelical who is the State Secretary, helping homosexual activist Grenell, is a bigger shame, because he is doing exactly what left-wing Protestant Hillary Clinton was doing when she was also a State Secretary.”

“When I think about violence and homosexuality, the first thought coming to my mind is not individuals suffering violence for their sexual lifestyle,” he added. “The first thinking is children suffering homosexual violence — physical and psychological. There is a massive effort to cover up the suffering of children in the hands of homosexual predators.”

Scientists have found no link between homosexuality and pedophilia, but Severo continued to push the assertion that gays are predators, and he blamed gay priests for the widespread abuse of children and teens in the Roman Catholic Church.

The commentators were still reluctant to blame Trump for the decriminalization campaign. . . . Perkins was encouraged that Trump seemed not to know of the campaign when reporters asked him about it Wednesday.

There may be another reason for Trump appearing to be ignorant of the move, however. New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman floated a possible explanation on Twitter: Or he does and doesn’t want to acknowledge on camera because it risks offending portions of his base.

Trump Shocks GOP with Bogus Emergency Declaration

Much of Trump's core base is motivated by one thing: a seething hatred of anyone non-white.  And this hatred extends to the Christofascists as evidenced by hate group leader Tony Perkins who heads the Family Research Council, formerly an affiliate of The Family Foundation here on Virginia. Perkins told his lemming like followers to "ask God for Trump’s wall to protect America from “thieves, murderers, and invaders”." Statement such as this underscore why Trump will cite a bogus national emergency to use funds not appropriated by Congress as required by the U.S. Constitution to build his farcical wall that serves no purpose in most instances other than to satiate the racial hatred of his base.  If Virginia Democrats busy wringing their hands over issues of race are truly concerned, they need to move to stop Trump's batshitery.  Fortunately some Senate Republicans seem hesitant to support Trump's lie which may be blocked by the courts as the Department of Justice has already warned Trump.  Of course, the real national emergency is that Trump still occupies the White House.  A piece in Politico looks at the GOP unease as Trump seeks to thrill the ugliest elements of his base.  Here are highlights:

The surprise announcement Thursday that President Donald Trump will use his emergency powers to try and build his border wall blindsided some Republicans, confused others and sent the Senate GOP into a general state of shock.

The news, delivered by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on the Senate floor, came after weeks of warnings from his own party not to declare a national emergency at the border.

Trump has decided to challenge Republicans’ resolve anyway — but he may not like the outcome. Aides privately predicted Trump will lose a vote on the Senate floor once the Democratic House passes a resolution of disapproval to block the move.

“I wish he wouldn’t have done it,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who McConnell interrupted on the Senate floor to make his announcement. “If [Trump] figures that Congress didn’t do enough and he’s got to do it, then I imagine we’ll find out whether he’s got the authority to do it by the courts.”

“In general, I’m not for running the government by emergency, nor spending money. The Constitution's pretty clear: spending originates and is directed by Congress,” said Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who like almost everyone else on Capitol Hill wants more information. “So I’m not really for it.”

Others were blunter.

"It’s a mistake on [Trump's] the president’s part," said Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine). "I also believe that it will be challenged in court. It undermines the role of Congress and the appropriations process.”

The question is not simply a theoretical one. Republicans might have to go on record on the Senate floor in the coming days over the matter. Under congressional rules, the Senate would be forced to act on a resolution of disapproval passed by the House, and just four Republicans would need to join with 47 Democrats to rebuke the president at the simple majority threshold. [A] battle over Trump’s executive powers will draw attention to the Senate GOP's on-again, off-again rift with the president over his hard-line immigration positions. And a veto override vote against their own president is not what Republicans want to be dealing with as the 2020 campaign begins.

Some Republicans breathed a sigh of relief that Trump’s unilateral move would at least end, for now, a wall fight that sparked a 35-day partial shutdown and threatened another.
But the move also represents a blow to any GOP effort to work on immigration reform while Trump is president.

“I always kind of take pause to the assertion of executive power,” said Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.). “The main reason is it could detract attention away from the long-term solution that can only occur through an act of Congress.”

Evangelical Mega-Donors Are Rethinking Who Deserves Their Money

Mega Donors Howard and Roberta Ahmanson.

