Only Liberals Do This: Mom Might Cut Off Her Kids’ Contact With In-Laws Because They Support Trump
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Okay—I’ll channel the Left’s code here for a second. I do come from a place of privilege concerning families—the most important aspects of it. No one has been stricken with a serious illness, everyone gets along, we love each other to death, and we all have very different political views. My dad is a Republican. My mom is a liberal Democrat, always has been since she first volunteered for Joe Biden’s Senate run in 1972. She knows I’m a Trump supporter. I know she’s a Clinton supporter. And guess what? We still get along fine.
There’s a disturbing number of families that are nuking their relationships over politics , despite the fact that Republicans and Democrats have been elected and re-elected president of the United States for years. The point is, I’m sure a lot of people were disappointed with either of those outcomes in the long list of elections we’ve had—and yet, I don’t remember hearing families going berserk over George W. Bush winning—twice.
Liberals gloated to no end in 2012, but we shut their faces in 2016. I don’t know why liberals feel the need to detonate relationships over political differences. It’s sad. There’s not a single thing you can discuss or bond over that doesn’t deal with whatever is going on in the trash heap that is Washington, D.C.?
Deep down, yes, there's more that unites us as a country, but it’s the Left who is just unwilling to discuss that. They want a divorce. And in an era where Left and Right don’t understand one another, I guess that’s where it can become easier to sever ties with your family members over a political disagreement. Let’s take this Huffington Post guest writer who says that her uber-Catholic, pro-Trump in-laws might cause her to cut her kids’ ties with their grandparents (via Huffington Post ):
“I don’t understand why anyone lives in Los Angeles,” my mother-in-law said to my husband over the phone a few months ago. “It’s full of immigrants.”
This offensive “observation” was not a stand-alone comment. It was only the latest in a series of bigoted sound bites from my in-laws. Both in their 70s, they live on Florida’s Gulf Coast in a predominantly white, older community saturated by conservative talking points. They see themselves as tolerant, life-loving Catholics. But their tolerance extends only to people they know and understand ?and those people are white, straight, “American” people.
Actually, it isn’t just racism that muddies the water in my relationship with my in-laws. It’s sexism and homophobia, too. Sometimes, it’s even veiled anti-Semitism. (Note to non-Jews everywhere: Telling a Jewish person how much you love Jewish people is, on its face, a message of marginalization.) My father-in-law once had to leave the room when two men kissed on TV. “Disgusting,” he whispered under his breath, within earshot of my son.
My in-laws have always been conservative. They have always been Republican. But, before 2016, they were Catholics devoted, specifically, to the “problem” of abortion. That was the issue they cared about, and it was the issue that ignited their ballot box passion. What my husband and I have witnessed, however, has been an ideological shift, from a relationship with religion to blind idolatry.
[…]
When I asked them to stop watching right-wing cable news in the living room of our home (“You’re afraid of the truth,” my father-in-law snapped back), they rerouted to their computers. They now take solace at the kitchen table, laptops kissing, where they sift through whatever degradation the right happens to be pushing at that moment. Tucker Carlson drones on, and then Sean Hannity. They cannot get enough, and they will not stop. Days fade from bright to bruise as they sit at their computers, happily held hostage by alternative facts.
Their hatred is expanding, and it’s expanding quickly. These days, it manifests itself through conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein and the Clintons, antifa and Black Lives Matter. My in-laws oppose abortion in any and all circumstances, but they appear unbothered by the idea of migrant kids in cages at the country’s border. The media sources they ingest, of course, are intentionally dishonest, and our conversations with them reveal a view of the world that’s disturbingly removed from reality.
[…]
So the burning question remains: What do we do? And how do we do it? Day after day, week after week, month after month, my husband and I have put off any kind of real conversation with my in-laws because they live far away, and we don’t see them much, and because, honestly, just thinking about how that conversation will probably go is stomach-wrenching. My husband speaks to his mother on his drive home from work, and lately I rarely — if ever — answer the phone when I know it’s her because my anger has not yet peaked.
My own family, who long ago branded me a hothead, advised me to do no more than limit the contact my children have with their grandparents. How much damage could be done in small doses? they posited. That’s not really a solution, of course; it’s more or less a way of continuing to avoid the problem. Our friends have been mostly noncommittal. Mostly people shake their heads sympathetically or pat my shoulder. They don’t know what to say. What advice would I give to someone else, after all? What advice would I offer myself? Would it be to cut all ties? And how does one even go about doing that?
You can break up with a boyfriend. You can end a friendship. But how do you stop a family member from being a family member?
Now, there’s no definite answer to the severing of ties question, but isn’t it sad that it’s come to this?
I’m a total partisan. I can’t stand Democrats or their agenda, but I know that losing my mother to politics is just stupid. And being someone who blogs about politics all day, the last thing I want to talk about with my family is that subject. And they know it too. There are other things to talk about, the last being where I stand on the issues because they know how I feel. Granted, these in-laws did say some pretty bad things about blacks, but so did one of my late uncles. We didn’t cut ties with him, and even though I was young, I don’t have any bad memories of him. Then again, he never spoke like that in front of me or anyone else for that matter. And the times he did, it was always in the past. Heck, there was a lot of opinions back then that was considered more acceptable, but in the Left’s book—there is no forgiveness.
I do disagree with the Epstein angle. I couldn’t care less about the conspiracy theories; the man is a credibly accused pedophile who trafficked underage girls. And yes, Bill Clinton did take flights on his Lolita Express in the past. Antifa should be declared a domestic terror group; one member recently attacked an ICE facility in Tacoma, Washington, and the Dayton shooter supported them as well.
I don’t know if these in-laws were serious about conspiracy theories about the Clintons, but I’ve peddled the “body count” in jest many times. Liberals have very thin skins on everything. Everything is racist or problematic. Joking about the Clintons could be triggering. Whatever happens, I hope contact with the in-laws isn’t severed. It’s a decision that cannot be taken back. Things will never be the same.
We all know that families aren’t perfect. You have to love whomever no matter the flaws. It’s sad that political views have become a category in this arena. I’m a proud Trump supporter, I’m not delicate in how I phrase my positions; I’m pugnacious. And I’m unapologetic. And my family knows that. They still love me anyway, even if my liberal mother has mixed feelings about my stuff being tweeted out by the president.
I fondly remember that call, “Honey congratulations…I think.” We then shared a laugh. It’s just a political opinion, folks. But some on the Left view this as some mark on their soul.
The ironic thing about the HuffPo essay is the lack of acknowledgment that the Left is just as nasty and has, arguably, become more violent since Trump has been elected. Yes, the Left proudly touts their support for diversity and tolerance, but only for their side. Their policies are so good…that they’re mandatory. It’s tolerance…with guns pointed at our heads. Sorry, no thanks.
And if you think I’m nuts, was it a Republican who posted a list of donors from an opposing political campaign that invites harassment? No. That would be Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX), who chairs his brother Julian Castro’s 2020 presidential campaign. Is it doxxing? No, but it narrows the target area for the left-wing nuts who will harass these people. Not even MSNBC could defend it.
Liberals can’t stand you supporting a Republican. And it seems some are more than willing to make you pay for such a decision, no matter what the cost.
H/T VodkaPundit
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Now, there’s no definite answer to the severing of ties question, but isn’t it sad that it’s come to this?
I’m a total partisan. I can’t stand Democrats or their agenda, but I know that losing my mother to politics is just stupid. And being someone who blogs about politics all day, the last thing I want to talk about with my family is that subject. And they know it too. There are other things to talk about, the last being where I stand on the issues because they know how I feel. Granted, these in-laws did say some pretty bad things about blacks, but so did one of my late uncles. We didn’t cut ties with him, and even though I was young, I don’t have any bad memories of him. Then again, he never spoke like that in front of me or anyone else for that matter. And the times he did, it was always in the past. Heck, there was a lot of opinions back then that was considered more acceptable, but in the Left’s book—there is no forgiveness.
I do disagree with the Epstein angle. I couldn’t care less about the conspiracy theories; the man is a credibly accused pedophile who trafficked underage girls. And yes, Bill Clinton did take flights on his Lolita Express in the past. Antifa should be declared a domestic terror group; one member recently attacked an ICE facility in Tacoma, Washington, and the Dayton shooter supported them as well.
I don’t know if these in-laws were serious about conspiracy theories about the Clintons, but I’ve peddled the “body count” in jest many times. Liberals have very thin skins on everything. Everything is racist or problematic. Joking about the Clintons could be triggering. Whatever happens, I hope contact with the in-laws isn’t severed. It’s a decision that cannot be taken back. Things will never be the same.
We all know that families aren’t perfect. You have to love whomever no matter the flaws. It’s sad that political views have become a category in this arena. I’m a proud Trump supporter, I’m not delicate in how I phrase my positions; I’m pugnacious. And I’m unapologetic. And my family knows that. They still love me anyway, even if my liberal mother has mixed feelings about my stuff being tweeted out by the president.
