Some White Evangelicals are Difficult to Recognize as Christians

Despite its many problems and failings, Catholicism continues to push for a social gospel that attempts to mitigate the sufferings of the poor, the homeless and refugees. Such cannot be said for many of today's white evangelicals in the United States who feign piety, express shock at Donald Trump's foul language, yet totally betray the social message demanded by the Gospels by virtue of the policies they support.  In a column in the Washington Post, former Republican Michael Gerson who was raised as an evangelical lets loose on the modern day Pharisees who comprise perhaps the vast majority of white evangelicals. I often say that one cannot be a decent moral person and be a member.supporter of today's Republican Party.  Gerson more or less states that one cannot be a Trump supporter and be a Christian.  Here are column excerpts:

After a recent speech by President Trump, Hardesty — who is a conservative, pro-Trump Democrat — received phone calls from Christians complaining of the president’s use of the term “goddamn.” In a letter to Trump, Hardesty pronounced himself “appalled by the fact that you chose to use the Lord’s name in vain on two separate occasions.”

This is hardly a national groundswell for decorum. But I don’t want to be dismissive of people revolted by the steaming, stinking cesspool of Trump’s public rhetoric. The problem is one of proportion.

Hardesty admitted that evangelicals Christians had been willing to overlook many of the president’s character flaws, but he ventured that on the matter of blasphemy, Trump’s “evangelical base might be far less forgiving.”

Consider this statement in the light of some recent developments:

*The Trump administration seems intent on sending to Congress a more than $4 billion package of budget cuts focused on diplomacy and foreign-assistance spending. These proposed reductions would likely affect efforts to fight the spread of Ebola, programs to encourage food security and nutrition across Africa, aid to countries taking the brunt of the refugee crisis, and democracy support in Venezuela, Ukraine and Tibet.

*[Trump] The president continues to vilify refugees as national security threats without the slightest bit of evidence. This year, the Trump administration capped the number of refugees who can resettle in the United States at 30,000 . . . . And the administration is now considering cutting that number to nearly zero next year.

*Along the southern border, the Trump administration has tightened the rules on asylum, making it more difficult for applicants to seek protection when family members face threats, and barring migrants seeking asylum if they passed through a third country while making their trek. The administration’s policy of family separation, its abusive treatment of migrants, its policy confusion and its general incompetence have contributed to a humanitarian crisis on both sides of the border.

There is an obvious response to Hardesty and other offended evangelical Christians.

Massive budget cuts to hunger-relief programs in Africa, refusing to take in desperate Syrian refugees and separating crying children from their parents at the border are tolerable, but using the Lord’s name in vain is a bridge too far? Pathological lying, spreading conspiracy theories, misogyny, making racist comments and dehumanizing others are permissible, but swearing somehow crosses the line?

This kind of Pharisaical preference for rules over humans reveals a large gap of spiritual education. In a poll conducted last year by the Pew Research Center, only 25 percent of white evangelical Christians said the United States has a responsibility to accept refugees, while 65 percent of those not affiliated with a religion affirmed that duty. . . . this reveals cruelty, corruption and hypocrisy at the heart of the Christian faith.

The problem does not lie in Christianity but in the moral formation of Christians. Are they getting their view of refugees from Christian sources? Or are they taking their view from Fox News, talk radio and Trump? I suspect the latter. And the worship of political idols is ultimately a spiritual problem — a different kind of blasphemy.

Many white evangelical Christians hold a faith that appeals to the comfortable rather than siding with the afflicted. They have allied themselves with bigots and nativists, risking the reputation of the gospel itself. And, in some very public ways, they are difficult to recognize as Christians at all.

Unfortunately, nothing seems likely to change evangelicals.  Thus, all one can do is hope that the flight from religion accelerates and that in time evangelicals shrink as a percentage of the population and that their toxic influence wanes. When that day comes, they best hope that they don't receive the kind of treatment that have inflicted on others.