As regular readers know, I generally view evangelical Christianity - at least in its present form - to be a cancer on American society and, indeed the world.  Hate, exclusion and division are  its principal hallmarks combined with a shocking level of hypocrisy.  The results of this reality are many, including the flight of 40% of Millennials from organized religion as a whole, a growing exodus of young evangelicals from their churches, and per a piece in The Atlantic wealthy evangelicals who are beginning to shift their donations away from "Christian" organizations obsessed with abandoning the Gospel message while waging a culture war in the quest for political power and self-enrichment (e.g., think Tony Perkins, Franklin Graham, and Jerry Falwell, Jr.).  Whether or not these shifts will save Christianity from the death spiral evangelicals have set it on.  Here are highlights from The Atlantic on the shifting largess of wealthy evangelicals:

In 2005, Time magazine crowned Howard and Roberta Ahmanson the most powerful evangelical financiers in America. As an heir to the assets of Home Savings and Loan, a mortgage and insurance empire, Howard Ahmanson became an influential philanthropist, backing projects in Bible translation, art, and—perhaps most notably—politics. The Ahmansons poured millions of dollars into ballot initiatives and Republican campaigns in California; in 2008, they gave more than $1 million to support Proposition 8, which successfully banned same-sex marriage in the state. The couple back the Discovery Institute, a think tank that promotes intelligent design, and the Claremont Institute, which promotes limited government.

This history makes Howard Ahmanson’s recent transformation all the more remarkable: One of the most stalwart backers of religious-right causes has become disenchanted with the GOP and many of its associated institutions.

“The Republican Party is a white-ethnic party. And I don’t want to be identified with that,” Ahmanson told me recently. He dislikes that white evangelicals are largely supportive of Donald Trump—“Whatever this is, it’s not the Gospel,” he said—and has stopped giving to groups such as the Family Research Council, . . . . “God is using this time, and Donald Trump, to purge the church,” he told me. “Are you about Christ and the Gospel first, or is your church just a Sunday extension of your political team?”

To say the least, Howard Ahmanson is not representative of American Christian philanthropists of any generation. His religious journey has been distinctive, and he has eclectic taste in causes. Moreover, several of the influential evangelicals who were Ahmanson’s peers on Time’s 2005 power-player list have redoubled their pursuit of national political influence: Franklin Graham, the evangelist and son of the late Billy Graham, spent his summer on a political speaking tour across California, and Jay Sekulow, who runs the American Center for Law and Justice, is one of Trump’s lawyers. Evangelical influence reaches all the way to the White House: Vice President Mike Pence has been a fixture at Christian-right events over the past two years, and political operatives such as Tony Perkins and Ralph Reed are enjoying greater influence under Trump than they’ve had in years.

Yet the question Ahmanson posed—about the right way for Christians to live out their faith in public, and how to put money behind that vision—is something that a number of people in evangelical philanthropy circles seem to be asking. In large part, Trump’s presidency is not the context for this question. Evangelicalism, writ large, is going through intense cultural and structural shifts that are also shaping how wealthy Christians use their money. The rise of the so-called religious right “was driven by a lot of anxiety, and a sense of urgency: If we don’t act, the country will be taken away from us,” he explained. While a lot of money poured into this movement, from both wealthy backers and grassroots supporters, “it was always a smaller proportion of evangelical charitable dollars than you might think,” Crouch said.

In the late 1980s and into the ’90s, a new organization, the Gathering, was established to help guide wealthy individuals and families who wanted to give to Christian causes—the vast majority of them in nonpolitical ways.

One of the clearest shifts among Christian mega-donors is demographic. Gen Xers and early Millennials are just starting to take the reins of legacy family foundations or come into their giving potential, and their sensibilities differ from their parents’. “For a long time, especially with Baby Boomers, there was so much wealth created so quickly,” Bruce said. “People just started giving where it was comfortable, which was usually local, with causes … they become familiar with … through their local church or network.” By contrast, her generation wants giving away money to be part of who they are, she said: The causes they support, whether it’s developing health clinics in Africa or mentoring kids in Houston, are central to their sense of identity. This overlaps with another trend in the evangelical-donor class: Over time, it may become more diverse.

Kwan described a community of second- and third-generation Asian American Christians in Silicon Valley who “aren’t necessarily beholden to the culture wars of the past,” he said. The causes that have come to be associated with evangelicalism—issues such as gay marriage, abortion, and religious liberty—don’t necessarily resonate outside a specific, white-evangelical milieu.All of these trends have shaped the way Christian dollars are spent. In a 2018 study, Giving USA and Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy found a sharp decrease in religious giving over the past four decades, declining from well over half of all giving in the late ’70s through the early ’90s to roughly a third as recently as 2017. This does not necessarily mean evangelicals are giving away less money, said David King, the director of the university’s Lake Institute on Faith and Giving.

Instead, they may be donating to organizations and causes that aren’t explicitly associated with church and parachurch organizations.“If you look at the current perception of the American church now, compared to historic witness of the church, there is a gap,” said Joshua Crossman, one of the board members of the Pinetops Foundation, a relatively small, new family foundation. He pointed to data from the Pew Research Center showing a sharp decline in the percentage of Americans who believe houses of worship contribute a “great deal” to solving social problems. In 2016, only 38 percent of religiously unaffiliated people said that was the case. “It would behoove all Christians to think about that gap and to figure out what we can do to best be a witness for Christ in our communities,” he said.