I fondly remember that call, “Honey congratulations…I think.” We then shared a laugh. It’s just a political opinion, folks. But some on the Left view this as some mark on their soul. https://thenewstalkers.com/vic-eldred/group_discuss/6702/only-liberals-do-this-mom-might-cut-off-her-kids-contact-with-in-laws-because-they-support-trump
And age is supposed to give them a pass? I seem to remember somewhere around 1954, catholic priest were apologizing for their role in not speaking up against slavery, Jim Crow treatment of Blacks, and red-lining. So, . . . where were these two life-long Catholics during those mass?
I am sick of all this talk and projection from the Right-wing. If you want life to change for the better in the United States, drop the pretense of being a friend and 'study' peace with all men, women, girls, and boys of good-will and not just those who support your causes. Conservatives are not 'unloved' for being conservatives. Conservatives are 'unloved' for being meddlesome, busybodies, who insist on there way or the highway. Case in point: "Moscow" Mitch McConnnell. Who would rather wear the moniker than do anything to please a liberal.
You realize that you are copying from part of the quoted hit piece in HuffPo by this mother against her in-laws without any real context? Real Americans don’t throw their friends and family relations in the garbage or flush them down the toilet over political belief differences. [deleted]
I don't care who it is from, HA.
"Real Americans." That's rich. You. . . . Divide much?
The "amen" chorus .
Everyone born here in America is a REAL AMERICAN, just stop with the failin palin lingo
No. Some conservatives do not see others as Americans. Take those conservatives at their word! So, when Heartland American writes or posts another mind-numbingly schizo article about 'we're all in this together (tremble)' you can call it out for what it is (simply copy and paste his comment and let him or her dine on it.) I've copied that little gem @2.1 into a word document.
We aren’t the ones dividing our own families and friendships over political differences or over who was supported in a single presidential election. It’s only progressives doing that.
@2.1 and I quote: "Real Americans don’t throw their friends and family relations in the garbage or flush them down the toilet over political belief differences. Removed for context
This statement causes division.
Not near as much division as actually breaking up life long friendships and ones own family does. I would seriously change my opinion of someone I knew if they did something like that. I stand by what I said in full.
We know how much she loves Sarah Palin and me when I used to be CornHusker4Palin...
It was disallowed. So that happened. No one will know (other than a few of us with saved versions) what you are 'standing by in full.'
Indeed. Progressives will get the results they deserve in the election outcome next year.
It's sad when friends and family members allow themselves to get so manipulated by smalls like politics that they severe ties with loved ones. They clearly haven't figured life out yet.
Good friends and family members are a very precious and limited commodity. Life is WAY too short to operate in such a manner. WAY too short!!
You are so right on here. Well said. Life is too short and precious to throw away relationships that really can’t be replaced. Hopefully the mom who wrote about cutting her parents in law from her kids will see reason and not act rashly.
What is that old saying that is oh so true??? What are the three things never discussed in a family - sex, religion and politics.
Works for me.
That seems to be all some religious conservatives can talk about these days. "Don't have sex before marriage!" "Homosexuals are an abomination!", "Faith in Jesus is the only true way to salvation!" "Donald Trump was chosen by God!"...
Is it really the person who doesn't want to listen to that craps fault for walking away?
It’s called agreeing to disagree without destroying relationships.
But how often do we have to agree to disagree? Wouldn't once be enough and then everyone can stop talking about it? Sadly, many of the religious conservatives I know seem to not be able to discuss anything else, so as soon as you agree to disagree, they're right back at "But don't you think … yada yada yada...". Most simply can't help themselves.
That is precisely one or several of the items about some religious conservatives which makes my skin crawl the most. They say they want to help you with your life experience and then proceed to help elect (reelect?) the epitome of a human devil!
Donald Trump is such a low-grade politician that he has his enablers running around mouthing, "Trump was elected and the people knew he had not shown his tax returns." What a bunch of baloney. Donald Trump lied then and continues to lie now that he is under 'life-long' audit. And, of course, being president with a 'foghorn' for a mouth and a propensity for firing cabinet members means he rides shotgun over the Treasury Secretary's discretion to decide anything on his own.
Riddle me this o ye faithful Christian-conservatives. How STUPID are Christian-Conservatives to throw support behind Donald Trump for four more years in a 2020 bid without seeing one tax return from this lying, cheating, tax reprobate? How about it Christian Conservatives while you advice others how to get right with God, what are you going to tell Donald Trump? Huh?
DP, there it is exposed and on the surface. The Trump Christian conservatives are frauds. Frauds. Frauds. They demand nothing from their conman, but to oppress others.
So that means that you don’t push anything you believe in on those topics in their presence as well, right? Can you keep your silence on all those issues yourself knowing what they believe when around them?
Then give us a better choice. When it comes to religious liberty, pro life, traditional values, pro 2A, national defense, taxes, regulations, energy independence, the judiciary etc. what alternative to Trump do you all have that would better advance our beliefs that him in 2016 or 2020?
because you as a so called Christian calling other Christians frauds, frauds, frauds isn’t divisive and dividing.
It is simple. Everybody drops their rocks. Come from behind their fortifications. Engage in compromise. Grow the nation as one open-body, one open-mind, one open-spirit. Accept diversity. It was what the nation wanted from the moment it began to celebrate immigrants' arrival here. People can work together and have their differences. Just look at the church in this country; millions of people roaming around to and fro diversify in their methodologies and not harming, attacking, or OVERWRITING one another.
Although that too can change; if one religious sect's ambition is not tamped down, but actually manages to 'color' outside the lines. Question then will be: Can the same or similar religious nationalists fights break out in the United States? Get the visual. Yes, see it. It's a horror, isn't it?
I do not shy away, HA.
Donald Trump is a fraud. He has lied to me, you, and the nation-at -large about who he is as a man and as a leader. Christians who enable a fraudulent leader, are not behaving in good faith or in according with the Spirit of Truth! It is not divisive to hold truth intact.
What you should ask is this:
Why does Donald Trump seek to divide the republican and conservative 'wheat' from 'chaff,' instead of allowing all to grow together into a well-constituted party?
Your conservative party is fragmenting over Trump - and he loves it as he name-calls fellow conservatives who can not walk with him; breaks apart well-developed institutions (and puts in weak, atrophied leadership is any at all), listens to the hidden voices of "whisperers" and others fringe elements, who only desire is to be near power, but not of it. Those marginal elements never dreamt they would have it so "good."
Are you suggesting that a Christian is not allowed to call a public figure a fraud if this figure claims to be Christian?
Is this in the Bible or did you make this up?
Oh come on, HA. You are publicly questioning whether CB is Christian? Open you eyes man.
Given @3.2.7, seems political ideology is a stronger binding force than religious beliefs for some.
No more so than he was questioning me as one. I didn’t vote for Trump or Hillary in 16 but many good Christians did so for him because he was either a better or less bad choice than her. In 2020 the choice will be much the same and the things Trump has done in office justify a vote for re-election. We are electing a national president not picking our pastor.
Hi Tig! Heartland American needs only to valid his reasoning with a certain question:
In the Trump Administration who is in Charge of the Treasury and the Tax Department of the United States?
President Donald Trump has step by step surrounded himself with men of his caliber and standards. Thus, when Donald Trump says to this one, "Go!" It is done. And that one, "Come!" It is accomplished.
Trump has not suggested, recommended or directed anyone in Treasury's tax division to properly apprise the House Ways and Means Committee of his tax status:
Is Donald Trump currently under an IRS audit?
Has Donald Trump in the past been under any audit by the IRS?
Indeed, this so-called, "Taxpayer-in Chief" has directed the heads of department to give no quarter to any request of any House committee on taxation or otherwise.
The Christian-Right considers God to be 'party' to this kind of scheme and action. This behavior by Donald Trump is not reconcilable with any Spirit of Truth I read about and can 'flesh' out in the books and letters of the Bible.
Indeed, Donald Trump it is said ignored the call of his country to serve in the wars of his youth, and now he ignores the laws of this land, by standing up to his fellow public servants tasked with a service job to execute. This is not Donald Trump being superb and at one's best. This is the character of a man who refuses to be treated fairly as his predecessors were in any way, shape, or manner. Indeed, it is indecency and cowardice on full display. The "Taxpayer-in-Chief" refuses to be open and honest with the citizens who must be open and honest in their dealings with the government.
This is what the Christian Right is exposing its religious character in support of. If a man enables Donald Trump by providing a 'back' for him to hide behind and launch rude and dangerous attacks at others, one should not be surprised or horrified, when one is looked at differently for doing so.
