Evangelicals Sold Their Souls and Have Little to Show for It

The vast majority of white evangelicals sold their souls and have backed Donald Trump, thus bear a large responsibility for putting the most immoral and incompetent individual ever in the White House.  In the process, evangelicals have shown their hypocrisy and own moral bankruptcy writ large and have helped drive the younger generations away from religion entirely and have thoroughly discredited the Christian brand.  Now, when I hear someone who supports Trump espousing their claimed religious beliefs, I immediately think of two words: liar and hypocrite.  the term modern day Pharisee also springs to mind.  I am hardly alone in this reaction.  So what have evangelicals received in return for prostituting themselves and destroying the Christian brand?  As a piece in The Atlantic lays out, not so much.  The ultimate irony is that their man Neil Gorsuch wrote the Supreme Court decision that extended non-discrimination protections to LGBT Americans.  Talk about a kick in the ass. Here are article highlights that lay out the little received in exchange for the moral degradation that evangelicals embraced:  

The closest thing social conservatives and evangelical supporters of President Donald Trump had to a conversation stopper, when pressed about their support for a president who is so manifestly corrupt, cruel, mendacious, and psychologically unwell, was a simple phrase: “But Gorsuch.”

Those two words were shorthand for their belief that their reverential devotion to Trump would result in great advances for their priorities and their policy agenda, and no priority was more important than the Supreme Court.

Donald Trump may be a flawed character, they argued, but at least he appointed Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court.

And then came Bostock v. Clayton County, Georgia. That is the case decided in mid-June in which the majority opinion, written by Justice Gorsuch, protected gay and transgender individuals from workplace discrimination, handing the LGBTQ movement a historic victory.

It was a crushing blow for the religious right, and it must have dawned on more than a few of Trump’s evangelical supporters that if Hillary Clinton had won the presidency, the outcome of the case would have been the same; the only difference is that the margin probably would have been 7–2.

The Bostock case was not the only major legal setback for social conservatives and evangelical Christians. By a 5–4 margin, the Court—in June Medical Services v. Russo—delivered a significant defeat to the pro-life movement, striking down as unconstitutional a Louisiana law that could have left the state with only a single abortion clinic. This dashed the hopes of those who were counting on Trump’s appointees to lead the Court in overturning Roe v. Wade. (Both of Trump’s Supreme Court choices were in the minority.)

Social conservatives can point to some important religious-liberty victories. But overall, this term was a judicial gut punch for the president’s evangelical supporters. The “but Gorsuch” argument has not been destroyed, but it has been substantially weakened.

Legislatively, Trump, compared with other presidents, has not achieved all that much for the pro-life cause and religious-liberties protection. . . . . Elsewhere, Trump has engaged in a bromance with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, the worst persecutor of Christians in the world, and established more intimate and admiring relationships with many of the world’s despots than with leaders of America’s traditional allies. And on issues that have traditionally concerned conservative evangelicals, such as fiscal responsibility and limited government, Trump has been awful: The deficit and the debt exploded under his watch, even pre-pandemic.

Based strictly on the standard of advancing causes that conservative evangelicals most care about, a fair-minded assessment of the Trump record is that some important things were achieved, especially in appointing federal judges. That clearly would not have happened in a Hillary Clinton presidency. But in virtually every other area, including the outcome of several key Supreme Court decisions, Trump has fallen short of the promises and expectations.

Now think about what the cost has been of the uncritical support given to Trump by evangelical Christians. For now, focus just on this: Christians who are supporters of the president have braided themselves to a man who in just the past few days and weeks tweeted a video of a supporter shouting “white power” (he later deleted it but has yet to denounce it); attacked NASCAR’s only Black driver, Bubba Wallace, while also criticizing the decision by NASCAR to ban Confederate flags from its races; threatened to veto this year’s annual defense bill if an amendment is included that would require the Pentagon to change the names of bases honoring Confederate military leaders; referred to COVID-19 as “kung flu” during a speech at a church in Phoenix; and blasted two sports teams, the Washington Redskins and the Cleveland Indians, for considering name changes because of concerns by supporters of those franchises that those team names give undue offense.

The white supremacist Richard Spencer, describing the neo-Nazi and white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, told The Atlantic, “There is no question that Charlottesville wouldn’t have occurred without Trump.

For his whole life, before and since becoming president, Trump has exploited racial divisions and appealed to racial resentments. The president is now doing so more, not less, than in the past, despite the fact—and probably because of the fact—that America is in the grips of a pandemic that he and his administration have badly bungled and that has claimed more than 130,000 American lives.

As The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman pointed out on July 6, “Almost every day in the last two weeks, Mr. Trump has sought to stoke white fear and resentment.”

White evangelicals are the core of Trump’s political support, and while the overwhelming number of the president’s evangelical supporters may not be racist, they are willing to back a man who openly attempts to divide people by race. That would be enough of an indictment, but the situation is actually a good deal worse than that, since Trump’s eagerness to inflame ugly passions is only one thread in his depraved moral tapestry.

My hunch is that at the beginning of this Faustian bargain, most evangelicals didn’t imagine it would come to this, with them defending the indefensible, tarnishing their reputations, and doing incalculable damage to their causes.

The Trump presidency, which has produced few significant legislative or governing achievements, has inflicted gaping wounds on the Republican Party, conservative causes, and the evangelical movement. . . . . Much of the evangelical movement, in aligning itself with Donald Trump, has shown itself to be graceless and joyless, seized by fear, hypocritical, censorious, and filled with grievances.