While Trump has rocked evangelical politics, this era of American evangelical history had already taken shape before he came on the scene: “The church may be moving toward a time of the church in exile rather than the church as the dominant cultural institution,” as Kwan put it.

In previous years, evangelicals responded to a sense of declining cultural power with anxiety—that is what yielded the age of “ferment” that Crouch described. But at least among this subset of next-generation evangelical mega-donors, there doesn’t seem to be much of a desire to fight the culture. Their hope, instead, is that they will be known by their fruits.

The Christofascists' New Anti-LGBT Rallying Cry

Mitch McConnell with hate group leader/white supremacist linked Tony Perkins.

Over the weekend Family Research Council ("FRC") - a certified hate group - held it disingenuously named "Value Voters Summit" in the nation's capital.   The key note speaker was Mike Pence - a religious extremist in his own right.  Also addressing the group was Mitch McConnell who disgustingly praised FRC Tony Perkins, a man with well documented ties to white supremacy organizations.  Such is the state of today's GOP that someone like Perkins could have Trump's ear and have McConnell basically groveling to Perkins and assured the Bible thumpers that Kavanaugh would be confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court no matter what issues or damning facts might arise. As is the norm for such gatherings of Christian extremists, abortion and gays were the topics of rants and lies.  This year, a new anti-LGBT rallying cry was formulated pursuant to which lies and disinformation will be disseminated.  A piece in Rewire looks at this latest nastiness.  Here are excerpts:

“Gender ideology” took center stage at this weekend’s Values Voter Summit (VVS) in Washington, D.C. And side stage. And student mixer. In each instance, it was used as a handy catchall: Objecting to “gender ideology” allows Christian conservatives to consolidate all their objections to treating LGBTQ people with dignity into one scary talking point.

 This year, Vice President Mike Pence gave the keynote address following evangelical and conservative darlings like the Benham Brothers (house flippers and sons of Operation Save America’s Flip Benham), Michele Bachmann, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, David Daleiden (of Planned Parenthood hit-video fame), Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, HUD Secretary Ben Carson, Masterpiece baker Jack Phillips, and many others. The turn to “gender ideology” marks a change for this conference and for conservative talking points in general, which in the past have focused more directly on bathroom bills and specious fears for the safety of children. If you’re not familiar with the term, that’s not surprising. More popular with European conservatives, “gender ideology” as a conservative rallying cry has only grown in domestic U.S. circles in the past year or two. Among conservatives, “gender ideology” encompasses a broad range of horrors: LGBTQ-inclusive nondiscrimination laws, transgender-inclusive school and ID-document policies, and comprehensive sex education, to name a few. Rather than ginning up support around specific topics, the broader lens of “gender ideology” allowed speakers to talk about a range of theoretical harms to religious freedom if politics are permitted to be overrun by the “new secular orthodoxy” of sexual orientation and gender identity, as Emilie Kao of the Heritage Foundation called it during her presentation on religious liberty.

[O]n Saturday, moderator Peter Sprigg—researcher at FRC and author of many a [anti-gay] blog about LGBTQ people and policies—introduced the panelists to talk about “How Gender Ideology Harms Children.” First up was disreputed former head of Johns Hopkins Department of Psychiatry head Dr. Paul McHugh. In 1977, Dr. McHugh ended Johns Hopkins’ groundbreaking trans-affirmative medical program. Johns Hopkins reversed the ensuing decades of anti-trans pseudo-scientific rhetoric in 2017, when it reopened its Center for Transgender Health. At VVS, Dr. McHugh gave the same speech he’s been giving at conservative conferences since his retirement, comparing transgender people to people with eating disorders: “We work not to affirm their belief [that they are transgender], but to correct it.”

Throughout his remarks, Dr. McHugh cited discredited research, misrepresented data on trans children, and flat-out lied.

Elizabeth Johnston, known for her Activist Mommy blog and her campaigns against comprehensive sex education, was the last to speak from the stage on Saturday morning. Johnston is a fiery speaker who was the perfect closer for an audience primed to hear her lies and misinformation. Schools are teaching our kids “gender confusion” and how to have oral and anal sex, she claimed. She described comprehensive sex education as “sexual abuse and grooming.”

The week before last, a similar panel was held at the World Congress of Families, in Moldova. Peter Sprigg was there too, giving a PowerPoint presentation on “Five Myths of Gender Identity.” Sprigg was joined by several European anti-transgender activists, and the talking points they shared were very similar to those sprinkled throughout VVS on Saturday.