George Will: Pence, the Worst Person in Washington

Over the years at times I have seen political pundit George Will as more and more extreme and damaging to the concept of "conservative" political thought.  That said, compared to pretty much all of the Republican Party and the racists and religious extremists that now comprise the bulk of the GOP base, George Will nonetheless comes across as a true conservative of the old mold.  Mr. Will reflects a time when honor, honesty, and a measure of decency still counted for something within the Republican Party.  As Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell drag the Republican Party and conservatism in general further and further into the moral and ethical cesspool, a small rear guard of conservatives of the old mold struggle to resist the moral disintegration of conservatism.  Part of this effort involves calling out  those doing incalculable harm to the nation and society.  In a Washington Post column, Will calls out a man in some ways more sinister and dangerous that Trump himself: Mike Pence, a man who feigns piety yet turns a blind eye to immoral and illegal conduct.  Two telling sentences:  "Trump is what he is,  . . . . which is pathetic. Pence is what he has chosen to be, which is horrifying."  Here are more column highlights: 

Donald Trump, with his feral cunning, knew. The oleaginous Mike Pence, with his talent for toadyism and appetite for obsequiousness, could, Trump knew, become America’s most repulsive public figure. And Pence, who has reached this pinnacle by dethroning his benefactor, is augmenting the public stock of useful knowledge. Because his is the authentic voice of today’s lickspittle Republican Party, he clarifies this year’s elections: Vote Republican to ratify groveling as governing.

Last June, a Trump Cabinet meeting featured testimonials offered to Dear Leader by his forelock-tugging colleagues. . . . . The vice president chimed in but saved his best riff for a December Cabinet meeting when, as The Post’s Aaron Blake calculated, Pence praised Trump once every 12 seconds for three minutes . . . .

Between those two Cabinet meetings, Pence and his retinue flew to Indiana for the purpose of walking out of an Indianapolis Colts football game, thereby demonstrating that football players kneeling during the national anthem are intolerable to someone of Pence’s refined sense of right and wrong. Which brings us to his Arizona salute last week to Joe Arpaio, who was sheriff of Maricopa County until in 2016 voters wearied of his act.

Arpaio, a grandstanding, camera-chasing bully and darling of the thuggish right, is also a criminal, convicted of contempt of court for ignoring a federal judge’s order to desist from certain illegal law enforcement practices. Pence’s performance occurred eight miles from the home of Sen. John McCain, who could teach Pence — or perhaps not — something about honor.

Henry Adams said that “practical politics consists in ignoring facts,” but what was the practicality in Pence’s disregard of the facts about Arpaio? His pandering had no purpose beyond serving Pence’s vocation, which is to ingratiate himself with his audience of the moment. 

[O]n Jan. 27, 1838, Lincoln, then 28, delivered his first great speech, to the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield. Less than three months earlier, Elijah Lovejoy, an abolitionist newspaper editor in Alton, Ill., 67 miles from Springfield, was murdered by a pro-slavery mob. Without mentioning Lovejoy — it would have been unnecessary — Lincoln lamented that throughout America, “so lately famed for love of law and order,” there was a “mobocratic spirit” among “the vicious portion of [the] population.” . . . . Pence, one of evangelical Christians’ favorite pin-ups, genuflects at various altars, as the mobocratic spirit and the vicious portion require.

It is said that one cannot blame people who applaud Arpaio and support his rehabilitators (Trump, Pence, et al.), because, well, globalization or health-care costs or something. Actually, one must either blame them or condescend to them as lacking moral agency. Republicans silent about Pence have no such excuse.

There will be negligible legislating by the next Congress, so ballots cast this November will be most important as validations or repudiations of the harmonizing voices of Trump, Pence, Arpaio and the like. Trump is what he is, a floundering, inarticulate jumble of gnawing insecurities and not-at-all compensating vanities, which is pathetic. Pence is what he has chosen to be, which is horrifying.

As dangerous as Trump is, Pence is perhaps the more sinister evil.  BOTH Trump and Pence need to be taken down by the Russiagate/obstruction of justice/Michael Cohen investigations. 

Will Trump Be Paul Ryan's Undoing?

As regular readers know, I loath Paul Ryan and view the man as a phony when it comes to professed religious belief and nowhere near the policy wonk that the mainstream media likes to pretend.  The GOP agenda that Ryan promotes is the antithesis of the Catholic social Gospel that Ryan pretends to respect.  Meanwhile, his budget proposals are little more than a warmed over version of Ronald Reagan's trickle down economics which did not work in the 1980's and will not work now.  Despite these failings in morality and truth and veracity, Ryan is treated as the best thing to come to the GOP in decades.  Fortunately, now, Ryan's waffling self-prostitution to Donald Trump may be the root of his undoing.  The Trumpkins simply are not buying in to Ryan's smoke and mirrors bullshit.  At least that is the premise of a piece in Think Progress.  Here are highlights:

Paul Ryan . . . . was supposed to be the GOP’s conquering hero. He is the architect of the Republican Budget, a general so beloved he persuaded 235 elected lawmakers to fall in line — marching together behind legislation that would phase out Medicare.