One pastor of a large church on the Pacific Coast told me: “There are many reasons why young people are turning away from the Church, but my observation is, Trump has vastly accelerated that trend. He’s put it into hyperdrive.” . . . . Hollywood and the media created a decidedly unattractive stereotype of Christians. And Donald Trump fits it perfectly. Made it all seem true. And sadly, I now realize that stereotype is more true than I ever knew. It breaks my heart. In volleyball terms, Hollywood did the set, but Trump was the spike that drove the ball home. He’s everything I’ve been trying to say isn’t what the church is all about. But sadly, maybe it is.”

In the midst of the wreckage, Trump’s evangelical supporters will undoubtedly comfort themselves with this thought: They got Gorsuch.

Trump v. Jesus: Christians Can’t Follow Both

As regular readers know, I have a problem with many Christians.  First there are the toxic white evangelicals who have embraced Donald Trump and his racist, divisive policies, including policies that harm the poor, the sick, the elderly and advance religious based bigotry.  Then there are the "good Christians" who try to follow the New Testament teachings of Christ - as opposed to the Old Testament so loved by white evangelicals who cherry pick brief passages as a means to condemn others - and do not seek to harm others.  My complaint with these Christians?  Their silence and failure to loudly and openly condemn (i) Trump and the GOP policies that are the antithesis to the Gospel message, and (ii) the white evangelicals who are killing the Christian brand and fueling the flight of the younger generations from religion entirely.  One exception to this damning silence Rev. Jim Wallis and 90 other religious leaders who have joined in a statement in support of the House of Representatives impeachment inquiry.   The point these religious leaders make is simple: support of Trump and following the Gospel message are mutually exclusive.  Read the statement here. Here are highlights from a piece that looks at this position. 

Many Christians pluck a line from the Bible and pretend it is the entirety of Scripture, using the command as a club against anyone who makes them uncomfortable. Their religion is a green light from God Almighty to harass gays, plague women, and of course support Donald Trump, the living embodiment of their faith.

“I love him so much I can hardly explain it,” said right-wing pastor and Trump adviser James Robison.   Many echo Robison; 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump.

But there are also Christians like Rev. Jim Wallis.  “There is a conflict between the politics of Jesus and the politics of Trump,” said Wallis. “Racial bigotry is a deal breaker for the Gospel. White nationalism, which Donald Trump embraces and champions, isn’t just racist — it’s anti-Christ. Dehumanizing immigrants isn’t just racist — it’s anti-Christ. Demeaning women isn’t just sexist — it’s anti-Christ. At some point, Christians have to ask themselves: Are the teachings of Christ going to be followed or not?”

Nor is Wallis alone: 90 Christian leaders joined him signing a call for this Sunday, Oct. 13, to be a National Day of Prayer “for the truth to be revealed through the impeachment inquiry.”

“For the sake of our nation’s integrity and the most vulnerable in our society, we call on fellow Christians to support the current impeachment inquiry,” read the statement. “Now is the time to shine the light of truth.”

“Trump appeals to our worst demons,” he said. “There really is a worst of America, and he is a marketer for it. He’s deliberately dividing our country.”

Wallis believes much of the powerful evangelical movement isn’t based on religion, but on politics. “In 1980 there was a political effort by Republican operatives, who approached Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson and said, ‘Give us a list of your followers and we’ll create a new right wing movement and make you household names.’ It’s a political mobilization. Not theological. Not religious.”

But the faith that can be corrupted to serve Trump can also, Wallis believes, light the path away from him.

“There’s is a religious right that wraps political ideology around faith to polarize the country and, I think, silence and sabotage Jesus,” said Wallis. “He’s been hijacked. I want to try to reclaim Jesus and what He said. Those who turn to the politics of Jesus will defect from the politics of Trump,”

Any indication that those who have sold their souls to Trump are now willing to renege on the deal?

“A lot of white evangelicals are breaking from their parents over climate change, over LGBTQ issues,” Wallis said. “There are a growing number of white evangelical suburban Republican women who are shifting, [saying] ‘We care about life in the womb, but we also care about life on the southern border, about kids being ripped away from their parents.’”

“Jesus says, ‘I was a stranger. How you treat the stranger is how you treat me. How you treat the sick is how you treat me. How you treat the poor is how you treat me,’” Wallis said. “These are the most important people to Jesus and the least important to this administration.

“If you are followers of Jesus, you can’t ignore what Jesus said,” said Wallis. “So much of what Donald Trump says and does and makes policy is literally antithetical to the teachings of Jesus. No one can deny that. So how can you support him when he is contrary to everything Jesus said and did?”

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.

America Is Losing Its Soul

This photo sums up the horrors of Trump?pence. 

America has much ugliness and many horrors in its history, ranging from genocide committed against Native Americans, to over two centuries of slavery as a legal institution, to concentration camps for Japanese Americans during WWII.  Most of us like to think that at least since WWII America has by and large embraced its better angels and cast aside the hate and bigotry of the past.  Yet, as the ongoing human rights crisis at America's border with Mexico reveals, a portion of Americans, including Donald Trump and Mike Pence, exhibit a moral bankruptcy not that far removed from that of Germans who either participated in or conveniently looked the other way as Hitler and his Nazi regime committed atrocities and millions were murdered. Among those seemingly condoning the horrors at the border are evangelical Christians who continue to support Trump and his nightmarish policies.  Indeed, as I have noted before, in the era of Trump, one cannot be a decent and moral person and be a Republican or Trump supporter.  The two are mutually exclusive.  For the rest of us, if we do not do all in our power to remove Trump and his acolytes from power, we become as soulless as his followers.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at America's steady loss of its soul.  Here are excerpts:

The photograph conforms to all the necessary standards for a media image depicting tragedy. It shows a father and his daughter, face down, at the edge of a river, their bodies floating in the muddy water. They can’t be identified and their faces are not visible, which would violate standards of “taste” at many media outlets. But the story of the two people in the photo by Julia Le Duc has been documented.

