Evangelicals supporting Donald Trump are being strongly criticized by other evangelicals for that support. Trump, the critics say, doesn’t believe in or stand for anything evangelicals believe in or stand for.
Progressives have also criticized evangelicals for supporting Trump, but for different reasons. They see it as an example of hypocrisy, what with evangelicals constantly blasting liberals for undermining the nation’s moral foundation while supporting a man who is the epitome of moral relativism.
I think both groups are missing the point.
The issue is not evangelical support for Donald Trump. It is the fact that evangelicals have become “the largest and most reliable Republican constituency” in the country.
Evangelicals who supported Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Jeb Bush, Mike Huckabee, or any of the other candidates were just as misguided as those supporting Trump.
Political evangelicalism has become synonymous with Republican politics, turning Christianity into a Republican constituency.
That fact has led to this reality: Evangelical Republican partisanship is the real scandal in American politics today. That is what this election is really about.
It also poses one of the great dangers our nation faces because it represents a clever and deceptive circumvention of the separation of church and state.
As an established Republican base, evangelicalism doesn’t need to be officially recognized as the nation’s “state religion.” It can be content to assert influence and control as a primary player in one of the two major political parties in the country.
Evangelicals supporting Trump see this election as an opportunity to maintain their influence. It’s about quid pro quo. They support Trump and when he gets in the White House he will support their moral crusades he couldn’t care less about.
Had Ted Cruz shown the vote getting power of Trump they would have backed him, but he didn’t. From the get-go Trump showed he was the guy and they went with him.
Establishment evangelicals don’t like what they are seeing, but they are no better in their partisanship than Trump evangelicals. They just happen to choose the wrong horse to bet on.
What makes this serious situation worse is that few people are paying attention to it. They are focused on evangelicals backing Trump rather than evangelicals being a collective voting block for Republicans.
Currently there are more than 50 evangelical organizations seeking to exert political influence within the Republican Party.
That is a powerful lobbying force Republican candidates and party leaders cannot afford to ignore.
It isn’t much of an exaggeration, if one at all, to say that the Republican Party is a de facto arm of today’s American evangelicalism.
That’s why the Republican Party platform for the last several years has read like a sermon instead of a political statement.
Republican evangelicalism is bad for everyone. It makes for “bad religion” and for “bad politics.”
Make no mistake, then. While this election is about who will be our next president, and about who will control the Congress, and about who will be our next Supreme Court justice, it is about so much more.
It is about the fact that at the end of the day on November 8 we will have made a choice between traditional American democracy and creeping theocracy.
The stakes couldn’t be higher.
linnposts.com 