The Christianity Today Editorial Won’t Sway Evangelicals

Evangelical moral bankruptcy is unabated.

Like many, I welcomed the Christianity Today editorial calling for Donald Trump's removal from office.  That said, I viewed it as doing little to break white evangelicals' unholy alliance with Trump for several reasons.  The first is that Christianity Today, while respected, is not read by many evangelicals.  It is well written and tends to cater to educated evangelicals - to the extent that term isn't an oxymoron given that evangelicals tend to be the least educated of Christian denominations in the USA. The second is that the professional Christians who are driven by money and power rather than the gospel message - e.g., Franklin Graham, Tony Perkins, Jerry Falwell, Jr., et al- are totally unmoved by arguments centered on morality.  Thus, the sad reality is that most evangelicals will be unmoved and will continue to confirm to the rest of society that they are morally bankrupt and have no standing to lecture others on matters of morality or faith.  A column in the New York Times looks at this reality.  Here are highlights:

Thursday night, Christianity Today, long known as the “flagship” magazine of American evangelicalism, broke the internet with an editorial arguing for the impeachment and removal of Donald Trump from office. The piece, penned by the magazine’s outgoing editor, Mark Galli, implored evangelicals to consider the “unambiguous facts” of the impeachment case against [Trump] the president, maintaining his actions not only violated the Constitution, but were also “profoundly immoral.” 

The reaction — particularly from non-evangelicals — was excited and swift. . . . . The magazine’s website, apparently buckling under the unusual spate of traffic, was down for part of the evening, but that did not stop the avalanche of coverage on television, news sites and social media.

For many outsiders, Christianity Today seems to speak for millions of evangelicals. After all, the magazine was founded by Billy Graham, the pastor to presidents since Eisenhower.

That assumption, though, profoundly misapprehends American evangelicalism in the Trump era.

Since his 2016 election, in which 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for him, Mr. Trump continues to enjoy their unwavering loyalty. Three-quarters of white evangelicals approve of his job performance, and 80 percent of them remain opposed to impeaching him.

While many conservative evangelicals respect Christianity Today, it is read by a small slice of them, and is unlikely to make any significant dent in the president’s remarkable popularity. . . . .  It did not take long after the editorial was published for the president’s staunchest evangelical defenders, including Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, to react.

Mr. Graham reproached the magazine for invoking his father’s name to support its position, maintaining that his father, who died in 2018, had supported Mr. Trump as “the man for this hour in history for our nation.” He even accused the magazine of being “used by the left for their political agenda,” and representing “the elitist liberal wing of evangelicalism” — a smear taken up, not surprisingly, by [Trump] the president himself in a tweet.

As I reported the same day the editorial was published, Mr. Trump’s evangelical supporters have built a powerful network of political organizations, prayer warriors, televangelists, religious media, mega-churches and voter identification and mobilization efforts . . . . In this insular ecosystem, [Trump] the president is seen as a divinely anointed leader, sent by God to save America at a critical moment in history, when, supporters claim, their religious freedom is under attack by secularists.

Mr. Trump’s support is not just about anointings and prayers. It is also about personnel, policy and law — in other words, a government led by Christians who will undo, for example, advances in L.G.B.T.Q. rights. The Christian right enjoys not just regular and frequent access to the president, but virtual carte blanche on dictating policy, as top ideologues have been placed in cabinet positions and other political appointments in federal agencies.

Ralph Reed, a leading evangelical activist and supporter of Mr. Trump, has boasted to his followers, “There are more Christians serving” in the Trump administration “than all previous presidents combined.”

Mr. Trump’s evangelical defenders may truly believe he is anointed, or they may just relish the unparalleled authority he has granted them. Either way, this actual mainstream of American evangelicalism is not likely to give up on its divine leader, or on its newfound power, no matter what the impeachment proceedings uncover.

Why People Hate Religion

Some of the faces of "Christian" hypocrisy. 