Salvadoran migrant Óscar Alberto Martínez Ramírez and his toddler daughter, Valeria, died Sunday after being swept away by a strong current while the family was trying to cross the Rio Grande into the United States. Unknown to most of the world until this week, they are now briefly famous, a toddler in red shorts and tiny shoes, tucked inside her father’s dark T-shirt, seemingly at rest as if napping with her dad on a hot afternoon.

[I]t recalls the vulnerability of Alan Kurdi, a 3-year-old Syrian Kurdish boy whose body washed up on a beach in Turkey in 2015. Nilüfer Demir’s picture of the boy, who seemed to be resting after play, became one of the most searing images of the European refugee and emigration crisis. Both images share elements with other photographs in which the innocence of childhood highlights the cruelty of human or natural forces . . . .

[T]hese images have already broken through our own resistance to seeing pain and tragedy in the world, we imagine that they must break through the collective conscience as powerful political icons. They enter our consciousness almost by stealth and then explode, and that is how we assume they’ll work in the public square, too.

As it circulates, we believe it will acquire enough force and familiarity that our political leaders will have to do something different — change policies, reverse course, revise their own understanding of the severity of a problem. For more than a century, this metaphor has been in operation behind the scenes whenever journalists, or activists, hold up photographs to the world, and say: This is a truth you must acknowledge.

The metaphor of “breaking through,” however, relies on an understanding of the human conscience that is being sorely tested at the moment, not just in the United States, but in every country where nationalism and nativist populism are creating divisions between us and them, between the rightful “folk” and the supposedly illegal outsider.  . . . The thing that needs to be broken through is a basic sluggishness in the moral apparatus, a resistance to doing the hard work of humanizing the other.

But when nationalism has successfully dehumanized the other, there is no breaking through, and people who imagine that a photographic message must assuredly be so powerful that it will touch all hearts are forced to grapple with a more confounding truth: Not all consciences operate alike, not everyone is susceptible to what seems a basic, even rudimentary level of empathy. And so, there is a paradox: We resist the idea of living in an us-vs.-them world only to find that our basic sense of “us” is already fractured. We look out at our fellow humans and can’t honestly understand how their minds work. At some level, we think, “Can’t you see what is happening in this image?” As if seeing and understanding are identical.

This one photograph tells us very little about Ramírez and his daughter, and perhaps with all the attention it has received, we will learn more about the reality of who they were. But just as important is the imaginative reality of the viewer’s effort to sense them as humans, absolutely identical in value and dignity to any person in our most intimate circle of acquaintance.

Of course, one doesn’t have to do this work. Images of tragedy that arrive in a divisive political context often have an off-ramp. You may look at this photo and think that its deep message is “We are all hoping for a better life and will take extraordinary risks on behalf of those we love.” But someone else will probably say, “People shouldn’t cross borders without permission.” The drowning becomes a kind of punishment, a river stands in for ideas of human authority, and the photograph doesn’t break through anything. It merely reiterates an old and cherished belief: Bad things happen to those who break the rules.

There is a fundamental difference between these two interpretations: One requires time and effort, an act of engaged empathy, while the other is a quick judgment that reaffirms an existing sense of the world.

The day after these two people perished in the Rio Grande, the president of the United States dismissed an accusation that he had sexually assaulted a prominent author and columnist in the 1990s. He used a phrase similar to ones he has used in the past to deflect similar allegations: “She’s not my type.” It is a terrible thing to say, with a specifically misogynistic meaning in the context of how men practice violence against women.

But it is a perfect summation of our new and deformed American conscience. . . . . For anyone who wants an off-ramp to the moral demands made by this image, this could be the universal caption: “They weren’t our type.”

Once again, I find myself deeply ashamed to be an American.  As for the "Christians" supporting Trump, they make an outstanding case not only of their own hypocrisy, but of why one should reject their form of Christianity entirely.

Mayor Pete Called Out the Hypocrisy of Trump-Supporting Evangelicals

Trump with evangelical hate group leaders.

Christians for a long time.  Indeed, there are few groups that lie more frequently, hate so many others so maliciously, and parade around in displays of utterly false piety. If there is any positive aspect of the Trump presidency, it is that the loyalty of evangelicals to the toxic demagogue has displayed their hypocrisy and hate writ large for the world to see.  They are morally bankrupt and have no more moral authority that the Catholic prelates who aided and abetted child rape for decades if not centuries. To call them modern day Pharisees, insults the Pharisees of the New Testament. The candidacy of Pete Buttigieg may do even more to expose they foulness of these people, especially since Buttigieg seemingly has no intention on being reticent about calling them out.  A piece in Esquire looks at Buttigieg's willingness to confront Christofascists and also looks at just how ladened with hypocrisy evangelicals are in fact.  Here are article highlights:

Amid all the chaos and cruelty, perhaps the one enduring benefit of Donald Trump's presidency will be The Great Unvarnishing. The acidity of Trump's public persona—his blatant narcissism and vindictiveness and lack of ethics and selfishness and greed—has worn on the top coat of paint many people have applied to themselves, gradually exposing what lies beneath. It isn't often pretty. All the pretense has gone straight out the window as [Trump] the president has seized control of one of our two major political parties while saying the quiet parts out loud.

No one pretends Donald Trump is an ethical person. He and his allies scarcely even pretend he is a president for all Americans. Everyone knows for whom he is the president: The Base, and especially the core Republican constituency of White Evangelical Christians. This is all the more revelatory because no one pretends Donald Trump is a man of God, really. His pantomimes of Devout Religiosity during the campaign were so half-assed that few adult humans could realistically believe he's a believer. The guy who bragged about grabbing women "by the pussy" and OK'd calling his own daughter a "piece of ass" was suddenly pretending to have accepted Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.