Though Ryan was, ostensibly, second fiddle to Mitt Romney, the GOP’s most influential minds spoke of the blue-eyed congressman as the One True King. According to Republican Überlobbyist Grover Norquist, the country needs only to “pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen” because that president’s one job would be signing “legislation that has already been prepared” — Paul Ryan’s legislation.

Ryan was the agenda setter. The mastermind. The man with the plan to unravel the New Deal and nuke the Great Society from orbit.

And then, the GOP’s rank-and-file got other ideas . . . . . According to one recent poll, 58 percent of Republican primary voters view Ryan at least somewhat unfavorably. Though the Speaker has an almost mystic ability to seduce GOP elites and inside-the-beltway reporters with those dreamy blue eyes, he has lost the confidence of his party’s voters.

There are, of course, many factors that contributed to Ryan’s collapse. His gutless response to Trump’s racism and sexism is certainly one of them. . . . . He waited to see which way the wind would blow. And he is now alone, at home neither with the Trump loyalists nor with the Never Trumpers.

Setting aside his failed effort to privatize Social Security, George W. Bush understood that the portion of the Republican base most likely to rally behind a candidate like Trump is also quite pleased with programs like Medicare. It explains why he signed Medicare Part D into law.

[W]hile the last several decades of American politics have largely been a fight between movement conservatism and Rooseveltian liberalism, a different kind of politics — openly racist while simultaneously generous to voters in the in-group — was a major player in U.S. elections for many years. Southern racists ranging from “Pitckfork” Ben Tillman to Jimmy Byrnes to George Wallace promised a mixture of government largesse for white people and oppression for African-Americans.

The spirit of George Wallace lives today in Donald Trump, whose explicit racism is paired with far less enthusiasm for tearing up the American safety net than many of Trump’s fellow Republicans. Paul Ryan, by contrast, hung his career on a proposal to repeal and replace Medicare with a voucher system that provides inferior benefits to seniors at a higher price. This proposal is wildly unpopular. Even self-identified Republicans prefer Medicare to Ryan’s vouchers by a 2 to 1 margin.

Ryan’s full budget package, which also includes cuts to programs like Medicaid and Food Stamps that ethnocentric whites may be more inclined to support that his voucher program, is so unpopular that only a minority of Republican donors support it.

Ryan rallied his party behind a wildly unpopular agenda. He did so at the very moment that the GOP’s white nationalist faction was on the rise. And his signature proposal is especially likely to pique that faction’s legitimate desire to protect its own economic safety net.

If the polls are correct, it now appears that Ryan has wound up with the smaller piece of the Republican pie. That’s not a happy position for him if he wants to remain speaker — or even if he wants to remain relevant as a thought leader within the GOP.

The GOP’s alliance between Wallace ethnocentrists and movement conservatives was never inevitable. And now it may be falling apart thanks to Ryan’s miscalculation.

Today's GOP: Have Americans Gone Crazy?

GOP extremist, GOP Senator Joni Ernst

With the GOP suddenly speaking well of France and other member countries of the European Union, some in Europe must be wondering what has come over the erst while French hating Republicans.  But the bigger question in the minds of most foreigners, I suspect, especially from my own experience traveling outside the USA as far back as 2004 when my son and I were in Canada (every Canadian we met said we Americans deserved better than the Chimperator) and even as recently as this past September when the husband and I were in Venice and Greece, is how and why has America gone so insane and allowed the insane far right to be ascendant.  A piece in Salon looks  at the phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

Americans who live abroad — more than six million of us worldwide (not counting those who work for the U.S. government) — often face hard questions about our country from people we live among. Europeans, Asians, and Africans ask us to explain everything that baffles them about the increasingly odd and troubling conduct of the United States.  Polite people, normally reluctant to risk offending a guest, complain that America’s trigger-happiness, cutthroat free-marketeering, and “exceptionality” have gone on for too long to be considered just an adolescent phase. Which means that we Americans abroad are regularly asked to account for the behavior of our rebranded “homeland,” now conspicuously in decline and increasingly out of step with the rest of the world.