I am often accused of hating religion.   That accusation is true when it comes to the "professional Christians" like Jerry Falwell, Jr., Franklin Graham, and Tony Perkins who spread a constant message of hate, as well as the scamvangelists (a term a blogger friend coined some years back) who use religion to line their own pockets and live lives of the tremendously wealthy - Joel Osteen and Pat Robertson among others springs to mind. Then, of course, there are the evangelicals who support the Trump/Pence regime.  And one certainly cannot exclude the Catholic Church hierarchy that has protected sexual predators for decades, if not centuries. The common theme among all of these individuals is rank hypocrisy along with a heavy dose of greed.  Nowhere do you see these individuals practicing Christ's gospel message of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, giving shelter to the homeless, or welcoming refugees. Other than their loud protestations of their religiosity, one would never know these people are Christian.  Meanwhile, those who actually practice Christ's ideals tend to be invisible and most certainly fail to loudly and publicly challenge those giving religion a bad name.  The result is 40% of the under 30 generations leaving organized religion and others "hating" religion.  A column in the New York Times looks at the phenomenon.  Here are excerpts:

You don’t hear much about Sister Norma Pimentel in the secular press. She’s not a wacko, a hypocrite, a sexual predator or a political operative. Her life’s work, she says, is guided by seeing “the presence of God” in migrant children in the shelter she oversees in the Rio Grande Valley — vulnerable souls that her president would otherwise put in cages.

What you hear about is the phonies, the charlatans who wave Bibles, the theatrically pious, and they are legion. Vice President Mike Pence wears his faith like a fluorescent orange vest. But when he visited the border this summer and saw human beings crammed like cordwood in the Texas heat, that faith was invisible.

Pence is the chief bootlicker to a president who now sees himself in messianic terms, a president who tweets a description of himself as “the second coming of God.” As hard as it is to see God Part II boasting about grabbing a woman’s genitals, paying hush money to a porn actress, or calling neo-Nazis “very fine people,” millions of overtly religious Americans believe in some version of Jesus Trump, Superstar.

In Indiana this summer, Archbishop Charles C. Thompson stripped a Jesuit prep school of its Catholic identity for refusing to fire a gay, married teacher. The same threat loomed over another Indianapolis school, until it ousted a beloved teacher with 13 years of service. He was fired for getting married to another man — a legal, civil action.

The archbishop claimed he was upholding Catholic teaching, an example of the kind of selective moral policing that infuriates good people of faith.

Catholic teaching also frowns on divorce. But when a divorced teacher, at the same school where the gay teacher was fired, remarried without a church-sanctioned annulment and posted her status on Facebook as a dare, the archbishop did nothing. For this is a road that leads to thrice-married, politically connected Catholics like Newt Gingrich, whose wife Callista (with whom Gingrich carried on an adulterous affair before getting married) is now Donald Trump’s ambassador to the Vatican.

Archbishop Thompson says he tries to be “Christ-centered” in his decisions. If so, he should cite words from Christ condemning homosexuality, any words; there are none.

Religious hypocrites are an easy and eternal mark. The French Revolution was driven in part by the revulsion of starving peasants toward the overfed clerics who had taken vows of poverty. The Protestant Reformation took flight on disgust at a church in Rome that sold passages to heaven, enriching men who had multiple mistresses after taking vows of chastity. White evangelical Christians, the rotting core of Trump’s base, profess to be guided by biblical imperatives. They’re not. Their religion is Play-Doh. They have become more like Trump, not the other way around. It’s a devil’s pact, to use words they would understand. 

In one of the most explicit passages of the New Testament, Christ says people will be judged by how they treat the hungry, the poor, the least among us. And yet, only 25 percent of white evangelicals say their country has some responsibility to take in refugees.

[W]hat really thrills them is when Trump bullies and belittles their opponents, as counterintuitive as that may seem. Evangelicals “love the meanest parts” of Trump, the Christian writer Ben Howe argues in his new book, “The Immoral Majority.” Older white Christians rouse to Trump’s toxicity because he’s taking their side. It’s tribal, primal and vindictive.

So, yes, people hate religion when the loudest proponents of religion are shown to be mercenaries for a leader who debases everything he touches. And yes, young people are leaving the pews in droves because too often the person facing them in those pews is a fraud.

They hate religion because, at a moment to stand up and be counted on the right side of history, religion is used as moral cover for despicable behavior. This is not new to our age. Hitler got a pass from the Vatican until very late in the war.

And if you’re looking for hope in the midnight of the American soul, look no further than Sister Pimentel’s shelter for hundreds of desperate children in McAllen, Texas.  Growing up, Sister Pimentel was going to be an artist, she says, until she felt a strong tug on her soul; it compelled her to a lifetime of selfless service. Faith is not that complicated. Religion always is.