It was all there: the obvious unfamiliarity with the material, and the open disdain for anyone who actually was familiar. Trump, the ultimate snake-oil salesman, couldn't resist calling out his newest and easiest marks for what they were while he made the sale. Except, again, it's doubtful many Evangelicals who pulled the lever for Trump really believed he's a God-fearing man. . . . They knew what they were getting.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg, a rising star in the 2020 Democratic field, said as much recently when he declared of [Trump] the president, "It's hard to look at his actions and believe they are the actions of somebody who believes in God." Chuck Todd of Meet the Press asked him to square that with Trump's Evangelical support on Sunday.

It's only "hypocrisy" if you believe the most important word in the phrase White Evangelical Christian is "Christian"—as in, you prioritize, above all else, the teachings of Jesus Christ. Of course it isn't. It has always been "White." The current all-encompassing figurehead of the Republican Party has merely laid this bare, because the question, What principles of Jesus Christ does Donald Trump embody? can only be met with derisive laughter. The better question might be which of the Seven Deadly Sins—pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth—does he [Trump] not embody.

No, the important part of White Evangelical Christian is White. These folks had called themselves Values Voters, which mainstream politicos would accept without much examination even though the most important values seemed to be abstinence-only sex ed and opposition to marriage equality and abortion. Jesus never devoted much time to any of these topics, and all his talk about giving aid to the poor and the sick never got much play in Republican politics.

They believe the United States was at its best in the postwar boom of the 1950s and '60s, but not necessarily because programs like the G.I. Bill—a dreaded Big Government initiative—enhanced social mobility and gave young (white) men the chance to establish middle-class families. They're more interested in who made the rules back then: white, Christian men, who accepted input from other white, Christian men. This is politics, and politics is about power.

Trump has merely exposed this longstanding force in conservative politics for what it is, even if he pays lip service to the concerns of people in the industrial midwest who've been left behind by globalization. His basic appeal is as a bulwark for White America against a changing world, where The Others—chiefly, Hispanic immigrants and worshippers of Islam—are the villains in American life. That is the potent symbolism of The Wall, which Evangelicals support more than any other group. This is also the psychological thicket of power and identity where America's gun culture resides.

Trump's brash disregard for consequences—a symptom of the collapse of shame as a social force—has also spilled over onto some of the Thought Leaders on the Christian Right. . . . One thing that never seems to come up is, say, this:

For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’

"Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you?When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ Trump enjoyed the support of 71 percent of Evangelicals shortly after his administration embarked on its "zero-tolerance policy," the inevitable consequence of which was to separate children from their parents at the southern border. He continued to enjoy their support after the Mobile Locker Room tape, and after it emerged he'd paid $130,000 to silence a porn star about the affair she alleges they had shortly after the birth of his youngest child. He enjoyed their support after his administration teargassed migrants—The Stranger whom Jesus implores us to Invite In—which apparently was a rare moment of Trumpian praise for Kirstjen Nielsen, the Homeland Security Secretary who also oversaw the family separations but now has been forced out because she's insufficiently extreme.

He will continue to enjoy their support because he is a potent vector of weaponized nostalgia, and he has made it a priority to install Conservative Judges—not to be confused with Great Legal Minds Who Happen to Be Conservative—to enshrine in the judiciary these politics of backlash against the changing world.

Yes, Donald Trump has given us one gift: The Great Unvarnishing. Racism cannot be dismissed as some vestigial legacy of America's past mistakes—it is one of the core animating forces in our society, a vehicle for power that still runs smooth as ever. Everything is malleable in the face of power and riches. People who oppose crony capitalism in theory support it in practice—as long as they're the cronies. And self-proclaimed Men of God will support Donald Trump, American president. It's almost like everyone has personal standards of ethics, and what religion you practice doesn't necessarily have anything to do with your morality.

On the bright side, you never have to listen to Political Christians again if you don't want to. Again: what principles of Jesus Christ does Donald Trump embody? Would you even let the guy babysit your kids? 

With luck, the exodus of the younger generations from religion will accelerate thanks to the glaring hypocrisy of the evangelicals.  If we are even luckier, evangelical Christianity itself will die in time.  In view, that cannot happen soon enough. 

The Pervasiveness of White Racial Resentment and GOP Race Baiting

A lengthy column in the New York Times looks at studies and surveys on one of America's most persistent social and political problem: white racism and white resentment, two undercurrents that Donald Trump inflamed to edge out Hilary Clinton in 2016 by roughly 70,000 votes spread across three states to gain an Electoral College win despite losing the popular vote by three million votes.  The column also looks at the insidious way the GOP continues to play the race card by pandering to racial fears that are unfounded when looks at real facts and figures as opposed to GOP sound bites and dog whistle messaging.  Personally, I do not comprehend the anxiety far too many whites hold toward those who are deemed "other."  Perhaps this is a result of living in a city where whites are a minority yet suffer no loss of privilege or standing or perhaps it's due to my being part of a minority group hated by many of the same people who hate blacks: white conservative Christians who in surveys admitted their racial animosity and exposed the lie to the claim they support Christian values.  Here are column highlights (note the white fear that others may some day threat whites as they have long treated minorities):

For 50 years Republicans have battered the Democratic coalition, wielding the so-called southern strategy — built on racism and overlaid with opposition to immigration — to win control of the White House and one or both chambers of Congress.

At the same time, Democrats have struggled to piece together a coalition strong enough to deliver an Election Day majority. In the 1950s, the Democratic coalition was 87 percent white and 13 percent minority, according to the American National Election Studies; it is now 59 percent white and 41 percent minority, according to Pew Research.