The similarity is no coincidence: Right-wing and Christian conservatives have been trading tactics and talking points across the ocean for several years now as they try to fight the gains made by the LGBTQ community. And the broadening of their rhetoric is also not a coincidence: Framing support for the LGBTQ community as “gender ideology” allows anti-LGBTQ activists to scare, confuse, and galvanize their voters as we move into an important election season here in the United States, and into a crucial moment in political history across the world.

I dealt with and corresponded with Peter Sprigg some years ago.  He has NO legitimate credentials, continually disseminates deliberate lies about LGBT individuals, and has covered up for "ex-gay" frauds whom he knows are not "cured" of their homosexuality.    Combine Sprigg and other bogus "experts" with Tony Perkins' white supremacist ties, and the only values upheld by "values voters" are lies, bigotry, racism and homophobia.

The Deliberate Cruelty of Trump’s Child-Migrant Camps

The Globe and Mail is Canada's most widely read newspaper and it is now carrying editorials that condemn the horrors being done to undocumented immigrant families by the Trump/Pence regime which is lying desperately to blame the policy on Democrats even though the policy originated with Trump, Pence and the always evil Jeff Sessions.  Similar anti-American, anti-Trump sentiments are being published by legitimate news outlets around the civilized world. While many Americans (I would hope a majority) are horrified by the Trump/Pence policy, the Trump base is applauding the horrors.  Trump supporter Tony Perkins - a man with documented white supremacist ties and currently the president of Family Research Council, a certified hate group - is but one example of Trump's racist cheerleaders.  As noted in previous posts, silence and inaction is not an option if one wants to avoid complicity in deliberate cruelty.  Some like former First Lady Laura Bush spoke out in an op-ed in the Washington Post condemning the Trump/Pence regime cruelty.  Here are some excerpts:

I live in a border state. I appreciate the need to enforce and protect our international boundaries, but this zero-tolerance policy is cruel. It is immoral. And it breaks my heart.

Our government should not be in the business of warehousing children in converted box stores or making plans to place them in tent cities in the desert outside of El Paso. These images are eerily reminiscent of the internment camps for U.S. citizens and noncitizens of Japanese descent during World War II, now considered to have been one of the most shameful episodes in U.S. history. We also know that this treatment inflicts trauma; . . . . it is our obligation to reunite these detained children with their parents — and to stop separating parents and children in the first place.

Imagine how America's image in the world is being devastated.  I dread the questions the husband and I will face when traveling in France and the United Kingdom in the fall.   A piece in the Globe and Mail gives us an idea of what other civilized nations are hearing and thinking.  Here are highlights:

Under the direction of Donald Trump and Attorney-General Jeff Sessions, the U.S. government has snatched roughly 2,000 children of asylum seekers from their parents – including an infant girl who was taken from her wailing mother while breastfeeding – and put them in detention camps. They are there for the crime of existing, as migrant children fleeing foreign violence and oppression, in Mr. Trump’s United States.

We’re told by Mr. Trump’s backers to feel good about the conditions of the camp – to cheer that migrants have TV and snacks and video games instead of mothers or fathers or siblings.

The older children scream for their parents, while the babies simply scream. The littlest ones cannot even tell us who they are. They don’t yet have words. And so we try, in the United States, to find the words for them. To find the words to describe this level of evil, which was both preventable and proclaimed.

This is the platform Mr. Trump ran on, after all: a platform of xenophobia and corruption. This is the culmination of the dictatorial ambitions and dehumanization of immigrants that smug journalists and officials told people to take seriously – but not literally. For Latino immigrants, demonized from the very day Mr. Trump launched his campaign, it was always literally.

The last 17 months have been a test of how far the administration could push the boundaries of morality and law before an atrocity was mainstreamed. . . . The sickness is not just caused by Mr. Trump; it also stems from a collective failure of the most powerful, whether elected or not, to call a lie a lie, to label abuse as abuse. Those tasked to check atrocities instead chose to enable them.

“This is not America,” Republican politicians like to say about the imprisoned children, “this is not who we are.” These statements ignore U.S. history – this was the United States for Indigenous children torn from their parents and sent to boarding schools, for African children sold into slavery, for Japanese families held in internment camps. One answer to “it can’t happen here” is “it already happened here” – children have been imprisoned in the United States, albeit selectively, through autocratic policies imposed over centuries by powerful white men upon the non-white and vulnerable.

Another answer to “it can’t happen here” is, of course, “make it stop happening” – an option the GOP can choose to enact, by holding Mr. Trump and officials, who have flagrantly broken the law, accountable for their crimes and striking down their policies. They refuse to do so.

In 2003, journalist Anna Politkovskaya described the horrors of Vladimir Putin’s rapidly changing Russia, its toxic mix of brutality and lies. . . . . A hit was ordered on Ms. Politkovskaya and she was killed in 2006 for speaking out. Her words stopped but the sentiment lingers.