Will the "Christian Right" Recover Any Shred of Legitimacy Post-Trump?

Since I began following the so-called "Christian Right" roughly 20 years ago, I have discovered several things.  One is that those encompassed by the term are neither Christian, nor are they right. Second, literally no one lies and spreads deliberate falsehoods more than the parasitic professional Christian crowd, especially falsely named "family values" organizations.   The irony is that now, while a civil war rages within the Republican Party, a similar civil war is raging within the so-called evangelical Christian demographic.  Two pieces look at this latter civil war.  The first is in Christianity Today and slams Donald Trump - and by extension evangelicals supporting Trump.  The second is at MSNBC and asks the question of whether the :Christian Right" movement can recover after Trump.   Here are highlights from Christianity Today:

Just because we are neutral, however, does not mean we are indifferent. We are especially not indifferent when the gospel is at stake. The gospel is of infinitely greater importance than any campaign, and one good summary of the gospel is, “Jesus is Lord.”

The lordship of Christ places constraints on the way his followers involve themselves, or entangle themselves, with earthly rulers.

[S]ome rulers and regimes are especially outrageous in their God-substitution. After Augustus Caesar, the emperors of Rome became more and more elaborate in their claims of divinity with each generation—and more and more ineffective in their governance. Communism aimed not just to replace faith in anything that transcended the state, but to crush it. Such systems do not just dishonor God, they dishonor his image in persons, and in doing so they set themselves up for dramatic destruction. We can never collude when such idolatry becomes manifest, especially when it demands our public allegiance.

This year’s presidential election in the United States presents Christian voters with an especially difficult choice.

But not all evangelical Christians—in fact, alas, most evangelical Christians, judging by the polls—have shown the same critical judgment when it comes to the Republican nominee. True, when given a choice, primary voters who claimed evangelical faith largely chose other candidates. But since his nomination, Donald Trump has been able to count on “the evangelicals” (in his words) for a great deal of support.

This past week, the latest (though surely not last) revelations from Trump’s past have caused many evangelical leaders to reconsider. This is heartening, but it comes awfully late. What Trump is, everyone has known and has been able to see for decades, let alone the last few months. The revelations of the past week of his vile and crude boasting about sexual conquest—indeed, sexual assault—might have been shocking, but they should have surprised no one.

[T]here is hardly any public person in America today who has more exemplified the “earthly nature” (“flesh” in the King James and the literal Greek) that Paul urges the Colossians to shed: “sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires, and greed, which is idolatry” (3:5). This is an incredibly apt summary of Trump’s life to date. . . . That Trump has been, his whole adult life, an idolater of this sort, and a singularly unrepentant one, should have been clear to everyone.

And therefore it is completely consistent that Trump is an idolater in many other ways. He has given no evidence of humility or dependence on others, let alone on God his Maker and Judge. He wantonly celebrates strongmen and takes every opportunity to humiliate and demean the vulnerable. He shows no curiosity or capacity to learn. He is, in short, the very embodiment of what the Bible calls a fool.

Enthusiasm for a candidate like Trump gives our neighbors ample reason to doubt that we believe Jesus is Lord. They see that some of us are so self-interested, and so self-protective, that we will ally ourselves with someone who violates all that is sacred to us—in hope, almost certainly a vain hope given his mendacity and record of betrayal, that his rule will save us.

Pretty damning of evangelicals supporting Trump.  Candidly, I agree whole heartedly.   Trump is revealing the moral bankruptcy and utter hypocrisy of many in the Christian Right, especially flim-flam artists like the leaders of Family Research Council, Franklin Graham and so many others.  The MSNBC piece looks at whether the so-called godly folk can ever recover from their self-prostitution to the Trump phenomenon.  Here are highlights:

Harvest Bible Chapel’s James MacDonald, a megachurch leader and a member of Donald Trump’s evangelical council, could hardly contain his disgust on Saturday after learning about the candidate’s 2005 comments about women.

“Mr. Trump’s comments released yesterday – though 10 years ago (he was 60) – are not just sophomoric or locker room banter,” MacDonald wrote in an email. “They are truly the kind of misogynistic trash that reveals a man to be lecherous and worthless – not the guy who gets politely ignored, but the guy who gets a punch in the head from worthy men who hear him talk that way about women.”