As the Democratic Party has evolved from an overwhelmingly white party to a party with a huge minority base, the dominant strategic problem has become the tenuous balance between the priorities of its now equally indispensable white and minority wings. The frontal attack Trump has engineered — in part by stigmatizing “political correctness” — has had a dual effect, throwing Democrats back on their heels while simultaneously whetting their appetite for a fight. . . . . For Democrats to counter Trump effectively, a number of scholars believe it is essential to understand the motivations — the needs, beliefs and agendas — of those whites who have moved into the Trump camp. In her forthcoming book, “White Identity Politics,” Ashley Jardina, a political scientist at Duke, describes three groups of whites who generally fall on the right side of the political spectrum.

The first is made up of those for whom their white “identity is extremely or very important” to them.  , , , , the percentage of whites who say their white identity is very or extremely important ranges from 28 to 42 percent. . . . . According to Jardina, “higher levels of white identity are somewhat linked to higher levels of racial animosity.” . . . . but many more white identifiers possess average and even low levels of racial prejudice.

The second group comprises those who rank high on a test of “white consciousness.” . . . The difference between white identity and white consciousness, Jardina argues, is that those in the latter category believe that “many whites are unable to find jobs because employers are hiring minorities.” Jardina reports that they also stress “the importance of whites working together to change laws that are unfair to whites.”

The third constituency is made up of whites high in “racial resentment.” . . . . On average, the level of racial resentment among whites is high, Jardina found: “Among all whites in the 2012 ANES face-to-face study, the mean level of racial resentment is 0.68 on a zero to one scale.”

Jardina argues in her book that the racial resentment scale reveals a new type of racial prejudice — one that is a subtle combination of anti-black affect and the belief that blacks do not adhere to traditional American values associated with the Protestant work ethic.

Jardina, whose work I have written about before, agrees that “some of this backlash” — including the election of Donald Trump and the opposition to immigration — “is rooted in prejudice, racism, and ethnocentrism.”

But, she adds, many whites’ reactions to our country’s changing racial landscape do not simply manifest in outward hostility. Amidst these changes, many whites have described themselves as outnumbered, disadvantaged, and even oppressed. They have voiced their anxiety over America’s waning numerical majority, and have questioned what this means for the future of the nation. They have worried that soon they may face discrimination based on their own race, if they do not already.

Such fears, in Jardina’s view, drive the emergence of white identity as a political issue: . . . They have led a sizable proportion of whites to believe that their racial group, and the benefits that group enjoys, are endangered.

The result?  This racial solidarity now plays a central role in the way many whites orient themselves to the political and social world. . . . . these whites feel, to some extent, that the rug is being pulled out from under them — that the benefits they have enjoyed because of their race, their groups’ advantages, and their status atop the racial hierarchy are all in jeopardy.

[These] whites, to a certain extent, are deliberately claiming victimhood:  White identifiers have co-opted the language of racial discrimination and oppression. Put bluntly, the politics of white identity is marked by an insidious illusion, one in which whites claim their group experiences discrimination in an effort to reinforce and maintain a system of racial inequality where whites are the dominant group with the lion’s share of power and privileges.

Eric Kaufmann, in his forthcoming book “Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities,” addresses similar racial and ethnic tensions. . . . Kaufmann argues that there is a structural dilemma posed by the multiracial nature of the left coalition: he views what he calls “the institutionalization of multiculturalism/diversity/equity” and of “high immigration” as fueling the rightward direction of recent political movements in the United States and Europe. He believes that it would benefit progressive groups, “in the interests of harmony,” for liberals to “argue their case for diversity” but that they should “tolerate difference of opinion and accept compromise.”

Lynn Vavreck — a political scientist at U.C.L.A. and one of the authors of one of the most influential books on the 2016 election, “Identity Crisis: The 2016 Presidential Campaign and the Battle for the Meaning of America” — is also looking at the recent rightward drift in the United States. She believes that developments in contemporary politics are not in any sense racially neutral but instead amount to “hostility or fear of outgroups.”

One of the key attitudes revealed in survey data linked to support for Trump has been the “fear of losing your job to a minority,” Vavreck wrote me by email. In addition, 64 percent of Trump voters believed that “average Americans” have gotten “less than they deserve” but “only 12 percent said black Americans have gotten less than they deserve.” 

They surveyed 22,500 people in France, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Britain and the United States and found that respondents greatly overestimate the total number of immigrants, think immigrants are culturally and religiously more distant from them, and are economically weaker — less educated, more unemployed, poorer, and more reliant on government transfers — than is the case.

In other words, pro-immigration, pro-diversity Democrats face clear obstacles breaking the Republican hold on white voters — and a challenge in repelling Trump’s race-and-immigration-focused offensive. Still, the accumulating insights on how and where Republicans have successfully worked these levers may help demonstrate — as President Barack Obama, President Bill Clinton and the results of this year’s midterm elections prove — that these obstacles are not insuperable and that they can be overcome.

The article suggest that white Trump voters need to do some real soul searching and admit that they may are motivated by prejudice or worse.

The Coming Demise of Evangelicals as a Political Force

One of the continuing toxic poisons in American politics is, in my view, white evangelicals who seek to impose their reactionary and exclusionary views on all citizens.  Over the last decades, this toxic mindset has taken over the Republican Party and, when looks at the history of the evangelical movement, has made white supremacy a pillar of today's GOP.  The good news is that the political power of the white evangelicals may be about to plummet as younger evangelicals are walking away from what has become a partisan religious movement defined by hatred of others.  A piece in Newsweek looks at what is hopefully the beginning of the end of white evangelical political power, an end hastened in part by evangelicals' embrace of Donald Trump, a man who is the embodiment of everything a true Christian should oppose and find abhorrent. Here are article highlights:

Alex Camire left the church a few months before his pastor announced from the pulpit that the election of Donald Trump was “a miracle of the Lord.”

