{"id":2171,"date":"2024-01-19T15:00:32","date_gmt":"2024-01-19T21:00:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/2024\/01\/22\/donald-trump-is-filling-the-god-shaped-hole-in-republicans-lives\/"},"modified":"2024-01-22T15:01:49","modified_gmt":"2024-01-22T21:01:49","slug":"donald-trump-is-filling-the-god-shaped-hole-in-republicans-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/2024\/01\/19\/donald-trump-is-filling-the-god-shaped-hole-in-republicans-lives\/","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump is filling the God-shaped hole in Republicans\u2019 lives"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Food for thought. \u00a0Note that the Daily Kos is a far-left source.<\/p>\n

Here at the LIGHT! we encourage all of our people to exercise discernment and critical thinking with all media. \u00a0While we prefer centrist and generally reliable sources (you can learn how to research these for yourself through our Faith & Politics class or the first week of any one of our Red, White and Blue dialogue dinners) we also read sources from across the political spectrum as well as the reliability spectrum so that we are aware<\/strong> of what is happening. \u00a0This is in line with “being shewd as serpents yet innocent as doves.”<\/p>\n

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\"DonaldFor many Americans who consider themselves Christian, it seems impossible to square the behavior of Donald Trump with any form of the religion they hold dear. It\u2019s not just that Trump has little understanding of the core tenets of Christianity or its roots in Judaism: It\u2019s that Trump\u2019s actions seem to be the polar opposite of everything Christians are supposed to believe. This is a man who has made vengeance the core of his latest election campaign. Whose philosophy is to return any blow 10 times over. Who regularly calls for violence, on levels large and small. A man who is eager to kill people by the thousands. Who declares that those who refuse to follow his every order deserve death. And that\u2019s before even dipping into a personal life filled with accusations of fraud, adultery, theft, and rape. Where Jesus said, \u201cI am the resurrection and the life,\u201d Trump declares, \u201cI am your retribution.\u201d<\/p>\n

How can anyone who claims to follow one of these men support the other? The answer, according to The New York Times, is simple: Trump supporters have redefined Christianity. For them, it has little to do with religion, and even less to do with Christ. Christianity is now just another synonym for MAGA. That Republicans have long claimed a special position as the more religious party is no surprise. A quick look at the 1956 Republican Party platform shows a party that was already opening with a \u201cdeclaration of faith\u201d and an insistence that the \u201crights of men came from the Creator and not from the State.\u201d<\/p>\n

By contrast, the Democratic Party platform in the same year opens with a \u201cpreamble\u201d and is a lot more focused on the actions of the government than it is on celebrating their \u201ccreator.\u201d Still, no one party could claim any ownership of religious voters. Even after Ronald Reagan and his supporters essentially created the religious right in 1980, both parties continued to battle for religious voters based on issues, not on some presumption that one party was inherently more \u201cgodly.\u201d Republicans worried about losing liberal mainstream Protestants when they tried to cut funding for social programs, while Democrats were aware that issues like abortion rights were costing them conservative churchgoers.<\/p>\n

As the 20th century drew to a close, Democrats continued to maintain a toehold in even the most conservative churches. Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Jimmy Carter were all Southern Baptists. Carter was a Sunday school teacher who authored several books on his Christian faith. Evangelical leader Franklin Graham might be incapable of separating his religion from Trump, but his father Billy Graham was a lifelong Democrat who warned against fully supporting any political leader (even if he did make his name by thumping his chest over those godless commies). In the 2000 election, George W. Bush took the Protestant vote while Gore won Catholics (and Jews, and other faiths). In 2008, the same thing happened with John McCain and Barack Obama. Between those two elections, Democrats made gains with both Catholics and Protestants while also widening the gap with Americans who considered themselves unaffiliated with any religion.<\/p>\n

But what\u2019s happened in the past three decades, and especially in the Age of Trump, is very different. The number of Americans who no longer consider themselves affiliated with any religion has grown at an extraordinary rate. In 1992, America didn\u2019t look much different than it did in 1972 (or 1952) when it came to religion. But by 2022, the number of Americans who called themselves Christian was just over two-thirds of what it had been when Clinton and George H. W. Bush faced off, according to polling from the Pew Research Center and the General Social Survey. In the past few years, that change has accelerated sharply. And where earlier declines seem to have been largely felt by more progressive Protestant churches, recent \u201cde-churching\u201d has been felt most heavily on the right, among the same evangelical groups that have spent the last decades building megachurches and increasingly aligning themselves with Republican positions, according to The New York Times. The percentage of Americans who call themselves Protestant\u2014including evangelicals\u2014has dropped from 70% in 1953 to 34% in 2022, according to Gallup. That\u2019s a decline of more than 0.5% a year. Since 2016, the rate has averaged 0.67% a year.<\/p>\n

In the past decade, the number of those who self-identify as evangelical has declined more rapidly than the still ongoing fall in numbers at more liberal churches. A larger share of conservatives than liberals report that they no longer attend any church. This is a big factor in pushing America\u2019s total church membership below 50% for the first time since Pew or Gallup began their surveys. If the rate continues to decline as dramatically as it has over the past six years, Protestantism will disappear in the United States in the next 50 years. Based on the Pew results, Christianity itself would vanish not long after.<\/p>\n