So, MacDonald was resigning from his role on Team Trump? The pastor was severing his ties to a man who’d proven himself “lecherous and worthless”? Actually, no. MacDonald was upset, but not enough to withdraw his support for Trump’s candidacy.

There’s a lot of this going around. A wide variety of Evangelical Christian leaders and power players in the religious right movement have said they weren’t pleased with the latest Trump revelations, but they’re devoted to the GOP nominee anyway. Indeed, by some measures, the Christian Right’s leadershave stuck with Trump in greater numbers than congressional Republicans.

The New Republic’s Sarah Jones recently made the case that a reckoning is inevitable.

The religious right isn’t dead yet. But after this election becomes history, the movement will be forced to reckon with the consequences of its quest for power. Young adults, who overwhelmingly oppose Trump, are already leaving conservative churches, and the religious right’s Trump moment will surely only fuel this trend. If it had maintained a consistent public morality, maybe it could have retained some countercultural appeal. Now that its most visible leaders have sacrificed that authority, it has nothing left. […]

In the Gospel of Matthew, Christ tells his disciples that no one can serve two masters; you’ll be loyal to one and not to the other. By endorsing Trump, the religious right chose a master—and sacrificed everything it says it stands for. 

It’s a fair prediction. The next time there’s a major national debate over a moral/cultural issue, and pro-Trump religious right leaders present themselves as standard-bearers for “family values” and traditional theological norms, is there anyone, anywhere, who’ll be able to contain their laughter?

These people are morally bankruptcy and need to be rejected by decent moral people.  They need to become political and social pariahs.  

.   

New IKEA Ad Will Drive Christofascists to Hysteria

Big corporations have learned that diversity is good for business and the corporate line.  This reality continues to be lost on the Republican Party and, in particular, the Christofascists who want to impose a form of Christian Sharia Law on all Americans.  The result is that time after time the professional Christian crowd goes into spittle flecked rants every time a major corporation either runs an ad featuring a gay couple or, the horror, a interracial couple, or places ads in LGBT media outlets. Now, IKEA has launched an ad campaign that says that all homes are equal and then features an interracial gay couple.  Ad Week looks at the new campaign.  Here are highlights:

[T]he state of the American dream is a touchy issue. And while politicians running for the Oval Office obviously have to take on middle- and working-class angst, brands might prefer to steer clear of something so contentious and polarizing.

Ikea, however, is not among those brands. In its latest marketing effort, the home-furnishings giant goes right to the heart of a difficult topic, asking, "Where did the American dream go?"

As it turns out—according to related research Ikea conducted in partnership with the Economist Intelligence Unit—the dream hasn't gone far, though it has changed significantly.

"One of the things we've seen since [the recession of] 2008 is a change in people's perception of what it means to make it in today's society," said Christine Whitehawk, Ikea U.S.'s communications manager. "So you see a shift happening."

That shift, according to Ikea, means consumers are measuring the American dream less in terms of material accumulation—the suburban McMansion with a new SUV in the driveway—and more in terms of making the most of what they have, living life on their own terms, and focusing on creating memories instead of just accumulating more things.

Among the findings of the brand's report, titled "Discovering the New American Dream," is that 60 percent of people now believe that the American dream has "more to do with achieving satisfactory quality of life defined in ways other than obtaining material possessions." While 45 percent of people still believe the American dream means buying a home, for example, a much bigger number, 57 percent, believe the dream is lived "though everyday moments with friends and family."

Literal diversity also figures big. One of the print ads shows two gay men chilling out on a sofa in front of a flag that reads "All homes are created equal." This is hardly the first time Ikea has put a gay couple in its advertising—it cast one as far back as 1994—but this time the image reads less like the spotlighting of one segment of the population and more like an image of a diverse population overall. (The couple's not just gay but mixed race, too.)

"There are so many different ways that Americans live—multigenerational, gay parents, etc.—that define the real portrait of the America that's really out there," Stone said. "If we'd put across 20 different living situations, they'd all be equally powerful."

The new creative is the opening salvo in a year's worth of creative under the slogan "We Help You Make It," all of it intended to teach consumers that, whatever their definition of the American dream might be, Ikea can help with it.

"People are finding it harder to make it in today's society, but the optimism is still there," Whitehawk said. "We're trying to get the message out that we're here to partner with them to create that everyday better life that they want to have."