The 29-year-old Connecticut social worker had been raised in the evangelical tradition; his parents were married in it. But Camire’s faith had started to fail a decade earlier when his church deemed his mother’s alcoholism—and his parents’ subsequent divorce—a sin. Later, a secular college education taught him that “the world”—the community outside the church—wasn’t going to drag him into a cesspool of sex and drugs, as he’d been taught from childhood. His pastor’s outspoken support of Trump convinced him he’d made the right decision.

Californian Jason Desautels similarly began to doubt his faith as a teen. In the week after the Oklahoma City bombing, his church’s minister railed against “sand people” and Muslims. “When it came out that the bomber was a white nationalist, he didn’t apologize or even say anything,” Desautels recalls. “And the adults seemed to be all fine with it. That planted the seed.”

Later, as an Army infantryman in Iraq, Desautels, now 39, moved further from the church. “I was in the land of Father Abraham,” he says. “I had this weird spiritual moment when I realized that these families had lived in this neighborhood for longer than America had been a nation, and here we were telling them what to do.” He cut ties completely with his church after his sister came out as gay and felt she had to apologize to their parents.

Blake Chastain, 35, entered Indiana Wesleyan University the week of 9/11, with hopes of graduating from the seminary. Instead, he began to fall away from the church when he couldn’t reconcile what he was learning in Bible study with his professor’s support for the Iraq War. “Conservative Christianity,” he says, “was at odds with the teachings in the Bible.”

All three men are on the front lines of a growing movement among millennials that is reshaping the evangelical church and the nation’s political landscape. Since the 1970s, white evangelicals have formed the backbone of the Republican base. But as younger members reject the vitriolic partisanship of the Trump era and leave the church, that base is getting smaller and older. The numbers are stark: Twenty years ago, just 46 percent of white evangelical Protestants were older than 50; now, 62 percent are above 50. The median age of white evangelicals is 55. Only 10 percent of Americans under 30 identify as white evangelicals. The exodus of youth is so swift that demographers now predict that evangelicals will likely cease being a major political force in presidential elections by 2024.

To be sure, evangelical Christians have been rewarded for their support of Trump after enduring eight years wandering in Barack Obama’s political desert. They have two new conservative Supreme Court justices, and there have been nine self-professed evangelical Cabinet members, plus a flurry of laws and executive orders clamping down on gender roles, abortion and LGBTQ rights. But experts say this may represent the last bounty for a waning political power. Unlike their parents, the younger generation is not animated by the culture wars; many are pushing for social justice for migrants and LGBTQ people and campaigning against mass incarceration—positions more in line with the Democratic Party. 

The result is a shrinking conservative bloc, something that could weaken white Christian political power—and, consequently, a Republican Party that has staked its future on its alliance with the religious right. It’s a conundrum that the father of modern GOP conservatism, Barry Goldwater, predicted in 1994: “Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem.”

The association of the religious right and the Republican Party has its roots in the 1954 Supreme Court ruling Brown vs. the Board of Education of Topeka, after which white Southerners began to flee public schools following forced desegregation. They opened so-called segregation academies: religious schools that were tax-exempt. When the IRS came after evangelical colleges like Bob Jones University, which officially prohibited interracial dating, the schools were faced with losing their tax-exempt status.

That would have meant financial doom. But a Republican activist named Paul Weyrich—with patronage from Western segregationist beer billionaire Joseph Coors—forged alliances with Southern religious leaders like Jerry Falwell and successfully lobbied to soften IRS enforcement. . . . Republican strategists used the issues of abortion and gay marriage to cement the union and drive right-leaning Christians into the voting booth.

But demographic trends are steadily diluting their outsize clout. Researcher Robert Jones, author of The End of White Christian America, has tracked what he calls a “stair-steps downward trajectory of white Christian presence in the electorate.” In 1992, when Bill Clinton was elected, 73 percent of the electorate was white and Christian. By 2012, that number was 53 percent. “If current trends hold steady, 2024 will be a watershed year—the first American election in which white Christian voters do not constitute a majority of voters,” Jones, who heads the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), tells Newsweek.

[T]heir ranks are now dwindling, driven largely by the youth exodus. According to Jones, white evangelicals constituted 21 percent of the U.S. population when Obama was elected in 2008. Eight years later, in 2016, that number dropped to 17 percent. Today, they make up 15 percent of Americans.

For an analogy, he uses Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s landmark “stages of grief” experienced by the dying and their loved ones to describe what’s happening to evangelicals and American politics. First comes denial, then anger, followed by bargaining, depression and acceptance.

“We are past denial. People see the writing on the wall in terms of demographic change. And that is also why we see immigration taking over and becoming the flagship issue. That and a wall symbolize the resistance to this demographic change,” Jones says. “I think we are somewhere between anger and bargaining. And in many ways, this shotgun marriage between Trump and white evangelicals happened under some duress and is a desperate bargain that you make at the end of life. That is what we’re really seeing here.”

To understand what’s happening among evangelicals, researchers study the results of PRRI’s annual, wide-ranging, 80,000-interview American Values Atlas poll. In the most recent survey, from 2017, 40 percent of individuals under 30 claim “no religious affiliation” (sometimes called “the nones”). “White evangelicals are a big part of that decline,” Jones says. . . . “They cite partisanship,” Jones says. “That’s a big turnoff for young Americans. And so is negative treatment of gay and lesbian people.”

Polls find that upward of 80 percent of young people now support same-sex marriage. That number includes young Republicans and evangelicals under 30. . . . Some major evangelical leaders and thinkers, not surprisingly, reject this assessment.

Christopher Maloney, 32, was raised evangelical, stepped away from his faith and has released a documentary film on the exvangelical movement called In God We Trump. He disagrees with Moore that young evangelicals like him will come back to the fold.