Today, we live under an aspiring autocrat who locks up babies who literally cannot speak for themselves. We are confronted with an assault against children so horrifying it is hard to find the words to describe it. But whatever our feelings, they are nothing compared to what migrant children and parents must be going through. Use your words and fight – for families to be reunited, for their rights and for their freedom, for this nation’s blighted soul.

America - if it ever had one given some of its horrific history - is losing its soul.  While Trump and his white supremacist/Christofascist base revel in the cruelty being unleashed, the rest of us must demand these evils cease.  We also need to get out and vote en mass come November and vote Republicans at EVERY level out.  Let's change Congress so that it can stop and/or remove Trump.  Better yet, send Trump to prison (and not a VIP one) for the rest of is life. 

Supreme Court Wrongly Hands Victory to Christian Extremist

Jack Phillips - the face of bigotry and hate hiding behind the smoke screen of "religious freedom".

While the majority ruled in Masterpiece Cakeshop on a narrow basis for Christian extremists Jack Phillips - and, in my view, court manufactured finding that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission’s ruling against Phillips had been "infected by religious animus" - virulently anti-gay Christofascists are nonetheless celebrating the ruling as a wide ranging victory.  Individuals like Family Research Council ("FRC") president Tony Perkins, a man with a well documented ties to white supremacists groups, who parades around as a "godly Christian" while fleecing the bigoted and gullible, a crowing about the "victory" and no doubt looking for the next hand picked plaintiff to continue the assault on LGBT rights.  The irony, of course, is that the Court found the Civil Rights Commission's supposed "religious animus" to be improper, yet Phillips' religious based anti-gay animus was given a pass.   The even large issue is who else will now be subject to targeting by white Christofascists?  Non-Christians? Interracial couples?  Muslims?   A piece in the New York Times looks at this wrong-headed ruling The full opinion is here).  Here are article excerpts:

The Supreme Court on Monday ruled in favor of a Colorado baker who had refused to create a wedding cake for a gay couple. The court’s decision was narrow, and it left open the larger question of whether a business can discriminate against gay men and lesbians based on rights protected by the First Amendment.

The court passed on an opportunity to either bolster the right to same-sex marriage or explain how far the government can go in regulating businesses run on religious principles. Instead, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy’s majority opinion turned on the argument that the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which originally ruled against the baker, had been shown to be hostile to religion because of the remarks of one of its members.

At the same time, Justice Kennedy strongly reaffirmed protections for gay rights. “The outcome of cases like this in other circumstances must await further elaboration in the courts,” he wrote, “all in the context of recognizing that these disputes must be resolved with tolerance, without undue disrespect to sincere religious beliefs, and without subjecting gay persons to indignities when they seek goods and services in an open market.”

On the one hand, Justice Kennedy has written every major Supreme Court decision protecting gay men and lesbians. On the other, he is the court’s most ardent defender of free speech.  On Monday, Justice Kennedy chose a third path, one that seemed to apply only to the case before the court.

Writing for the majority in the 7-to-2 decision, he said the Civil Rights Commission’s ruling against the baker, Jack Phillips, had been infected by religious animus. He cited what he said were “inappropriate and dismissive comments” from one commissioner in saying that the panel had acted inappropriately and that its decision should be overturned.

“The neutral and respectful consideration to which Phillips was entitled was compromised here,” Justice Kennedy wrote. “The Civil Rights Commission’s treatment of his case has some elements of a clear and impermissible hostility toward the sincere religious beliefs that motivated his objection.”

That passage echoed his plea for tolerance in his majority opinion in 2015 in Obergefell v. Hodges, which recognized a constitutional right to same-sex marriage. In that decision, he called for “an open and searching debate” between those who opposed same-sex marriage on religious grounds and those who considered such unions “proper or indeed essential.”

The breadth of the court’s majority was a testament to the narrowness of the decision’s reasoning. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Elena Kagan and Neil M. Gorsuch joined Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion. Justice Clarence Thomas voted with the majority but would have adopted broader reasons.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, joined by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissented.

Some gay rights groups took a darker view of the decision. “The court today has offered dangerous encouragement to those who would deny civil rights to L.G.B.T. people,” said Rachel B. Tiven, the chief executive of Lambda Legal. “We will fiercely resist the coming effort that will seek to turn this ruling into a broad license to discriminate.”

Rest assured, a broader attack on LGBT rights will be coming. The ultimate irony is that when one looks at non-discrimination and public accommodation laws, all of the protected categories - age, race, sexual orientation, national origin, age,  - are things that one cannot control.  Only one category - religion - is something that is changeable and relies on a conscious decision - an option, if you will - to embrace a particular dogma and form of ignorance and/or bigotry.  If anything should be forced to yield to immutable characteristics, it should be religious belief which all to often is based on myths and legends.   