It’s not close to the same thing. Political party membership and voting choices are between the church member and his or her conscience. The things that unify on religious grounds and on political ones are totally different. Most people belong to churches that are made up of a variety of political beliefs. I would never question the salvation of a church member of my church whose political beliefs are a 180 from mine. I remember one year at the county fair when a church member was manning the democrats booth across the hall from the GOP voter registration booth I was manning. Also many churches are international or global organizations so what unifies religious identity and political identity are not the same and they shouldn’t be the same. I could go and drop off door knob items door to door with that democrat church member and never talk politics with him while doing that.
Then how could you question CB's Christianity given what the man has written on NT for years?
It is many progressives who are un American frauds, frauds, frauds not Christian conservatives. It is progressive Christians who are stupid for supporting the secularist agenda of the progressive political left and openly sides with secularists against other believers. They don’t care that the secularist agenda oppresses Bible believing Christians.
As have I and he’s questioning mine.
If he is also questioning your Christianity then the same goes for him given all you have written.
Both of you are clearly dyed-in-the-wool Christians but certainly have a very different definition for what it means to be Christian and the beliefs of same.
Questioning the Christianity of either of you two, based on what you two have written on NT, is preposterous.
This is my charge against the Christian Right. Prove me wrong: demonstrate in writing or sound where the Christian Right has attempted to correct Donald J. Trump about his behavior and activities. All things being equal, I will reconsider, mitigate, or apologize for making this charge.
Okay, suppresses us, as believers, in what way: To save time give me your BEST example.
Red Herring argument. Neither President Trump’s nor any other persons tax returns have any bearing on being a Christian, or a Conservative Christian.
No one has any business seeing Trump OR ANY other Americans tax returns. No rational person makes their voting choice based upon a candidate or elected persons tax returns. I’ve voted since 1968 and have NEVER once heard or read of a person voting based upon a tax return
Furthermore that is why there is NO Constitutional or Federal law requirement to do so.
This argument of yours displays the emotionally driven, and lacking rational thought that characterizes many on the left. Many on the right have their own equal shortcomings in voting, but on totally different reasons.
Our voting choices should be based upon shared ideology, shared values, shared vision, agreement with the policy and/or legislative agenda of the candidates (add legislative and/or governing record if they have one). The rest like your juvenile tax demands do nothing to further sound voting decisions
The Republicans have not been a Conservative party for over 100 years. There are some conservatives within their party, but they do not control that party.
I’ve advocated their demise and replacement with a Conservative party for decades
This need to be unpacked:
Your conscience is connected to God as a believer. Surely, you will tell me that you picked a political party based on your spiritual beliefs, and not your spiritual beliefs based on your political party. Thus, it is your faith which informs you above all. And extrapolating from faith, you drew closer to the ideas of the Republican Party, yes?
Yes. Churches and membership can be diversified in minutia and non-offensive rules, traditions, and self-regulating dogmas relating to faith and belief. However, to be clear, I do not question anyone on NT's salvation. If you think I have done so - point me to that statement for a clarification or apology accordingly.
What falls under question is the abuse from the Christian-Right of a former president (Barack H. Obama) which you and some others here attempt to display as a foil to sully and ironically cast bright glimmering light on Donald Trump. It is disingenuous and unchristian-like to judge falsely. For example:
Given the Christian-Right charge that former President Obama lied, can you quantify (throw out) a reasonable estimation of the lies told in the Obama two terms. Now compare that reasonable number (your conscience will be your guide) with the expressed and running count of lies being promulgated in the Trump Administration spanning a mere two and half years.
Heartland American, remembering a Christian desires to judge honestly, what is a righteous assessment of this example? It's rhetorical. Unless you choose to make a public reply.
Untrue. The Spirit is one. Jesus' prayer: that they may all be one; even as You, Father, are in Me and I in You, that they also may be in Us, so that the world may believe that You sent Me. (John 17:21.) and this: God is a Spirit: and they that worship God must worship God in spirit and in truth” (John 4:23-24).
Indeed, we must not accept Trump who daily operates daily in a personal and professional spirit of devils and lies.
Why not? Which of you is so 'violate' of your shared and agreed beliefs that you forge a relationship in-spite of disparate political leanings? Lastly, Donald Trump ran as the anti-theological candidate. As someone mimicking faith and not in-filled by a faith in God. In this sense he is not your typical conservative candidate. For those candidates can call upon the God in them at some level. Trump, obviously does not.
It is time to admit it, HA. The conservative movement was searching for a 'hatchet man' to come in and 'tool' for the party. Donald Trump understood 'the Ask", the "Movement" understood 'the Offer and the Receipt."
So well is it understood by all involved that it split the conservative movement into two.
Let's just say, I read your comment and it is of no value to me. That's all.
Your love of totalitarianism and contempt for the Constitution is showing again
“Demanding Trump's tax returns is congressional overreach
Congressional demands for information must be grounded in proper constitutional powers. Congress does not have general investigative authority, let alone a mandate to enforce federal law, both of which are vested in the president. Nor does it have adjudicative power, which is reserved to the judiciary. Its proper investigative power is broad but limited to the purposes of legislation or oversight. And Congress’s oversight powers can be exerted only over matters that plausibly can be reached through the exercise of congressional legislative powers.
As the Supreme Court stated in Watkins v. United States (1957), with respect to a McCarthy-era demand by the House Un-American Activities Committee for information from a private citizen, “there is no general authority to expose the private affairs of individuals without justification in terms of the functions of the Congress,” and “investigations conducted solely for the personal aggrandizement of the investigators or to ‘punish’ those investigated are indefensible.”
Although Congress has oversight authority over the executive branch generally, it has no such authority over the president himself — any more than the president has oversight authority over Congress or the judiciary. Each branch of the federal government is constitutionally equal; none is subordinate. Trump’s business activities before he entered office, and his refusal to make public his tax returns, are not proper subjects of congressional investigation. Although presidential candidates usually release their tax returns as a matter of campaign strategy, Congress could not compel such a release by statute. The Constitution sets qualifications for the presidency, and Congress cannot alter that list.”
David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey practice appellate and constitutional law in Washington. They served in the White House Counsel’s Office and the Department of Justice under former Presidents Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
You would. It seems you have been put on 'ignore' how long?
Hardly surprising. Your contempt for rational thought is not new
No comment. Allow the Spirit of Truth be your guide. That's all.
Hurling naked insults? Has it come to this? I call upon you to remember your stature and discipline - Brother.
You appear to be forming your conclusions from a secular basis and not according to the standards established by Jesus
Yes there are many who claim to be Christians but their hearts and their lives do not obey the word of Jesus
"Not everyone who says to Me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, 'Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?' And then I will declare to them, 'I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!' Matthew 7:21-23
And He went through the cities and villages, teaching, and journeying toward Jerusalem. Then one said to Him, "Lord, are there few who are saved?"
And He said to them, "Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I say to you, will seek to enter and will not be able. When once the Master of the house has risen up and shut the door, and you begin to stand outside and knock at the door, saying, 'Lord, Lord, open for us,' and He will answer and say to you, 'I do not know you, where you are from,' then you will begin to say, 'We ate and drank in Your presence, and You taught in our streets.' But He will say, 'I tell you I do not know you, where you are from. Depart from Me, all you workers of iniquity.' Luke 13:22-27
John 8:31 (amplified Bible)
So Jesus said to those Jews who had believed in Him, If you abide in My word [hold fast to My teachings and live in accordance with them], you are truly My disciples.
"I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing. 6 If anyone does not abide in Me, he is cast out as a branch and is withered; and they gather them and throw them into the fire, and they are burned." John 15:5-6
So likewise, whoever of you does not forsake all that he has cannot be My disciple. Luke 14:33
He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. 38 And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. 39 He who finds his life will lose it, and he who loses his life for My sake will find it. Matthew 10:37-39
I confront and will continue to speak to the Christian Right eye to eye. If it bends that group out of sorts, then so be it. Better it be bent backwards and corrected, then to allow it to abuse the ministry of the Lord of the Gospels and Apostles. The aim is to make straight paths through all the meddlesome, dominionist, busy-bodying accomplished and sought after by certain believers who think God has given them a mandate to wage 'war' on others in this nation. Nothing can be farther from the truth of this great faith we as believers share.
Im not on ignore with the GOP. I left the GOP in 1970 and have no desire to return. They do however ask me every year to come back.
The Holy Spirit has been faithfully guiding me into all truth as promised for over 57 years.
2 Timothy 4:1,2. “I charge you therefore before God and the Lord Jesus Christ, who will judge the living and the dead at His appearing and His kingdom: Preach the word! Be ready in season and out of season. Convince, rebuke, exhort, with all longsuffering and teaching”
“Speak these things, exhort, and rebuke with all authority. Let no one despise you.” Titus 2:15
(Chuckles.) That's all.
Are you suggesting that CB is not a Christian?
You somehow have ascertained that CB is not obeying the word of Jesus?