“People around my age and younger were already deconstructing their evangelical faith in large numbers before Trump came along,” he says. “What the 2016 election did was accelerate what was already happening. We had begun edging toward the doors, and when evangelicals embraced Trump we bolted outside. To be honest, I don’t see a return of younger generations to the church as we know it.”

They aren’t interested, he says, in going to a central place to worship anymore, particularly when those fellow churchgoers are Trump supporters. “Millennials largely live by Christian ethics without any formal doctrine or dogma,” he says. “We just don’t need a religious structure to tell us how to be kind to one another.”

The disaffected ranks include women like Dawne Marx, a 53-year-old Texas mother of five, who walked away from her church community in 2016 after decades of voting with the evangelical fold. “I was a single-issue voter, a pro-life voter,” she tells Newsweek. “It was so nice and tidy. I didn’t have to think about anything else.”

Then she saw the images of family separations at the Mexican border and listened as the president casually dismissed the Saudi killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi:

“All of a sudden there is Trump. And children wrapped up in aluminum blankets in cages and this crass, crude man, on a daily basis, saying things like, ‘OK, so a journalist got chopped up.’ And he’s saying, ‘We have a $100 billion contract, and there are a lot of jobs on the line.’ It’s like: They chopped somebody up!”

As one of the individuals in the article correctly noted, conservative Christianity is at odds with the teachings in the Bible.  It has become the home of modern day Pharisees who are the antithesis of what Christians should be. It deserves to die. 

Trump is Now Questioning Pence's Loyalty

The New York Times is reporting that the ever more paranoid Donald Trump is now questioning Mike Pence's loyalty.  For once, Trump's paranoia might be well placed.  Pence accepted Trump's invitation for the VP slot for two reasons: (i) it allowed him to avoid running for re-election as governor of Indiana and likely losing, and (ii) it furthered his obsession/delusion that god had plans for him to one day be president. Trump in turn wanted Pence to solidify support among white evangelicals to whom Trump was promising the moon.  It was an arrangement of convenience and with evangelicals having sold their souls and rejected any semblance of Christian values and rallied to Trump's standard, Trump no longer needs Pence and probably rightly suspects the hypocrisy filled, self-promoting  Pence wants Trump driven from office so he can conveniently step into the position he has long coveted and would be only too willing to stab Trump in the back. These two foul individuals deserve each other.  Here are article excerpts: 

Trump’s post-midterm election news conference at the White House last week took a surprising turn when a reporter asked about locking down his 2020 ticket.

“Mike, will you be my running mate?” Mr. Trump asked Vice President Pence, who stood up, raised his hand, and nodded.

“Will you? Thank you. O.K., good,” the president said. “That was unexpected, but I feel very fine.”

But in private Mr. Trump is apparently not feeling so fine. In recent weeks, with his electoral prospects two years from now much on his mind, Mr. Trump has focused on the person who has most publicly tethered his fortunes to him. In one conversation after another he has asked aides and advisers a pointed question: Is Mike Pence loyal?

Mr. Trump has repeated the question so many times that he has alarmed some of his advisers. The president has not openly suggested dropping Mr. Pence from the ticket and picking another running mate, but the advisers say those kinds of questions usually indicate that he has grown irritated with someone.

[S]ome Trump advisers, primarily outside the White House, have suggested to him that while Mr. Pence remains loyal, he may have used up his utility. These advisers argue that Mr. Trump has forged his own relationship with evangelical voters, and that what he might benefit from more is a running mate who could help him with female voters, who disapprove of him in large numbers.

Others close to the president believe that asking about Mr. Pence’s loyalty is a proxy for asking about whether the vice president’s chief of staff, Nick Ayers, is trustworthy.

Trump has never completely forgotten that during the 2016 campaign Mr. Pence issued a disapproving statement the day after the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape was made public, on which the president was heard making comments boasting about grabbing women’s genitals. Trump has kept close counsel about whether he is seriously considering making a change to the ticket, or simply poll-testing advisers as the campaign begins. And few advisers believe he would really go through with it. In recent weeks, Mr. Pence has stepped into public frays to defend the president, saying that “everyone has their own style” when asked if Mr. Trump’s fiery political and personal language have led to violent acts, including the mass shooting at a Jewish synagogue and bomb threats mailed to prominent Democratic figures. Some of Mr. Trump’s outside advisers have mentioned Nikki R. Haley, the United States ambassador to the United Nations, a post she plans to leave at the end of the year, and former governor of South Carolina, as a potential running mate. Ms. Haley is close with Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Mr. Trump gave her an unusually warm send-off in the Oval Office when she announced she was leaving the United Nations job in September.

And Ms. Haley on the ticket might help Mr. Trump win back the support of women, who voted for Democratic candidates in large numbers in the midterm elections.

But Ms. Haley is less likely to show the same kind of public loyalty as Mr. Pence, a former congressman and governor of Indiana. She recently poked fun at Mr. Trump in a speech at the annual Al Smith Dinner in New York City, where politicians historically make jokes at the expense of themselves and their supporters. And that was after her original speech was toned down, and some of the barbs at Mr. Trump removed, people familiar with the address said.

Trump and Pence are both despicable.  One can only hope that they BOTH go down in the Russiagate investigation. 

PR Blitz Before Midterms Won’t Fix Evangelicals' "81% Problem"

For decades I have complained that the mainstream media has failed to hold evangelicals accountable for their bigotry and contempt for others.  In the area of gay rights, time and time again otherwise reputable news outlets would provided platforms devoid of hard questioning to leaders of what pretend to be "family values" organization even though in fact their organizations are certified hate groups.   Tony Perkins, the white supremacist affiliated leader of Family Research Council is but one such example.  Now, in the Trump era, evangelicals are belatedly being exposed for their hypocrisy and racism.  Indeed, the majority of white evangelical Christians show themselves on a daily basis to be the antithesis of Christ's gospel message.  Rather than allow the veil to be drawn back letting the general public see the toxicity of these Trump supporting Christians in name only, some groups are mounting a PR blitz that would have the public discount the racism that so strongly motivates so many white evangelicals.  A piece in Rewire looks at both the problem of the media not be tough enough on evangelicals as well as the effort to white wash evangelical racism and betrayal of true Christian values.  Here are excerpts:

Over the last few decades, they’ve become experts at marketing, PR, and image management, using vehicles like the National Prayer Breakfast and The Gathering to slickly handle relationships with political elites and the press.