Pence Secretly Drafted Trump’s Latest Transgender Ban

Hate group leader Tony Perkins with Trump and Pence

As much as I despise Donald Trump and view him as a clear and present danger to America, in some way Mike Pence presents an even more insidious danger.   Pence - like Rick Santorum, Ken Cuccinelli and some other virulently anti-gay Republicans - is a religious fanatic and will go to any lengths to quell his inner demons.  One of his main demons concerns homosexuality due to, in my belief, the fact that he, like Santorum and Cuccinelli, is a self-loathing closeted gay who somehow thinks that make life a living hell for other LGBT individuals makes amends for his own secret lusts.  (Pence also spent his early years as a Catholic, which I know first hand screws one up unbelievably if you are LGBT).  The only positive thing Pence did is not have seven children like Santorum and Cuccinelli did as they tried to convince the world - and most importantly themselves - that they aren't really gay.  Thus, it is no surprise to learn that Pence along with a group of professional gay-haters  was behind Der Trumpenführer's latest anti-transgender military ban.  Among this cabal was hate group leader Tony Perkins, in my view one of the most dishonest individuals on the planet.  A piece in Think Progress looks at this latest attack which is based on the usual Christofascist lies.  Here are excerpts:

Then President Trump announced a new ban on transgender people serving in the military late Friday, it was somewhat of a surprise — Defense Secretary Jim Mattis had reportedly recommended in February that Trump allow transgender people to serve. It turns out that Vice President Pence and some of the country’s most prominent anti-LGBTQ activists had a role in reversing the outcome, which explains why the report explaining the decision is rife with anti-trans junk science.

Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern reported Friday night that, according to multiple sources, Pence played “a leading role” in creating the report, along with Ryan T. Anderson of the Heritage Foundation, which has been dubbed “Trump’s favorite think tank,” and Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council (FRC), an anti-LGBTQ hate group.  Both Heritage and FRC praised the report Friday. According to Stern’s reporting, it was true that Mattis favored allowing transgender military service, but Pence “effectively overruled” him.

A separate source independently confirmed to ThinkProgress Saturday that Pence was involved, characterizing him as forming his own ad hoc “working group,” including Anderson and Perkins, separate from the panel of experts Mattis had assembled.

Mattis’ original document is not currently publicly available, but it was widely reported that Mattis favored an inclusive approach that resembled what had originally been proposed by Defense Secretary Ash Carter under President Obama in 2016. [T]he report features numerous anti-trans talking points that FRC and other anti-LGBTQ groups have used in various campaigns favoring discrimination against transgender people. It also attempts to distort the research on transgender health in ways that directly parallel Anderson’s recently released book, When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. One of the most obvious biases in the new report is an emphasis on concerns about how transgender people in the military might somehow infringe on the privacy of other soldiers — particularly women. These are the same arguments Perkins, Anderson, and others have made in justifying overturning LGBTQ protections in Houston or defending North Carolina’s HB2, a law that mandated discrimination against transgender people.

According to the report, transgender people would violate other troops’ privacy simply by sharing a space with them . . . . Not so subtly, the report concludes that unit cohesion will deteriorate if the anti-transgender prejudices of other service members are not catered to.

“[U]nit cohesion” is the same hollow argument that was previously used to defend “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT), a law that prohibited lesbian, gay, and bisexual people from serving openly in the military. Such warnings even included near-identical concerns about shared shower use. Following DADT’s repeal, a study showed that LGB inclusion had no negative impact on military morale, despite similar warnings. Nowhere does the report even mention that every major medical organization in the U.S. has arrived at a consensus that transgender people should be affirmed in their gender identities and supported in their transitions. The American Medical Association has even explicitly expressed support for lifting the military’s ban on transgender service. The report likewise makes no mention of the widely-used standards of care developed by the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH), which recognize the benefits of affirmative care.

As has become inevitable in just about every attempt to justify anti-trans discrimination (including Anderson’s book), the study also wildly distorts studies about the suicidality of transgender people.

The report essentially manufactures doubt about the health outcomes of transgender people to justify the very kind of discrimination that is the most significant factor for trans people’s negative experiences.

But as the report largely reflects the views of Pence, a longtime opponent of LGBTQ equality, and some of the top anti-LGBTQ activists in the country, it’s easy to see how it arrived at such discriminatory conclusions.

It is very difficult to lie more than Tony Perkins who, like Trump, should be assumed to be lying if his lips are moving. 

Trump Evangelicals Have Sold Their Souls

Trump and the morally bankrupt Jerry Falwell, Jr.