To pseudo Christians, anyone who does not believe the same as they do are not 'true Christians.' And while spouting endless verses of the Bible and claiming Christ-like piety, they fail to live by the true teachings of their supposed savior by condemning those who simply do not following their own footsteps.
It is an old story, one that has been played out around the world for thousands of years by those who feel they are qualified above all others to sit at the right hand of their God.
Bingo!
The war being waged is by the principalities of evil against the forces of good. The war has already been won at the cross and the beast power is casting about for whom it may devour to take with it at the judgement. Sadly the church itself will be divided in this struggle and many will choose the wrong side and will by commission or omission choose the wrong side and be deceived by the signs and wonders perpetuated by the evil one. And no I will not sit in judgement and suggest what has not yet been revealed or try to guess which Christians are on the wrong path or the right one.
While I understand what you wrote down, I do not comprehend what it means to you or why you thought to display it to me. Care to elaborate?
The point is that it’s a battle between God and Satan, following Gods laws or man made laws that are counterfeit of his. It has nothing to do with the political parties or ideologies of any one nation at any one point in time until the point that one passes laws that compels one to choose between obeying God or man. That hasn’t happened here yet and it’s not reasonable for a Christian now to say that there aren’t good and saved Christians who are supporters of all the various candidates for US President including the incumbent.
Many claim to be Christians, but their lives say differently
CB and I have had the discussions on key teachings of Jesus that he believes are either not to be followed, or are suggestive to him rather than imperative commands
It is not by my standards I form that conclusion. But by the words of Jesus. CB does not stand alone. I make the same charge against much of the body of Evangelicals who don’t obey Christ
there is a reason why Jesus said the following (not all apply to CB, but to ALL who call themselves Christians)
“You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Therefore by their fruits you will know them. “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’”
Matthew 7:16-23
“A large crowd was following Jesus. He turned around and said to them, “If you want to be my disciple, you must, by comparison, hate everyone else—your father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even your own life. Otherwise, you cannot be my disciple. And if you do not carry your own cross and follow me, you cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14:25-27
“Enter by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and there are many who go in by it. Because narrow is the gate and difficult is the way which leads to life, and there are few who find it.” Matthew 7:13-14
“Then one said to Him, “Lord, are there few who are saved?” And He said to them, “Strive to enter through the narrow gate, for many, I say to you, will seek to enter and will not be able. When once the Master of the house has risen up and shut the door, and you begin to stand outside and knock at the door, saying, ‘Lord, Lord, open for us,’ and He will answer and say to you, ‘I do not know you, where you are from,’ then you will begin to say, ‘We ate and drank in Your presence, and You taught in our streets.’ But He will say, ‘I tell you I do not know you, where you are from. Depart from Me, all you workers of iniquity.’ There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, when you see Abraham and Isaac and Jacob and all the prophets in the kingdom of God, and yourselves thrust out. They will come from the east and the west, from the north and the south, and sit down in the kingdom of God. And indeed there are last who will be first, and there are first who will be last.”
Luke 13:23-30
“He who loves his life will lose it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves Me, let him follow Me; and where I am, there My servant will be also. If anyone serves Me, him My Father will honor.” John 12:25-26
“If you love your father or mother more than you love me, you are not worthy of being mine; or if you love your son or daughter more than me, you are not worthy of being mine. If you refuse to take up your cross and follow me, you are not worthy of being mine. If you cling to your life, you will lose it; but if you give up your life for me, you will find it.”
Matthew 10:37-39 NLT
Matt 25:41-46 (Sheep and Goats (conclusion)) Then he will say to those on his left, “Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.” They also will answer, “Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?” He will reply, “Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.” Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.”
“Blessed are those who do His commandments, that they may have the right to the tree of life, and may enter through the gates into the city. But outside are dogs and sorcerers and sexually immoral and murderers and idolaters, and whoever loves and practices a lie. “I, Jesus, have sent My angel to testify to you these things in the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, the Bright and Morning Star.” Revelation 22:14-16
not looking too good for trumpsters of the religious variety, is it? oh well, buh-bye
Jesus hated false prophets - isn't it funny how many of his followers are exactly that? And they suffer from such unwarranted pride that they think they alone have the one proper interpretation of God, Jesus, and the bible.
Boy, are they in for a nasty surprise if their god really exists
You follow an extremely bizarre interpretation of the bible, despite posing as the only person who apparently truly understands it (which is not a very biblical thing to do). And speaking in tongues???? Nobody should take a person's interpretation of the bible seriously if that person actually speaks in tongues, IMO.
I followed the same orthodox doctrines taught by Jesus, the Apostles, and most of historic Christianity.
i don’t offer private interpretation because it is a sin
as to tongues, more Christians today either have the gift of tongues or continue to believe it as a continued promise to believers. Even the fastest segment of the Catholic Church are Catholic Charismatics
the gift of tongues is a normal part of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit for hundreds of millions of Christians worldwide. I’ve had this beautiful gift from God since 1962.
None of that relates to support of our president. That is about our PERSONAL actions
no one is judged by God on the actions of others.
Look - once and for all, I do not question your salvation, period. End of story.
Front and Center . Donald Trump is a perpetual liar, even today, the Washington Post headlines:
In 928 days, President Trump has made
12,019 false or misleading claims
"False" claims as in lying. "Misleading" claims as in being questionable, and manipulative of the hearts and minds of the citizenship. The American President is probably the most informed citizen in our country-bar none; maybe the most informed individual in the world. So what does these "claims" signify? You tell me.
More importantly how can any citizen, at-known any standard bearers for the Spirit of Truth support and enable a man who willingly and extensively lies to those he serve s? The Christian-Right has not or can not correct Donald Trump. The Christian-Right in order to have any credibility in its stated positions, must depart from the Trump Administration, or DEMAND THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION IMMEDIATELY REVERSE COURSE ON LIES AND MISLEADING CLAIMS!
Look LFOD, you get in trouble with the moderators when you 'flood the zone' like that with scriptures. Even I must complain: it is too much to unpack there. This is not a dedicated classroom to the Bible. Do me this favor, before I respond to you: Pick the scripture most related to your point and offer it-even if you just link it - I can go read it (surely I will).
Then, we will discuss it concisely without a great amount of 'spillage.' Is this agreeable with you?
Since nobody else can understand the gibberish, what's the point? Linguists have analyzed it and there is no language structure to it at all. It's nothing but people blathering when they're having a delusional fit of ecstasy. The bible even said it shouldn't be practiced in the church.
The first "speaking in tongues" passage in the bible meant nothing about babbling in gibberish, anyway. It says that the apostles spoke in different languages - most likely real languages - and everyone was able to understand what was being said in the language that they knew. Funny how literalists always bastardize the bible.
The ecstatic language? There's no "gift" involved in having a fit and babbling nonsense. Rather, it's something for which treatment should probably be received.
You may as well handle snakes.
I would hope that passage wasn't an attempt to convert - I'm not sure how anyone who read that type of crap would want to!
Funny, though - I'm not sure what bible that came from where it adds the "by comparison" part. Sounds like a trick to pretend that passage isn't as horrible as it actually is.
... make sure the cameras are rolling first.
The gift of tongues is literal. It’s like in the Bible when 3000 were baptized because people in Jerusalem at Pentecost all heard the apostles speaking to them in their own tongue and almost none of them were bilingual. Near and at the end of time here it will become much more common.
The babbling gibberish which LFOD is referring to has nothing to do with someone speaking in a REAL LANGUAGE and other people, who don't speak that language, being able to understand it. That was my point. What he's referring to is the people who have religious fits and nothing they say is intelligible to anyone else; it's like they're having a mental seizure and they've convinced themselves that they're actually channeling their god like a medium would. It's bizarre.
Linguists have proven that nobody else can actually understand what the babbler who speaks gibberish in tongues is saying. It's just ... gibberish, and has no structure that an actual language would have. It's not a gift, it's a sign of someone who probably could use mental help at worst (people with brain injuries and psychiatric patients sometimes speak in tongues), and someone who's having a fit at best, working themselves into a religious trance. Then some charlatan pretends they can understand what the person having the fit is saying, and "interprets" it for the gullible fools who are witnessing the fiasco.
Or maybe those people are actually possessed by demons and that's why they have a babbling fit?
How funny that people claim to be literalists and yet they use "speaking of tongues" to mean something far different than it did in the bible; they often don't seem to have even read their bible. Now, if you were to speak an actual language and everyone else could understand it - including those who didn't actually speak or understand that language - that would be different.
What a bizarre sect you follow.
Given your experience, how long do you think these folks have had the gift? To the untrained ear it seems they are simply uttering gibberish. Does one start off babbling (like a baby before it learns to speak) before the gift matures into a true spiritual language? Or are these two just full of crap (in your opinion)?:
Badf— er, the PEOPLE'S Fish has uttered wise words on this matter. Thank you!