The problem is that efforts to better understand evangelicals all too often manifest as a reluctance to be critical and a failure to include the perspectives of both exvangelicals and policy researchers, both of whom are knowledgeable and have legitimate concerns about widespread evangelical tendencies toward the rejection of pluralism and attempts to impose theocracy. In 2014, according to a Christian Post report, an evangelical Times editor, Michael Luo, “told an audience at The King’s College… that whenever his colleagues at the New York Times do happen to botch a report that casts Evangelical Christians in an unfair light, that it is mostly due to ignorance.” 

As a result, in order to avoid kerfuffles, major media outlets often have reporters who are current or former evangelicals, or who are extremely friendly to evangelicals, do the lions’ share of the coverage of evangelicalism. In the Washington Post, evangelicals largely cover themselves. Both Michael Gerson and Sarah Pulliam Bailey are graduates of Wheaton College, arguably the epicenter of “respectable” evangelicalism. And a handful of evangelicals who have become experts at presenting a moderate face to the media are far and away the most frequently quoted sources. Their answers to softball questions are left unchallenged, and there is little or no probing into those areas in which exvangelicals and policy researchers would easily see answers as incomplete or outright disingenuous.

[T]he U.S. media has contributed mightily to the normalization of white evangelicals, an overwhelmingly anti-pluralist, anti-democratic demographic that researchers have identified as “uniquely conservative.” However, thanks to white evangelicals’ unwavering Trump support—81 percent voted for him and 71 percent still view Donald Trump’s presidency favorably—we’ve recently seen an unusual amount of critical coverage in typically friendly outlets over white evangelicals’ prevailing attitudes toward asylum seekers and refugees.

Evangelicals—and those who are strongly invested in a “respectable” image for evangelicalism—now seem to be making a concerted effort to push back ahead of the midterm elections, in which evangelicals’ reputation will be tied to what many will see as a referendum on a historically unpopular authoritarian president for whom they remain the single most supportive demographic.

The first salvo in this new PR blitz was launched in September, when the Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group published a report, written by the director of polling at the libertarian Cato Institute, that purports to show that “Trump voters who attend church regularly are significantly more likely than nonreligious Trump voters to have favorable attitudes toward black people, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, Muslims, and immigrants, even while holding other demographic factors, such as education, constant.” In a New York Times op-ed, the report’s author Emily Ekins framed the report explicitly as a response to “people on the left” who “think the religious right has compromised its Christian values in order to attain political power for Republicans.”

The problem with Ekins’ claim that “church teachings can curb tribalistic impulses by regularly reminding worshipers that we are all God’s children,” is that her own data, which she is employing either sloppily or disingenuously, shows nothing of the sort.

In a thorough analysis for RD, Timothy Gloege points to findings in the Voter Study Group data that make the uncritical acceptance of Ekins’ claims impossible for any intellectually honest observer. For example, the study found that 82 percent of frequent church-attending Trump voters agree with the statement that “if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites,”. . . . What we have here are “respectable” racists, the kind who are image-conscious enough not to want to be seen as racist, deflecting such charges with declarations that, “I can’t be racist, I have black friends.” What we certainly do not have is evidence that churchgoing Trump voters are in actual fact less racist than secular Trump voters.

In the Washington Post, Paul A. Djupe and Ryan P. Burge make much the same point, drawing attention to the fact that frequent church attendance correlates with higher rates of Trump support. In addition, the data shows that for Trump voters who never attend church, self-reported positive feelings toward minorities correlate with less support for the president, but among churchgoing Trump voters the opposite holds true.

But the Cato Institute isn’t doing all the heavy lifting when it comes to “saving” evangelicals’ reputation. Evangelical leaders and institutions have also been working to distance themselves from Trump in the public’s perception. Just as conservative evangelicals cherry-pick their favored Bible verses in order to focus on punitive readings obsessed with policing sexuality, they also have a knack for cherry-picking data that paints them in a positive light. . . . Their analysis focuses on evangelicals’ self-described motives for voting for Trump, as if people don’t lie about their motivations in surveys such as this, and ignoring the possibility that voting for and continuing to support a president who separates the children of asylum seekers from their parents at the border and who stands accused of sexual misconduct by 22 women is somehow morally justifiable if one claims to do so for economic reasons, or to have simply voted “against Hillary Clinton.”

One can argue that this has also been the thrust of decades of efforts that white evangelical leaders like Russell Moore have poured into so-called “racial reconciliation,” a project that has arguably failed, as we are seeing Black people and other people of color leave predominantly white evangelical churches when their concerns about the racism and Trump support of their fellow church members are not taken seriously.

[T]o support [Trump] this president despite his continuous assaults on the free press, his overtures to white nationalists, his human rights violations at the border, and his anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ policies, is morally despicable regardless of motive.

Facing complicity in such enormous cruelty represents a serious ego threat, but if evangelicals want to be taken seriously by the U.S. mainstream going forward, they are going to need to prove themselves capable of serious self-reflection and repentance. . . . . White evangelicals own the disastrous Trump presidency. Until they admit this, admit it is a problem, and change, we must recognize them as a toxic illiberal force in American society and politics, one that needs to be politically sidelined if we are going to preserve American democracy.