   

New IKEA Ad Will Drive Christofascists to Hysteria

Big corporations have learned that diversity is good for business and the corporate line.  This reality continues to be lost on the Republican Party and, in particular, the Christofascists who want to impose a form of Christian Sharia Law on all Americans.  The result is that time after time the professional Christian crowd goes into spittle flecked rants every time a major corporation either runs an ad featuring a gay couple or, the horror, a interracial couple, or places ads in LGBT media outlets. Now, IKEA has launched an ad campaign that says that all homes are equal and then features an interracial gay couple.  Ad Week looks at the new campaign.  Here are highlights:

[T]he state of the American dream is a touchy issue. And while politicians running for the Oval Office obviously have to take on middle- and working-class angst, brands might prefer to steer clear of something so contentious and polarizing.

Ikea, however, is not among those brands. In its latest marketing effort, the home-furnishings giant goes right to the heart of a difficult topic, asking, "Where did the American dream go?"

As it turns out—according to related research Ikea conducted in partnership with the Economist Intelligence Unit—the dream hasn't gone far, though it has changed significantly.

"One of the things we've seen since [the recession of] 2008 is a change in people's perception of what it means to make it in today's society," said Christine Whitehawk, Ikea U.S.'s communications manager. "So you see a shift happening."

That shift, according to Ikea, means consumers are measuring the American dream less in terms of material accumulation—the suburban McMansion with a new SUV in the driveway—and more in terms of making the most of what they have, living life on their own terms, and focusing on creating memories instead of just accumulating more things.

Among the findings of the brand's report, titled "Discovering the New American Dream," is that 60 percent of people now believe that the American dream has "more to do with achieving satisfactory quality of life defined in ways other than obtaining material possessions." While 45 percent of people still believe the American dream means buying a home, for example, a much bigger number, 57 percent, believe the dream is lived "though everyday moments with friends and family."

Literal diversity also figures big. One of the print ads shows two gay men chilling out on a sofa in front of a flag that reads "All homes are created equal." This is hardly the first time Ikea has put a gay couple in its advertising—it cast one as far back as 1994—but this time the image reads less like the spotlighting of one segment of the population and more like an image of a diverse population overall. (The couple's not just gay but mixed race, too.)

"There are so many different ways that Americans live—multigenerational, gay parents, etc.—that define the real portrait of the America that's really out there," Stone said. "If we'd put across 20 different living situations, they'd all be equally powerful."

The new creative is the opening salvo in a year's worth of creative under the slogan "We Help You Make It," all of it intended to teach consumers that, whatever their definition of the American dream might be, Ikea can help with it.

"People are finding it harder to make it in today's society, but the optimism is still there," Whitehawk said. "We're trying to get the message out that we're here to partner with them to create that everyday better life that they want to have."

   

Why Conservative Christians Are Backing Trump

As regular readers know, I hold few people in lower regard that far right conservative Christians whose most pronounced traits are incessant lying, hypocrisy, racism, and a desire to impose their religious beliefs on all citizens.  They talk constantly about their own supposed faith and religiosity even as they hate nearly everyone and back Republican policies that are the antithesis of the Gospel message.  Some pundits and others are shocked that so many conservative Christians are backing Donald Trump, whereas I see it as a match made in heaven, if you will: foul, self-centered hypocrisy filled pathological liars bonding to one another.  A piece in Salon puts forth an explanation for Christofascist support of Trump in less direct terms, but nonetheless shows the underlying hypocrisy of these people and their always self-enriching "leaders."   Here are excerpts:  

In theory, the religious right should hate Donald Trump. He’s a libertine, he clearly worships Mammon and not Jesus, he has been married three times, he has a long history of bragging about his sex life . . . . But the ugly truth is that the supposed guardians of American morality, religious conservatives, are lining up behind Trump. I spoke with Peter Montgomery of People for the American Way about why.
 Your piece is called “‘God’s Guy’: 25 Religious Right Justifications For Supporting Donald Trump.” What kinds of religious authorities did you look at for this piece?Well, there’s a range of people. There are religious right political figures like Tony Perkins and David Barton and David Lane, who are people that we cover pretty extensively, and then there are some folks who don’t show up on [our] website as much [as those] who are sort of in the “prophet and apostle” category of that wing of Pentecostal Christianity [who tend] to see things in terms of spiritual warfare and demons and the Antichrist. So it’s a mix. Since the primaries, most of the religious right leaders who were in Cruz’s camp are rallying around Trump, and it’s true that some of them are doing so kind of reluctantly. Some based on the Supreme Court, some based on the fact that they just really hate Hillary Clinton. And some have offered this range of religious rationales. 