Both of those scenarios are extremely unlikely. However, there is one group in Gallup\u2019s poll on religion that has increased over the past two decades, and the nature of that category may explain a lot about what\u2019s going on. The one growing category (in addition to those unaffiliated with any religion, which is way up) is people who report themselves as \u201cChristian (nonspecific).\u201d This was just 2% of the population in 1999. It\u2019s 11% today. And \u201cnonspecific\u201d seems to match well with The New York Times\u2019 description of Trump\u2019s followers. As the article makes clear, while church membership in the United States has been declining, many of those who no longer associate with any church still consider themselves Christian\u2014though they seem to be a very different sort of Christian. According to the U.S. Religion Census, church attendance in Iowa fell 13% in a decade\u2014over twice as fast as the nation overall. Of those who still attend, many complain of an aging church population and the difficulty of bringing in young families when their children are involved in multiple activities. (On a personal note: This is exactly the issue afflicting my own church, where Sunday school is down to a handful of children, young families are very rare, and I\u2019m practically a spring chicken. Church membership is aging, and you don\u2019t have to peek in many pews to see that this is true.)<\/p>\n

However, religious leaders continue to insist that even among those who have left an organized church, many still strongly identify as Christian. It doesn\u2019t seem like too much of a stretch to suggest these people may be among the \u201cnonspecific\u201d Christians in Gallup\u2019s polling: people who have become unmoored from any particular church, but still hang on to the label of the religion they knew as a child. But even as churches have been shrinking, Trump has been surging, and in story after story, America is being told that Christians support Trump. Except \u2026 do they? Because what\u2019s going on doesn\u2019t really seem like Christianity at all. Take the example of a retired corrections officer quoted in the Times article. \u201cI voted for Trump twice, and I\u2019ll vote for him again. He\u2019s the only savior I can see,\u201d Or this rather confusing statement from a former Sunday school teacher who now works in a slot machine parlor and says, \u201cTrump is our David and our Goliath.\u201d Conservative theologians may be trying to draw connections between Trump and the Persian leader Cyrus the Great, who in the Bible is credited with freeing Jews from captivity and returning them to Jerusalem, but most Trump supporters aren\u2019t nearly so esoteric. Trump is front and center in their beliefs.<\/p>\n

Why has Jesus been ousted as the central character in many a \u201cChristian\u2019s\u201d life in favor of Trump? As Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor, explained to The New York Times, \u201cPolitics has become the master identity. Everything else lines up behind partisanship.\u201d These are people for whom \u201cChristian\u201d is a label. It doesn\u2019t mean they have any interest in understanding the tenets of Christianity as a religion: It means they follow Trump . And it helps to explain why so many pastors are willing to trade Jesus for Trump when standing at the pulpit. \u201cPeople who love their country and believe in God, but haven\u2019t been typical churchgoers\u2014he\u2019s brought those people into the fold,\u201d said Jackson Lahmeyer, the founder of Pastors for Trump, a national group of church leaders backing the former president. These are pastors who have done just what the retired corrections officer and the slot machine attendant have done: replaced Jesus with Donald Trump. Only while Trump\u2019s supporters may find that a vitriol-spitting bigot seems to fit the God-shaped holes in their hearts, Pastors for Trump have an even more crass and destructive reason. In the face of emptying churches, they\u2019re willing to swap out crosses for MAGA hats in the hope it will put asses in the pews and dollars in the offering plates.<\/p>\n

The \u201cChristian\u201d label serves another purpose for Trump supporters: It allows them to play the victim. It gives them the right to be racist, misogynist, antisemitic, anti-Muslim, and anti-LGBTQ+ \u2026 then retreat behind religion if anyone points it out. It\u2019s martyrdom in a box, always ready for instant deployment. And if that means they have to trade a message of love, acceptance, and forgiveness for one of spite, anger, and violence \u2026 hey, does it matter? They\u2019re Christians . You wouldn\u2019t understand. Just take this prayer from Joel Tenney, a \u201clocal evangelist\u201d who doesn\u2019t lead a church but opened for Trump at an Iowa rally. \u201cThis election is part of a spiritual battle,\u201d Mr. Tenney said. \u201cWhen Donald Trump becomes the 47th president of the United States, there will be retribution against all those who have promoted evil in this country.\u201d Tenney might seem to be explicitly preaching against what followers of Christ are told to do. But that\u2019s the old Christianity. The kind that doesn\u2019t even own a gold-trimmed penthouse. Campaign Action Trump is going to win Iowa, but what does that mean for Haley and DeSantis\u2014and for whomever else is still (barely) in the running? Kerry and Markos talk about what to expect and what weird and wild stuff could happen this coming Monday.<\/p>\n

This content was originally published here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Food for thought. \u00a0Note that the Daily Kos is a far-left source. Here at the LIGHT! we encourage all of our people to exercise discernment and critical thinking with all media. \u00a0While we prefer centrist and generally reliable sources (you can learn how to research these for yourself through our Faith & Politics class or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2173,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2171","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-uncategorized","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8kHU7-z1","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/thelight.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/01\/Donald-Trump-is-filling-the-God-shaped-hole-in-Republicans-lives.jpg?fit=915%2C610","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2171","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2171"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2171\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2174,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2171\/revisions\/2174"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2171"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2171"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/thelight.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2171"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}