I still remember a time when to be an American was to be envied. The country where I grew up after World War II seemed to be respected and admired around the world for way too many reasons to go into here.

That’s changed, of course. Even after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, I still met people — in the Middle East, no less — willing to withhold judgment on the U.S.  Many thought that the Supreme Court’s installation of George W. Bush as president was a blunder American voters would correct in the election of 2004. His return to office truly spelled the end of America as the world had known it.  Bush had started a war, opposed by the entire world, because he wanted to and he could. A majority of Americans supported him.  And that was when all the uncomfortable questions really began.

In the early fall of 2014, I traveled from my home in Oslo, Norway, through much of Eastern and Central Europe. Everywhere I went in those two months, moments after locals realized I was an American the questions started and, polite as they usually were, most of them had a single underlying theme: Have Americans gone over the edge? Are you crazy? Please explain.

Then recently, I traveled back to the “homeland.”  It struck me there that most Americans have no idea just how strange we now seem to much of the world. In my experience, foreign observers are far better informed about us than the average American is about them.   This is partly because the “news” in the American media is so parochial and so limited in its views both of how we act and how other countries think — even countries with which we were recently, are currently, or threaten soon to be at war.


Take the questions stumping Europeans in the Obama years (which 1.6 million Americans residing in Europe regularly find thrown our way).  At the absolute top of the list: “Why would anyone oppose national health care?” European and other industrialized countries have had some form of national health care since the 1930s or 1940s, Germany since 1880.  Some versions, as in France and Great Britain, have devolved into two-tier public and private systems.  Yet even the privileged who pay for a faster track would not begrudge their fellow citizens government-funded comprehensive health care. That so many Americans do strikes Europeans as baffling, if not frankly brutal.

Sweden led the way in the 1930s, and all five Nordic countries pitched in during the postwar period to develop their own variations of what came to be called the Nordic Model: a balance of regulated capitalism, universal social welfare, political democracy, and the highest levels of gender and economic equality on the planet. It’s their system. They invented it. They like it. Despite the efforts of an occasional conservative government to muck it up, they maintain it. Why?

In all the Nordic countries, there is broad general agreement across the political spectrum that only when people’s basic needs are met — when they can cease to worry about their jobs, their incomes, their housing, their transportation, their health care, their kids’ education, and their aging parents — only then can they be free to do as they like. While the U.S. settles for the fantasy that, from birth, every kid has an equal shot at the American dream, Nordic social welfare systems lay the foundations for a more authentic equality and individualism.

These ideas are not novel. They are implied in the preamble to our own Constitution.

Knowing that Americans used to support such ideas, a Norwegian today is appalled to learn that a CEO of a major American corporation makes between 300 and 400 times as much as its average employee. Or that governors Sam Brownback of Kansas and Chris Christie of New Jersey, having run up their state’s debts by cutting taxes for the rich, now plan to cover the loss with money snatched from the pension funds of workers in the public sector. 

Implications of brutality, or of a kind of uncivilized inhumanity, seem to lurk in so many other questions foreign observers ask about America like: How could you set up that concentration camp in Cuba, and why can’t you shut it down?  Or: How can you pretend to be a Christian country and still carry out the death penalty? The follow-up to which often is: How could you pick as president a man proud of executing his fellow citizens at the fastest rate recorded in Texas history?  (Europeans will not soon forget George W. Bush.)

Other things I’ve had to answer for include:
* Why can’t you Americans stop interfering with women’s health care?
* Why can’t you understand science?
* How can you still be so blind to the reality of climate change?
* How can you speak of the rule of law when your presidents break international laws to make war whenever they want?
* How can you hand over the power to blow up the planet to one lone, ordinary man?
* How can you throw away the Geneva Conventions and your principles to advocate torture?
* Why do you Americans like guns so much?  Why do you kill each other at such a rate?

To many, the most baffling and important question of all is: Why do you send your military all over the world to stir up more and more trouble for all of us?

That last question is particularly pressing because countries historically friendly to the United States, from Australia to Finland, are struggling to keep up with an influx of refugees from America’s wars and interventions.

Did you note the question about claims of being a "Christian nation"?  While America pretends much more religiosity than old Europe, when it comes to governmental policy, the European models are much more in line with the Gospel message than America's vulture capitalist inspired model that kicks the needy to the gutter.   And who drives the effort to destroy the social safety net in the USA?  The Christofascist base of the GOP, of course.   I find the words selfish hypocrites on my lips.