I make no bones about the fact that I do not like evangelical Christians in general and those that voted for an continue to support Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer.  Part of this dislike may be an unconscious residue of my Catholic upbringing where Protestant fundamentalists and evangelicals were viewed with suspicion, particularly their rejection of evolution and other matters science that the Catholic Church had found a way to accommodate.  This latent dislike/distrust became much more pronounced once I began studying evangelical "family values" organizations both in my days as a Republican activist and later after I "came out."  What I discovered was that there were few in society more willing to lie and disseminate deliberate falsehoods that the self-anointed who quickly condemn others and seem best defined by their hatred of others.  Fast forward to 2016 and evangelical responsibility for putting Donald Trump - a thoroughly foul and morally bankrupt individual - in the White House.  As Michael Gerson points out in two columns, one in the Washington Post and a far lengthier one in the Atlantic, Trump supporting evangelicals have sold their souls and, more tellingly for the future, have made the term evangelical synonymous with moral bankruptcy and a denigration of what is supposed to be the Gospel message.  Gerson was raised as an evangelical himself, but like me, he puts truth, honesty and morality above partisanship and a self-created martyrdom complex.  He believes that religion - especially Christianity - can be a positive good, while I dissent and view religion as a whole as a negative force in the world.  Trump supporting evangelicals reinforce my negative assessment.  First, these highlights from the Post column:

With their reactions to the Roy Moore candidacy and the Stormy Daniels scandal, the Trump evangelicals have scaled the heights of hypocrisy to the summit. Family-values conservatives who dismiss credible accusations of sexual abuse and wink at hush money for a porn star have ceased to represent family values in any meaningful sense. They have made a national joke of moral standards that were once, presumably, deeply held. At least when a Democrat violated them.

My friend Pete Wehner proposes a thought experiment: If a militant atheist were to design a trap with the goal of discrediting evangelical Christians, could they do better than Moore and Daniels? It would take some consideration.

But this barely scratches the surface of the moral compromises being made. The problem with Trumpism is not only the transparent excuses it offers (and requires others to accept) for shoddy and offensive behavior. As I argue in the Atlantic , the deeper issue is the distinctly non-Christian substance of President Trump’s values. His unapologetic materialism. His tribalism and hatred for “the other.”

The very thing that should repel evangelicals — Trump’s dehumanization of others — is what seems to fascinate and attract some conservative Christians. It is yet another example of discrediting hypocrisy.

Identifying evangelicalism with Trump’s ethno-populism may have some short-term benefits. But public influence eventually depends on the persuasiveness of public arguments. And close ties to Trump will eventually be disastrous to causes that evangelicals care about. Pro-life arguments are discredited by an association with misogyny. Arguments for religious liberty are discredited by association with anti-Muslim bias. Arguments for family values are discredited by nativist disdain for migrant families. Trump evangelicals are blessing the destruction of public norms on civility, decency and the importance of public character.  . . . . . And the ultimate harm is to the reputation of faith itself. 

The far longer piece in The Atlantic looks at the hypocrisy and moral bankruptcy of Trump supporting evangelicals in much more detail.  Here are excerpts:

One of the most extraordinary things about our current politics—really, one of the most extraordinary developments of recent political history—is the loyal adherence of religious conservatives to Donald Trump. The president [Trump] won four-fifths of the votes of white evangelical Christians. This was a higher level of support than either Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, an outspoken evangelical himself, ever received.
 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. We are a long way from The Book of Virtues. [T]he 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. 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.’ ” So it is little wonder that last year the Princeton Evangelical Fellowship, an 87-year-old ministry, dropped the “E word” from its name, becoming the Princeton Christian Fellowship: Too many students had identified the term with conservative political ideology. I was raised in an evangelical home, went to an evangelical church and high school, and began following Christ as a teen. After attending Georgetown University for a year, I transferred to Wheaton College in Illinois—sometimes called “the Harvard of evangelical Protestantism”—where I studied theology. I worked at an evangelical nonprofit, Prison Fellowship, before becoming a staffer for Senator Dan Coats of Indiana (a fellow Wheaton alum). On Capitol Hill, I found many evangelical partners in trying to define a “compassionate conservatism.” And as a policy adviser and the chief speechwriter to President George W. Bush, I saw how evangelical leaders such as Rick and Kay Warren could be principled, tireless advocates in the global fight against aids. Those experiences make me hesitant to abandon the word evangelical. They also make seeing the defilement of that word all the more painful. The corruption of a political party is regrettable. The corruption of a religious tradition by politics is tragic, shaming those who participate in it. How did something so important and admirable become so disgraced? . . . . The answer extends back some 150 years, and involves cultural and political shifts that long pre-date Donald Trump. It is the story of how an influential and culturally confident religious movement became a marginalized and anxious minority seeking political protection under the wing of a man such as Trump, the least traditionally Christian figure—in temperament, behavior, and evident belief—to assume the presidency in living memory. In the years before the Civil War, a connection between moralism and a concern for social justice was generally assumed among Northern evangelicals. They variously militated for temperance, humane treatment of the mentally disabled, and prison reform. But mainly they militated for the end of slavery. . . . . 
 “I rest my opposition to slavery upon the one-bloodism of the New Testament. All men are equal, because they are of one equal blood.” In the mid-19th century, evangelicalism was the predominant religious tradition in America—a faith assured of its social position, confident in its divine calling, welcoming of progress, and hopeful about the future. Fifty years later, it was losing intellectual and social ground on every front. Twenty-five years beyond that, it had become a national joke.