Some of the folks that you’ve covered seem to believe that Trump is God’s emissary or that he’s here to do God’s will. What’s that about?The religious right hates Barack Obama. They really did everything they could and prayed very hard for him not to get elected or reelected. And some of them actually saw his reelection as a sign of God’s judgment on the country. That hatred also applies to Hillary Clinton.Some of the religious right leaders also distrust the Republican establishment and they think that God is using this sort of bulldozer strongman person like Trump to come in and knock down the establishment of both parties and really clean house. They’ve found examples in the Bible. One of the ones that people reference is King Cyrus, who was not one of God’s chosen people and was not a believer but God had his purposes and used King Cyrus in a way that advanced his wishes. So that’s one of the rationales that has come up for Trump. . . So when Trump destroys everything, why is that considered a good thing in their view?I’ll talk about David Lane in answering that. David Lane is a political operative who organized the event that Trump just spoke at this past week in Orlando and, in fact, Marco Rubio also spoke at. David Lane is a Christian nationalist who believes that America was founded by and for Christians and that it has a covenant with God and a mission to advance the Christian faith. He believes that we have gone far from that mission. And his goal is to use the political process to bring America back to his idea of a Christian nation. . . . for someone like him, the establishment Republican Party has been a disappointment because they haven’t aggressively pursued this idea of a Christian nation. He hopes that somehow kicking down all the walls is going to make that more possible. Somebody else like James Robison believes that God is going to give Trump some kind of high-profile conversion moment like the biblical story of Saul, who used to persecute Christians, having this vision of Jesus and then becoming Paul the Apostle.  Do you often see religious right figures grapple with the fact that the Democrat in the race, Hillary Clinton, is clearly more religious than the Republican?They do not want to grapple with that at all, no. You don’t see a lot of religious right leaders acknowledging her lifelong commitment as a Christian, as a member of the United Methodist Church, even though it’s very much out there. A lot of the religious right leaders, when they say “Christian,” they don’t really mean all Christians. They’re talking about a subset of Christians that share both their theological worldview and their right-wing politics. . . . It’s why we have people on this list talking about Hillary Clinton as channeling the spirit of the Antichrist. How much do you think this rallying around Trump has to do with his statements about Muslims?There are a number of reasons they’re rallying around him, and one is that he’s been a very outspoken critic of radical Islam with his call to keep Muslims from coming into the country. Some of these religious right leaders, as much as they like to posture as champions of religious liberty, they really don’t feel the same way about Islam. They try to make these convoluted arguments that the First Amendment doesn’t really apply to Muslims in the same way because Islam is not a religion but a totalitarian political ideology. I think they like his attacks on Muslims because they think this is a country by and for Christians. The question of religious freedom comes up here, and you see some of these pastors and religious right leaders claiming that Trump is for religious freedom. What do they mean by that?When the religious right talks about religious freedom these days, they’re mostly talking about the right of people to discriminate against LGBT individuals and couples and families. For them, religious liberty is not the kind of shield for everyone to exercise their religion [that] we think of when we think of the First Amendment.  . . . It’s about being able to use religious beliefs as a cudgel against people and policies that they don’t like.

Are Evangelical Power Brokers Losing Their Control Over the GOP?

Even as almost all of the GOP presidential nomination contenders are shamelessly prostituting themselves to the Christofascists in the GOP party base, a piece in Slate argues that if Donald Trump wins in Iowa, it may be a sign that the poisonous influence and control of Christian extremists is finally waning.  Most of the right wing professional Christian class has lined up behind the very scary Ted Cruz and in advance of the caucuses voting .  Some are actively attacking Trump.  In the past the evangelicals and Christofascists have been able to deliver victory to their candidate in Iowa.  Should they fail to do so this election cycle, just maybe  their foul influence is waning.  It surely needs to wane in Virginia.  Here are highlights from Slate:

Last Wednesday evening, a few hundred Christian conservatives gathered at Noah’s Event Venue in suburban Des Moines for a rally with Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and former Texas Gov. Rick Perry. It featured leading figures from both the local and national religious right, there to make the case that the movement must unite behind Cruz. “Ted Cruz is one of us,” said Bob Vander Plaats, head of the FAMILY Leader, Iowa’s most influential evangelical organization [and a certified hate group].