I would ask LFOD to tightly tailor his point (for me to respond) as there is a great deal of verbiage and meaning to elucidate as it is, nevertheless.
It isn’t horrible at all. He’s talking about people following Him. He doesn’t say to not like your parents, siblings, other family, or friends. He’s simply saying to not let our caring for them come between ourself and Him. So if a family member comes between us and God rather than complimenting our relationship with Him, then we are to choose Him and eternal life instead of the family member and ending up in the hot place with them. He didn’t say that we have to abandon our earthly human relationships...unless those come between us and Him.
Nothing that egotistical deserves to be worshipped.
Some of humanity will live forever on an earth made new with the New Jerusalem here and a universe to explore and some will choose to not want that.
The Bible clearly explains the gift of tongues. I hope this helps to understand the Biblical doctrine which I have taught for decades
Let’s look at the reasons for tongues
For he who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God, for no one understands him; however, in the spirit he speaks mysteries. But he who prophesies speaks edification and exhortation and comfort to men. He who speaks in a tongue edifies himself, but he who prophesies edifies the church. I wish you all spoke with tongues, but even more that you prophesied; for he who prophesies is greater than he who speaks with tongues, unless indeed he interprets, that the church may receive edification.
1 Corinthians 14:2-5
So Paul said that when you are speaking in tongues you are not speaking to man, you are speaking to God.
Now, Paul said that no man understands the person speaking in tongues. How do you equate this with Acts 2 where all of them understood in their own dialects as they were declaring the wonderful works of God? They were all amazed. They said, "Are not all of these who are speaking Galileans? How is it that each one of us is hearing in our own languages as they are declaring the wonderful works of God?" Paul said, "No man understands him."
Now this has led some to conclude that there are two types of tongues. One they call the "sign gift" of tongues and this is the sign that a person has received the gift of the Holy Spirit. And that is usually a language or a dialect. And then they have developed a term called the "prayer language." And they say that Paul, here in 1 Corinthians 14, is talking about a "prayer language" that God gives to the people to assist them in their prayer life.
In 1 Corinthians 13 where Paul is talking about the supremacy of love, he said, "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels..." And so they declare that the tongues of men would be the dialects or the "sign tongues," which could be understood by man. And the tongues of angels would be the "prayer language," which would be a heavenly language that is not any earthly dialect.
Can't God understand all languages? Why does he require gibberish? And really ... Satan? Gibberish is a secret spy language that even the person speaking doesn't understand, so neither can Satan? Why bother talking out loud to God in the first place? Paul is a charlatan - but he did say to keep the gibberish in private, you know.
I can see why having a religious trance would build up someone's faith - it's why, for example, the Native Americans used peyote in their ceremonies.
You're free to your interpretation. What bible.org said makes a lot more sense to most people, though. The bible was referring to people being able to understand other languages. Only Paul seems to think gibberish has any value, just as he's the one who got everyone so hung up about sex.
I asked for your opinions on the speakers in the video; not your biblical doctrine on speaking in tongues.
I would call that prophylactic scripture. If one is going to support the notion of extemporaneously speaking in a spiritual language it is best to declare that language something that nobody understands. Kind of like declaring God to work in mysterious ways, it provides an excuse for the obvious skeptical question. Trouble is, nowadays experts can apply very advanced methods of linguistics to these utterances and show that they are not an unknown language, but rather gibberish. That, of course, would not surprise anyone who looks at this with common sense and reason.
So here were my questions @3.2.57:
Importantly, do you find these two to be an embarrassment or are they true believers with a gift from God?
I see tons of garbage from family members on Facebook all the time. I can get into an argument, or I can do what I always do; just scroll past. Done, simple, finished.
I don't like what they post? Scroll past. I've seen politics get in the way of too many family gatherings and it's not worth it. I disagree with them, they disagree with me. We agree to not discuss certain things, and I simply scroll past.
Very wise. We may disagree on much but here we agree on what you wrote above.
Some of your secularist friends here seem to have a hard time doing that here with content they don’t like.
I suppose, but this type of forum is different, wouldn't you agree? This is meant to provoke discussion when someone posts an article. If people are over for supper, I don't want to get into an argument. But on Newstalkers, wouldn't you rather people respond to what you post as opposed to scrolling past and ignoring?
You are on a social forum designed to engage in discussion and to NOT be an echo chamber. Accordingly, this forum is all about airing disagreement. It is all about the dialectic.
If one wants people to agree with everything one writes or seeds, one should go to an echo chamber or just send emails to oneself.
And yet, that is exactly what many of the most active and vocal people here do. Without thought. You aren't one of them.
I for one don't voice 24/7 hatred for Trump so i'm automatically persona non grata with many of those folks.
It's a pretty sad state of affairs but it is what it is.
Generally speaking, it is unhealthy to think that a social forum is going to change the minds of most people who comment on a particular topic. The purpose really is more for the readers who have not come to a strong conclusion on the topic. Ideally, these readers will consider both sides and possibly advance their understanding.
One who holds a very entrenched view on a particular matter might seed endlessly on that one matter. If the seeder is frustrated that there are some who do not seem to see things the seeder's way then that is psychologically unhealthy for the seeder. On the other hand, if the seeder is continually putting for a message with the hope of slowly influencing a largely silent group of people then I see no harm (other than the drudgery of seeing the same content over and over again on the front page).
Excuse me for intruding,. . . Let me speak for myself. Donald Trump is not a 'sport' for me. He is a bother and an annoyance. I detest bullies, compulsive liars, cheaters, and people who oppress other people. Each day, since Trump came down the escalator in 2015, Donald's bravado and vindictiveness has been on full display in our morning news—and, the unwarranted lying speaks for itself. Of course, since this is a 'board' some of us attend to daily, he qualifies as #1 mention for attention, devotion, and yes rubbing people the wrong way. I do not apologize for sharing my views, or wearing my displeasure on my sleeve regarding a man who is damaging to a lot that I have grown to love about my country.
Lol ... you see that happening here much? I don't.
That said, i agree in concept. Which begs the question. What do these "propaganda posters" think they are accomplishing. I have a theory about that but wondered what your thoughts on the matter are.
Thx for the polite entrance.
That said i see TDS as a real thing. See it most every day now. Trump is not as bad as many make him out to be and yet more or less everything he says and does gets reacted to negatively by some. Not always but more often than not that's because of said TDS IMO. It really is a chronic problem for many and i don't buy their reality. Not much of the time anyway. This "resist movement" is one of the most un-American things i have ever witnessed in my lifetime.
I watch many on the left say and do worse but they always seem to get the benefit of the doubt from the same people hammering on Trump. Hilary calls a big percentage of Americans "deplorable" but that's okay. Beto calls Trump a white supremacist .... no problem. Hair sniffer Joe is saying racist and bigoted things almost daily now but he gets a pass as well. Are you or did you call any of that stuff out? I highly doubt it. You likely justified it's righteousness using this partisan driven rationalization or that. And make no mistake, that would be hypocritical as hell if you didn't call it out like you are calling out Trump on much.
Many on the left and in the media have made it personal with Trump and there is nothing healthy about that for anyone involved
I suppose they think they are changing minds. It is likely IMO that they are just hurting their cause.
For example, one who claims evolution is pseudoscience has poisoned, to some degree, any valid point that s/he might make.
I agree .... absolutely.
IMO they are the true believers and will push and project their narrative as much as possible, using any means possible, for the causes they believe in. Damn anyone who doesn't goosestep precisely to the same narrative when they deem it's required.
True believers are the really dangerous ones. History is full of them. Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot to name a few of the worst.
Sparty On, I am not sure what I detect in your comment. So let me take some of your time to make a point clear(er).
ODS came first. People prone to acronyms came up with it. ODS was spearheaded by Orly Taitz . Chiefest among the ODS 'providers' was, you might can guess—Donald J. Trump who took up the refrain when he was considering running for president in 2011. Trump, the man whose tongue yet cleaves to the top of his mouth when he is confronted about the actual birthplace of former President Obama. You might remember 'birtherism' debunked, caused only a shift in disparagement to Obama college transcripts. Now, Obama -"44," and Trump - "45," and bygones are not allowed. As Donald Trump does all he can to dismantle Obama-led policies.
Donald Trump built ODS on a lie, and allows it to fester in waiting, as he has never renounced it. People can be right and/or wrong by degrees. Donald Trump has a 99 on the scale of hypocrisy to cry foul over any treatment he receives from Democrats. After all, you won't ask to see the 'promised,' Trump tax returns even though this four year presidency is three-years deep. TDS is not about intangibles, we can point to real instances in time where Donald Trump has strayed from the facts.
Lastly, when it comes to movements remember one spun up under the Obama Administration called, The Tea Party. And it was every bit as resistance as one can imagine.