But it was a series of momentous intellectual developments that most effectively drove a wedge between evangelicalism and elite culture. Higher criticism of the Bible—a scholarly movement out of Germany that picked apart the human sources and development of ancient texts—called into question the roots, accuracy, and historicity of the book that constituted the ultimate source of evangelical authority. At the same time, the theory of evolution advanced a new account of human origin. Advocates of evolution, as well as those who denied it most vigorously, took the theory as an alternative to religious accounts—and in many cases to Christian belief itself.

Religious progressives sought common ground between the Christian faith and the new science and higher criticism. Many combined their faith with the Social Gospel—a postmillennialism drained of the miraculous, with social reform taking the place of the Second Coming.

Religious conservatives, by contrast, rebelled against this strategy of accommodation in a series of firings and heresy trials designed to maintain control of seminaries. (Woodrow Wilson’s uncle James lost his job at Columbia Theological Seminary for accepting evolution as compatible with the Bible.) But these tactics generally backfired, and seminary after seminary, college after college, fell under the influence of modern scientific and cultural assumptions. To contest progressive ideas, the religiously orthodox published a series of books called The Fundamentals. Hence the term fundamentalism, conceived in a spirit of desperate reaction.

In reacting against higher criticism, it became simplistic and overliteral in its reading of scripture. In reacting against evolution, it became anti-scientific in its general orientation. In reacting against the Social Gospel, it came to regard the whole concept of social justice as a dangerous liberal idea. This last point constituted what some scholars have called the “Great Reversal,” which took place from about 1900 to 1930.

The banishment of fundamentalism from the cultural mainstream culminated dramatically in a Tennessee courthouse in 1925. William Jennings Bryan, the most prominent Christian politician of his time, was set against Clarence Darrow and the theory of evolution at the Scopes “monkey trial,” in which a Tennessee educator was tried for teaching the theory in high school. Bryan won the case but not the country.

[T]he 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. . . . This attitude was happily exploited by the modern GOP. Evangelicals who were alienated by the pro-choice secularism of Democratic presidential nominees were effectively courted to join the Reagan coalition.

[M]odern evangelicalism has an important intellectual piece missing. . . . . 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. . . . If you want to call yourself pro-life on abortion, then you have to oppose the dehumanization of migrants. If you criticize the devaluation of life by euthanasia, then you must criticize the devaluation of life by racism. If you want to be regarded as pro-family, then you have to support access to health care. And vice versa. The doctrinal whole requires a broad, consistent view of justice . . .

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. . . . . In this Christian political movement, Christian theology is emphatically not the primary motivating factor.

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.

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. . . . 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.

This was foolish and unnecessary. There is no meaningful theological difference between creation by divine intervention and creation by natural selection; both are consistent with belief in a purposeful universe, and with serious interpretation of biblical texts.

The consequences, especially for younger generations, are considerable. According to a recent survey by Barna, a Christian research firm, more than half of churchgoing Christian teens believe that “the church seems to reject much of what science tells us about the world.” This may be one reason that, in America, the youngest age cohorts are the least religiously affiliated, which will change the nation’s baseline of religiosity over time. 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.

[E]vangelicals would prove highly vulnerable to a message of resentful, declinist populism. Donald Trump could almost have been echoing the apocalyptic warnings of Metaxas and Graham when he declared, “Our country’s going to hell.” . . . . Given Trump’s general level of religious knowledge, he likely had no idea that he was adapting premillennialism to populism. But when the candidate talked of an America in decline and headed toward destruction, which could be returned to greatness only by recovering the certainties of the past, he was strumming resonant chords of evangelical conviction.
Trump consistently depicts evangelicals as they depict themselves: a mistreated minority, in need of a defender who plays by worldly rules.

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—winking at trashy behavior and encouraging the unraveling of social restraints. . . . Having given politics pride of place, these evangelical leaders have ceased to be moral leaders in any meaningful sense.

For a package of political benefits, 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?

The irony may well be that evangelicals will ultimately bear much of the responsibility for the death of Christianity as a majority phenomenon in America.  While the younger generations are fleeing Christianity and religion in general the most rapidly, older generations are beginning to shift away  as well. If this happens, it will be a case of divine justice, so to speak.