[R]eligious conservative leaders lining up to stop the avaricious thrice-married billionaire from winning the Iowa caucuses. Leading female anti-abortion activists from organizations including the Susan B. Anthony List and Iowa Right to Life had already released an open letter urging Iowans to support anyone but Trump, writing that they were “disgusted by Mr. Trump’s treatment of individuals, women, in particular.” Christian talk radio hosts such as Michael Brown were lambasting Trump and lamenting the endorsement he received from Jerry Falwell Jr., . . . . Tony Perkins, head of the Family Research Council, had just endorsed Cruz—on Trump nemesis Megyn Kelly’s TV show, no less—before flying to Iowa for the Des Moines rally. There, the Cruz campaign unveiled Pro-Lifers for Cruz, a coalition with more than 17,000 members; Perkins is its chairman.

This sort of rhetoric has won over the heavily evangelical Republican Iowa caucuses in the past. In 2008, Mike Huckabee, with Vander Plaats’ endorsement, triumphed in Iowa. Four years later, Rick Santorum, also endorsed by Vander Plaats, prevailed. The outcome of this year’s Iowa caucus may tell us if the American religious right has retained its outsize influence in American politics or if a new populist force has supplanted it. Trump is demonstrating that many grassroots conservatives are far more comfortable with what Ted Cruz called “New York values” than anyone imagined. If the leaders of the Christian right can’t stop Trump, it could mark the end of the movement as we know it. 

Ever since Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980, the religious right has been the primary vehicle for populist conservative energies in American politics. It hasn’t always won its battles with the establishment—neither Huckabee nor Santorum went on to win his party’s nomination. But it could legitimately claim to speak for the Republican grassroots. 

Now, however, the movement’s ability to channel grassroots rage is being tested. Anti-abortion activists continue to make great strides, but social conservatives have been routed on the other great culture war battle, gay marriage; the issue increasingly fails to move young evangelicals. Meanwhile, the country as a whole is becoming less religious.  

Leaders such as Focus on the Family founder James Dobson (who has endorsed Cruz) have nowhere near the influence they once did.  . . . . For those who abhor the goals of the religious right—banning abortion, overturning gay marriage, injecting Christianity into public schools—this may seem like good news. The rise of Trump, however, suggests that we should temper our satisfaction, as the religiously disconnected are not necessarily urbane secularists.

Should Trump triumph in Iowa, it will demonstrate that the Christian right, a crucial part of the conservative infrastructure, is similarly losing its relevance. It’s not just that Trump has been married three times; so was Newt Gingrich, who garnered significant religious conservative support four years ago. It’s not that Trump is an entertainer who used to be pro-choice; so was Ronald Reagan. What’s striking about Trump is that he doesn’t even try to speak in the idiom of the Christian conservative movement.  

 I asked the group whether it mattered to them that Trump is not particularly religious, has been married three times, and used to be pro-choice. “I don’t care about that,” Eric Struve said. “Separation of church and state,” added Trent Krough. Struve is quick to avow his faith in God, but he has a low opinion of religious conservative leaders. “A lot of them are kind of fake people, if you ask me,” he said. “Anybody can put on a face and act like they believe in God.”

Franklin Graham: Keep Satanic Gay People Away From Your Children

Franklin Graham, a professional Christian who would be a complete no one but for his famous - or infamous, depending on one's view of those who have made themselves wealth peddling religion -  is continuing his relentless denigration and demonizing of LGBT individuals.  In his latest message of hate, Graham is urging "Christians" to keep gays away from their children and away from their churches.  Like so many of the self-anointed "godly folk," instead of furthering the Gospel message of Christ, Graham's message is one of pure hate and judgment of others.  Right Wing Watch looks at the latest poison Graham is disseminating.  Here are highlights:

Last year, Franklin Graham joined James Dobson at an event in Colorado where the two warned against allowing gay people into churches because, according to Graham, they are representatives of "the Enemy" who wants to "devour our homes" and "devour this nation." 