Sorry CB but that dog don't hunt. Not with me. At least not to the same extremes as TDS. I mean it has been a mass frenzy for a majority on the left and nearly all the mass media since November 2016. ODS was no where close to that joined and intense I'm afraid if you can't see that reality, it will be difficult to find any common ground here at all.
That said, i wasn't much for "ODS" like some were. I wasn't on here posting five articles a day slamming Obama for the things i disagreed with him on. I know some were but if you really believe that was as bad as what is going on right now with Trump ..... well like i said ..... we will find little common ground here.
Regardless, i find the reasoning of "you did it, so that makes it okay for us to do the same thing" to be lacking any real logic and/or anything remotely positive. We gotta get out of that do-loop if there is any hope for the compromise that is needed. It could start in congress. The place where i think much of this nonsense is bred. There is a reason their approval rating hovers near all time lows and they clearly don't care what we think since it is only getting worse.
You have a number of sub-topics going inside your comment. I am going to just consider two.
1. Donald Trump is a trash-talker. Apparently, he likes to think of himself as someone who if you 'tap' him - he will throw out your private dirty laundry or what he perceives it to be to the public. But, the same man won't reveal his tax returns when asked by a qualified body of legislators under direction of the law. I remind you, President Trump has a title of, Taxpayer-In-Chief in his responsibilities and duties. He can not enforce what he won't example in the country. It will set a double-standard.
2. Trump's "people" during the campaign triggered investigations, Trump's "people" in his businesses triggered investigations, Trump's own daily lies continue to trigger fact-checkers (who definitely were not expecting this type of duty or service to the nation), and Trump triggered obstruction charges through his "exotic" use of Twitter and abuse of the professionals and agencies of the United States government.
President Obama was for eight-years a scandal-free administration. This was due to that leader's character and professional temperament, a willingness to COMPROMISE with the agencies and departments of his government, the combined Congress, and the people of the nation. Of course, republicans in Congress and the Tea-Party grassroots delivered fake scandals through the input of authorized control of the levers of government.
Sparty On, lastly, what is at stake in our nation is truth. We can all continue to run around in 'stately' little bubbles of propaganda mimicking separate but equal streams of consciousness, or the people "back home" can call their Washington D.C. leaders to establish order! Let's all rejoin this one world reality we all share and live out truth and nothing but truth-not anybody's individual or collective alternative to the same.
BDS was with us since Nov. 2000.
Your biases are showing. Or is it denial?
One need not wonder if you were so hard on The Clinton’s and Obama administrations when they operated in a scandalous manner. It appears you weren’t. Case in point. Obama had a scandal free administration? You have a VERY convenient memory in that regard my friend.
Is it denial or bias? I admit I can’t tell. But it is certainly one of them.
Well, here is a thought. Why don't we move on away from the past administrations and I won't have to wonder if you were hard on the Bush's. How about this for recent 'history':
Is Anthony Scaramucci, a staunch republican, 'taking one for the team?'
Video Phrase of the Day!
"Let's break the fever that's going on in the Republican Party."
Anthony Scaramucci: If Trump wins 2020 election, look out
Ok CB, I was directed to this WaPo article on the subject that you and others always want to understand, the support of Christian evangelicals for Trump and why:
In God’s country
Evangelicals view Trump as their protector. Will they stand by him in 2020?
...When my airplane dipped beneath the clouds, I could finally see the earth: interminable horizon, crisscrossing bands of interstate, the cities of the plains, home to more than 7 million souls. Landing in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex feels like drifting down to reality; if everything is bigger in Texas, it’s also more intense — the light brighter, the shadows deeper. I was particularly grateful for all that harsh relief in April, because I had come to take stock of a spiritual situation tailor-made to emphasize every challenge in the contest of conscience between heaven and earth. How are evangelical Christians faring in the age of Trump, and will they elect him anew in 2020?
Evangelicals — typically activist, biblically focused Protestants with an emphasis on conversion, or being born again in Christ, as it’s often put — span several denominations, all races and plenty of American territory. In 2014, the Pew Research Center found that 31 percent of Texans consider themselves evangelical, forming the largest bloc of religious voters in the state of more than 28 million. A full 65 percent of those voters are white, 22 percent are Latino, and 8 percent are black.
Exit polls show that Trump carried 85 percent of evangelical voters here in 2016, a touch higher than the national white evangelical average of 81 percent. That in itself wasn’t surprising: For decades evangelicals have been a reliable Republican constituency.
More intriguing was that a segment of white evangelicals had supported Trump all along — even during the Republican primaries, when more logical evangelical candidates, such as Texas’s own Sen. Ted Cruz, were still viable. At first, their numbers were relatively small, and ill-represented among regular churchgoers. But since coalescing in 2016, evangelical support for Trump has remained consistently high — even among regular churchgoers, who started out skeptical but now approve of Trump at rates identical to or higher than less regular attendees.
White evangelicals’ electoral drift toward Trump added an element of mystery to a story that was already startling. That the thrice-wed, dirty-talking, sex-scandal-plagued businessman actually managed to win the steadfast moral support of America’s values voters, as expressed in routinely high approval ratings, posed an even stranger question: What happened?
Theories about Trump’s connection with evangelical voters have long been dubiously elegant. The simplest, and perhaps most comfortable for Trump’s bewildered and furious opposition, is that evangelicals are and always were hypocrites, demanding moral rectitude from their enemies that they don’t expect from their friends. Others held that evangelicals must simply be ignorant, taken in by a campaign narrative that attempted to depict Trump as privately devoted to Christ, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Some argued that evangelicals just wanted an invincible champion to fight the culture wars, even if he didn’t share their vision of the good life. And then there was the transactional theory: Their votes were just about the Supreme Court.
There was probably some truth to every suggestion, with all the usual caveats about different individuals having different priorities, and all due distinctions made between the committedly vs. casually religious. But as 2020 approaches and evangelicals again find themselves evaluating against traditional, moderate Democrats such as Joe Biden and the ever-present possibility of just staying home, I wanted to ask evangelicals how they’re feeling about their alliance with the president and what their expectations are going into 2020.
The inquiry was equal parts spiritual and political, and maybe more so for me than the people I wanted to query. About half of my extended family is evangelical, and the thought of an impenetrable gulf of understanding between myself (a left-leaning Catholic and a member of the media to boot) and the people who had always seemed most familiar disturbed me. Had things really changed so much so quickly — and how? — or had I simply missed something long approaching? Of course, I should have known from enough time with this faith that probing mysteries only leads to stranger, harder questions.
Maundy Thursday
I met Robert Jeffress on what is traditionally a Christian day of service that in some denominations includes the washing of feet, the Thursday preceding Good Friday in the great spiritual windup to Easter Sunday. Downtown Dallas’s glittering First Baptist church campus, where Jeffress regularly preaches to audiences of 4,000 or so (not to mention some 16,000 tuning in remotely), was alive with activity in preparation for the upcoming holy days. I was ushered into a first-floor meeting room with polished wood furniture and stained-glass windows that, despite being entirely interior, glowed from within. Jeffress soon joined me. The pastor wore a crisp suit and rich purple tie, common enough around Easter time, since the soldiers who mocked Christ before his Crucifixion draped him in kingly violet.
Jeffress, 63, has called himself Trump’s “most vocal and visible evangelical supporter,” which is no mean feat, considering that other local megachurch pastors — Prestonwood Baptist Church’s Jack Graham and Gateway Church’s Robert Morris — also joined the president’s evangelical advisory board, a group of spiritual counselors formed during the campaign.
Jeffress was an early and ardent Trump adopter — “I was one of the earliest,” he told me, recalling a conversation he’d had with Trump in January 2016. “I said, ‘Mr. Trump, I believe you’re going to be the next president of the United States, and if that happens, it’s because God has a great plan for you and for our country.” Trump pressed him, Jeffress said, to which the pastor replied: “Daniel 2 says God is the one who installs kings and establishes kings and removes kings.” For his faith and his loyalty (including an episode in which Jeffress’s gospel choir serenaded a Trump rally with an ode to his “Make America Great Again” campaign slogan), Trump has richly rewarded Jeffress, tweeting positivelyabout the pastor’s books and inviting him to numerous events, including an Inauguration Day prayer ceremony, a Christmas reception and a White House dinner honoring an executive order signing.
Jeffress has a clear sense of how Trump fits into evangelicals’ political history. In particular, he felt that Trump couldn’t have come at any other time: that his success among evangelicals had, in large part, to do with the well-documented failure of evangelical politics to bring about change in the past 50 years.
The first president he ever voted for, Jeffress said, was Jimmy Carter, in 1976. “He was a Christian,” Jeffress pointed out. “People were excited about his candidacy.” But, though Carter was a virtuous, Bible-quoting, born-again Baptist, the pastor found himself disappointed with Carter’s presidency. His next vote, he said, was for Ronald Reagan: “the first divorced president in history.”
Jeffress suggested that it was the Democrats, with their support of Bill Clinton, who introduced the separation of character and policy in electing leaders. But the dawn of the split seems, in reality, to have come before that — even for Jeffress. Reagan predated Clinton, and Jeffress was, by his own account, already willing to cast his vote for a conservative divorced man at that point. And in 2011, Jeffress advised voters to shun Mormon Mitt Romney in favor of Jeffress’s preferred candidate, then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry, in part due to Perry’s evangelical virtues. “Do we want a candidate who is a good, moral person," Jeffress told attendees at the Values Voter Summit, referring to Romney, "or one who is a born-again follower of the Lord Jesus Christ?” The objective value of a candidate’s personal Christian commitments in evangelical calculus appears, over time, hard to predict.
But one consistent trend in the relationship between evangelicals and their candidates did stand out in Jeffress’s telling: increasing disillusionment.
Reagan talked about recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, Jeffress said, as did George W. Bush — but both of them failed to act on it. And the Bush era, in Jeffress’s telling, was even more disappointing than the Reagan era. Not only were the gains for evangelicals disappointingly small, but also the losses seemed huge.
“I remember very well back in 2004,” Jeffress recounted, “being on a conference call with religious leaders and how disappointed they were with George W. Bush, and how they felt like he had just really misled us. ... I don’t want to disparage him at all,” Jeffress added, “but what came out of that eight years? A $7 trillion war in the Middle East.”
Trump found an evangelical base still prepared to vote Republican, though soured by the failures of past leaders who had made much of their own personal virtue without accomplishing anything for their voters. Cynicism had set in, at least in Jeffress’s account, and Trump was especially well situated to speak to jaded disappointment.
Trump’s campaign was premised on the idea that only he could reveal and replace the secret weakness at the heart of everything — that because of his own personal riches, he could ostensibly fund his own campaign, freeing him from obedience to the wealthy interests that otherwise capture politicians. He knew this, he said, because he had been on the other side of things, spending money on his various primary opponents at times to purchase their services. “I give to everybody,” he declared in 2015, during the first Republican primary debate. “When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me.” For a frustrated conservative wondering why Republican presidents had never seemed to make good on their promises to evangelicals while their cultural cachet continued to slip, Trump’s blatant indictment of corrupt, money-driven politics must have seemed refreshingly honest — even if part of his admission was that he himself participated in it.
It was one of many ways in which Trump’s less-than-Christian behavior seemed, paradoxically, to make him a more appealing candidate to beleaguered, aggravated Christians. “I think conservatives for decades have felt bullied by the left, and the default response was to roll over and take it,” Jeffress said. But Trump enacted a practice of hitting back twice as hard whenever a critic takes him on — not exactly turning the other cheek, I pointed out. Jeffress chuckled. “[Trump’s] favorite verse in the Bible he says is, ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for tooth,' " the very maxim Christ was rebutting when he taught believers to return offense with peace.
Could it take a decidedly worldly man to reverse the fortunes of evangelicals who feel that their earthly prospects have significantly dimmed?
Could it take a decidedly worldly man to reverse the fortunes of evangelicals who feel, for whatever host of reasons — social, racial, spiritual, political — that their earthly prospects have significantly dimmed?
Jeffress didn’t think so, but not for the reasons I would have guessed. “As a Christian, I believe that regardless of what happens in Washington, D.C., that the general trajectory of evangelicalism is going to be downward until Christ returns,” he explained. “If you read the scripture, it’s not: Things get better and better and more evangelical-friendly or Christian-friendly; it is, they get worse and more hostile as the culture does. … I think most Christians I know see the election of Donald Trump as maybe a respite, a pause in that. Perhaps to give Christians the ability and freedom more to share the gospel of Christ with people before the ultimate end occurs and the Lord returns.”
It was strange to think of Trump as a bulwark against precipitous moral decline. After all, he appears to have presided over a more rapid coarsening of news and discourse than the average candidate. Even if you count modern history as a story of dissolution and degeneracy, few, if any, other world leaders have launched as many headlines containing censored versions of the word pussy.
But Jeffress didn’t see Trump pausing the disintegration of evangelical fortunes by way of personal virtue — or even cultural transformation. He spoke instead of “accommodation,” perhaps alluding to the kind of protections announced only a few weeks after our talk by Trump’s Department of Health and Human Services, which safeguards the jobs of health-care workers who object to participating in certain procedures for religious reasons. Rather than renewing a culture in peril, in other words, Jeffress seemed to view Trump as someone who might carve out a temporary, provisional space for evangelicals to manage their affairs.
That sounded familiar to Lydia Bean, 38, a researcher who taught at Baylor University and devoted her graduate sociological work at Harvard to studying the comparative politics of evangelicals in the United States and Canada. These days, Bean is a fellow with New America’s Political Reform program, where she writes and consults on political organizing and faith. When we spoke, she was gearing up to a run as a Democrat for a seat in the Texas State House.
“Basically, it’s like a fortress mentality, where it’s like — the best we can do is lock up the gates and just pour boiling oil over the gates at the libs,” Bean said as we ate dinner at a tiny German restaurant near Texas Christian University in Fort Worth that night. Among evangelicals, she said, “I really think one of the things that’s changed since I did my fieldwork at the very end of the Bush administration is a rejection of politics in general as a means to advance the common good, even in a conservative vein.” In that case, politics “becomes a bloodsport, where you’re punishing and striking back at people you don’t like” without much hope of changing anything. For that kind of “hopeless cynicism” regarding politics — walls up, temporary provisions, with just enough strength and zeal left to periodically foil one’s enemies — Trump is an ideal leader.
As to the cultural facts on the ground, Jeffress might have something of a point: Overall, American culture is hardly trending toward adherence to evangelical beliefs, with approval of same-sex marriage steadily rising among all religious groups (even evangelicals), religious affiliation quickly dropping, and support for legal abortion lingering at all-time highs. Jeffress is hardly alone in believing that evangelicals need some sort of special accommodations from a society that doesn’t share their values and that they feel persecuted by; according to a Pew Research Centersurvey released this year, roughly 50 percent of Americans believe evangelicals face some or a lot of discrimination, including about a third of Democrat-leaning respondents. If the rhetoric of spiritual renewal that at times illuminated the Bush presidency has ultimately faded, it makes sense that a figure such as Trump should inherit its dimming twilight and all the anger, despair and darkness that dashed dreams entail.
Still, the portrait of a bitter, brief victory amidst creeping defeat felt somehow ill-fitting as I thought over the day’s conversations on that spring evening so near to Easter. Was it really all so perilously close to the end? Jeffress had his man in the Oval Office, after all, and his justices on the Supreme Court. And all along the highways linking Dallas and Fort Worth, megachurches were advertising their upcoming services; Jeffress’s communications assistant had even invited me to a Palm Sunday procession through the streets of downtown Dallas that she estimated would attract thousands. And thousands did come.
Good Friday
The next day, my husband and I drove more than an hour northeast of Dallas to Farmersville, a town of fewer than 4,000 that lies on plains across a shallow lake studded with the bare branches of half-submerged trees. We arrived at the First Baptist Church of Farmersville shortly before the evening service, accompanied by a steady stream of worshipers and a warm wind. A plaque on the red-brick building’s exterior states that its roots stretch back to a meeting of 15 men beneath the shelter of a brush arbor in 1865; inside, its sanctuary is stately and well preserved, with a high vaulted ceiling and glittering stained-glass windows. We were immediately met by a greeter who assured us we were more than welcome, and despite the now well-known tensions between the media and red America, I knew he was being sincere.
As we settled into a maroon-upholstered pew, a middle-aged man with bright eyes and a crisp suit approached to welcome us, too. His name was Wesley Sisk, and when he learned we had come to talk about Trump, he was elated. “We think he’s doing a great job,” he enthused, “despite what some people think,” with a mischievous grin.
Sisk was one of the narrators that evening, reading from the Gospel of John. After opening prayers and a pair of hymns, Sisk took the lectern before the hushed congregation — elderly and young, some in suits and some in boots, with several babies and a few cowboy hats in laps — and began to relay the story of the night of Christ’s arrest.
The narrative unfolded between hymns and Communion: Jesus, betrayed by Judas and denied by Peter, faces a range of accusers who finally turn Him over to the Roman provincial governor Pontius Pilate, who seems more frustrated with the disturbance than committed to justice. Pilate interrogates Christ: Is He really, as his accusers say He has claimed, the king of the Jews?
Jesus famously replies that his kingdom is not of this world, an answer that has proved fertile ground, over the centuries, for Christian disagreement over the proper theological management of earthly affairs. Is there a Christian politics, or only a brief and remote sojourn on Earth, during which Christians ought to seek their own peace, but leave political rule to earthly kings? Or is there a way to join the two paths?