On his radio program today, Dobson played excerpts from his discussion with Graham at the event, in which called for Christians to keep their kids away from gay people and to take over school boards across the nation in order to remove gay-friendly programs. 

"We have allowed the Enemy to come into our churches," Graham said. "I was talking to some Christians and they were talking about how they invited these gay children to come into their home and to come into the church and that they were wanting to influence them. And I thought to myself, they're not going to influence those kids; those kids are going to influence those parent's children."

"What happens is we think we can fight by smiling and being real nice and loving," he continued. "We have to understand who the Enemy is and what he wants to do. He wants to devour our homes. He wants to devour this nation and we have to be so careful who we let our kids hang out with. We have to be so careful who we let into the churches. You have immoral people who get into the churches and it begins to effect the others in the church and it is dangerous."

Graham then went on to lament that "homosexuality is taught to be okay" in schools and "that is why I want to get the school boards back" before insisting that he loves gays and therefore feels obligated to tell them that "you cannot stay gay and call yourself a Christian."

That eventually promoted Dobson to rail against the entire LGBT agenda by once again absurdly misunderstanding bisexuality.

"You know what the 'B' stand for?" Dobson asked. "Bisexual. That's orgies! That is lots of sex with lots of people!"

Being gay is not a choice - I know this all too well having tried to deny reality and "pray away the gay" for 37 years.  However, being and ignorance embracing, bigoted asshole like Dobson and Graham IS a choice.  Sadly, these two men - and so many other professional Christians - put shaking down the ignorant and gullible for money so as to maintain their very comfortable lives ahead of truth, honesty and treating others as Christ commanded.  The Pharisees of the New Testament are exemplary individuals compared to Graham and Dobson.

 

Duggar Family Ally Sued for Sexual Abuse by Numerous Women

It seems that one never knows what delicious new bomb will go off and pt the hypocrisy of the Christofascists and "family values" crowd on open display.  Regular readers are likely familiar with the implosion of the Duggar family that made a nice living by peddling the godly Christian shtick and the parents' ability to bread like rabbits until it came out that son Josh had not only sexually abused his underage sisters and utilized the services of prostitutes.  Now,  Bill Gothard, a Duggar family ally and for years a major player in the Christofascist home schooling universe has been sued by a group of women who allege that Gothard sexually abused them.  Previously, Gothard had resigned from his "ministry" after 30 women alleged that he was a sexual predator.   Secularists and Democrats are not immune for sexual improprieties, but it seems that for every one of them that runs into trouble there are at least nine of the godly folk.  The Washington Post looks at this new lawsuit and Gothard's questionable past.  Here are highlights:

Ten women on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Bill Gothard, who for decades was a major force in the conservative Christian homeschooling movement, charging him and leaders in his ministry with sexual abuse, harassment and cover-up.

Gothard, who urged Christians to shun things like short skirts and rock music, is accused of raping a woman. The same woman says she was raped by one of the ministry’s “biblical counselors.”

The lawsuit is part of a battle between dozens of women and the Institute in Basic Life Principles, which was until recently an influential homeschooling ministry, and its charismatic leader Gothard, who urged Christians to focus on their “biblical character” and have large families.
Gothard, 81, resigned from the ministry in 2014 after more than 30 women had alleged that he had molested and sexually harassed women he worked with, including some who were minors.

Reached by phone on Wednesday, Gothard said he has not seen the lawsuit and denied allegations that he had raped one woman.

A smaller group of the same women filed a lawsuit in October against IBLP. In Wednesday’s amended lawsuit, more women have joined the lawsuit, and the lawyers added Gothard to the complaint as a named defendant.  

Gothard’s ministry was once a popular gathering spot for thousands of conservative Christian families, including the Duggar family from TLC’s “19 Kids and Counting.” Gothard’s Advanced Training Institute conferences, where families would learn from Gothard’s teaching, were popular among homeschooling families. He has also rubbed shoulders with Republican luminaries like former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee.

IBLP was in the headlines last year after In Touch magazine reported that Josh Duggar, the eldest son of reality TV stars, had been sent to an IBLP training center as a teenager after he admitted he had sexually abused four of his younger sisters and a family friend.

Read the entire piece.  The take away is that Gothard - like so many of the professional Christian crowd - is not only a parasite, but also seemingly a world class liar and hypocrite.  It is little wonder that the younger generations are walking away from organized religion and the poison it peddles.