After the service, I joined First Baptist’s pastor — a tall, gentle-spoken, bespectacled man named Bart Barber — along with several members of his flock for a dinner conversation that seemed to revolve around those long-standing points of contention, and their immediate incarnation in the figure of Trump.
Barber invited us to the home of Bob and Claude Ann Collins, two congregants active in local and national GOP politics, whose farmhouse sits on more than 100 acres of prairie dotted at this time of year with bluebonnets and Indian paintbrush and soft, high grass. Along with Barber and his wife, Tracy, and the Collinses, we met David Coleman, a retired insurance agent who now raises cattle with his 93-year-old father; Dale and Maria Ivy, a chef and recently naturalized American citizen originally from Mexico, respectively; a local journalist who wanted to observe the evening, and several of the gathered couples’ adolescent children.
For Barber, at least, warming up to Trump had taken some time. He wasn’t alone in that: An October 2016 poll by LifeWay Research, a Christian polling group, found that only 39 percent of evangelical pastors planned to vote for Trump. Barber himself voted for independent Evan McMullin, “and my congregation knew about that,” he added, “although almost no one agreed with me."
Trump’s character nagged at Barber. Citing John F. Kennedy, he pointed out that almost anyone running seems to have skeletons in his closet. “But the things that really bothered me,” he said, “were ways that [Trump] would react to things in ways that seemed intemperate and harsh.” Barber remembered with particular distaste an incident during the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak, when Trump tweeted that two critically ill American missionary health-care workers shouldn’t be treated in the United States — but should instead “suffer the consequences” of their decision to provide charitable aid. Trump “had an inclination to stoke the fears of people,” Barber said, whether it related to illness, religious entry bans or immigration. And he seemed like a “Johnny-come-lately” to many evangelical issues.
The Collinses and Dale Ivy went into 2016 rooting for Cruz; Ivy said Trump was initially his last choice. Barber had hoped for either former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee or Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). But as the primaries heated up and dropouts began, each of them began to review his or her choice. At a six-week Bible class, the group and other congregants explored the question of whether one votes for a candidate’s politics or character, Dale Ivy remembered, and they decided that “policy is character” — a conclusion a few of them recited somberly in unison, like received wisdom. Dale Ivy came to align with Trump, he recalled, “because we needed change,” while Coleman ultimately decided that, “as flawed as Trump’s character is, it was a lot better than Hillary Clinton’s.”
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Even as Trump took office, doubts lingered. Maria Ivy, who was naturalized several years ago, expressed some misgivings about Trump’s tendency to generalize about all illegal immigrants. “I’ve been blessed,” Maria said of her experience. “I was a professional. But if you do not have an education, you can’t just go apply for immigration. A lot of the people who come here illegally, they are poor and just trying to come to survive, and help their families.” Maria and Dale Ivy both agreed that vetting is an important part of the immigration process, while Bob Collins voiced concern that someone or something malign is behind the surge of migrants at the southern border. For them, Trump’s quest to build the wall and halt immigration from Latin America has come as a welcome check on these nefarious forces. Barber, meanwhile, still has his concerns: He knows illegal immigrants in town, he offered, “and none of them are rapists.”
Meanwhile, others warmed up to Trump quickly. Trump, Bob Collins said, “has done something no other politician has done: He’s circumvented the press. The press has a problem now. … I wish he would not do the personal attacks, but he needs to get the message out, even if it’s a blunt, brute-force message.” For them, the message was a welcome one. “We’re deplorables,” the Collinses intoned in unison, when I asked them what messages they had heard from Democrats. “We cling to our religion and our guns,” Coleman said, mocking the famous Barack Obama remark from 2008. “I don’t think there’s much room in the Democratic Party for evangelicals like me,” Barber added. “Even though Donald Trump is different than me, the Donald Trump White House tries to move toward evangelicals like me.”
Barber now considers himself willing to vote for Trump, despite his concerns about the president’s temperament. First, there’s the abortion issue. “Trump might say some things that run against the basic ethos of evangelical Christianity,” Barber acknowledged, but he has also put in place two Supreme Court justices who are known to take antiabortion positions. It was abortion, too, that delivered Coleman — who considers himself an independent — to Trump in the first place: “[Clinton] would not say she was against partial-birth abortion,” he said. “I understand — but don’t agree with it at all — but I can understand their thinking in the early trimesters. But killing a child …” This issue has, among evangelicals, become more important since 2016: Renewed attention to the question of late-term abortion stirred by the passage of a state law in New York and an attempt in Virginia has brought fresh fervor to the group, shoring up support for Trump in the coming election.
Barber also noted that the things he strongly disagrees with Trump on — immigration and threats to infringe upon the religious liberty of Muslims via travel bans — have been, in his view, mostly unsuccessful. Thus, he reasoned, many of the excesses he worried about in 2016 now seem unlikely to unfold. So with Trump delivering more than evangelical skeptics had expected and causing less damage than they had feared, Barber now feels more open to casting his vote for the incumbent in 2020.
But perhaps the most illuminating moment of the evening came when I asked whether any of them would be willing to vote for a more traditional evangelical challenger to Trump, should one hypothetically rise to oppose him in the primaries.
The president is having to deal with a den of vipers. I’m not sure Pence could do that.
Bob Collins
At first, there were murmurs about the possibility of Vice President Pence. But then Maria Ivy warned that Pence is soft compared with Trump, too decent and mannerly to take on the job. Bob Collins agreed: “The president is having to deal with a den of vipers,” he said. “I’m not sure Pence could do that.” “It’s spiritual warfare,” Dale Ivy added, emphasizing Trump is the only man in the field who seems strong enough to confront it. “The Constitution allows us a space,” Bob Collins said, to live according to their faith, and Trump has provided that for them, in part through his Supreme Court nominations. Claude Ann Collins agreed. “What space are we going to have to be able to live in and follow our beliefs,” she wondered, without a president willing to carve out such provisions despite widespread criticism?
In some sense it seemed that Trump is able, by being less Christian than your average Christian, to protect Christians who fear incursions from a hostile dominant culture. But that paradox also supplies a handy solution to the question of whether Christians should direct their efforts to worldly politics or turn inward, shunning political life for spiritual pursuits. By voting for Trump — even over more identifiably Christian candidates — evangelicals seem to have found a way to outsource their fears and instead reserve a strictly spiritual space for themselves inside politics without placing evangelical politicians themselves in power. In that sense, they can be both active political agents and a semi-cloistered religious minority, both of the world and removed from it, advancing their values while retreating to their own societies.
“Being on the precipice of being in a minority group strongly disliked by certain groups of people has made me reflect on people’s rights of conscience,” Barber mused as the evening wound down. The sentiment appeared to have led him in seemingly contrary directions, both into politics and away from the scope of extant legal regimes. He mentioned a Texas state bill he helped author that would protect nonprofit staff, including clergy, from civil liability for warning other nonprofits of allegations of sexual misconduct against former employees. Barber said he was moved to work on the bill by allegations of widespread sexual abuse involving Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers published in the Houston Chronicle. When we parted ways in the mellow blue night, Barber was still praying the bill would pass — which it did, unanimously, in May.
Holy Saturday
In Texas, as elsewhere, evangelicals take many forms. In 2000, Texas was 53 percent non-Hispanic white and 32 percent Hispanic; by 2016, it was 43 percent non-Hispanic white and 39 percent Hispanic, with the state’s black population holding steady over time. And while most of the rising Hispanic population is Catholic, a growing number are evangelical Protestants, a trend emerging elsewhere both at home and overseas. Meanwhile, Pew Research Center identifies some 6 percent of Texans as belonging to historically black Protestant churches, which often share significant theological ground with white evangelical counterparts, despite vast social and cultural differences. Just as Texas is by no means the sole province of white evangelicalism, evangelical Christianity itself is by no means strictly white, or strictly conservative. Faith and politics in Texas swirl inside this multiracial, multifaith sphere.
A little before our trip to Farmersville, I met Lola Vinson and Wes Helm, members of a multiracial, progressive community organizing group called Faith in Texas, whose projects have included local criminal-justice reform, anti-police-brutality efforts, a living-wage campaign and agitation against predatory lending. Working with several faith groups in Texas, including evangelicals, is key to the organization’s mission, and I wondered how Vinson and Helm’s experience might have shifted since Trump’s ascendancy.
For Vinson and Helm, both progressive Christians, organizing across those lines comes naturally, a pillar of their shared work. But, they said, trying to operate across the breaches widened by Trump’s rise among evangelicals has been daunting. “All of that has gotten more difficult in the last two years,” Helm said.
Vinson pointed out that racial, political and ideological divides among different Christian groups, and even within evangelicalism itself, had always existed. But Trump, she said, has intensified them. “I see [Trump] as a figurehead, a representation of just a much larger … insidious movement, and ideology. None of this is new,” she added. “It’s just now been emboldened and brought to the surface because there’s someone on such a large platform with seemingly all the power uplifting this toxic rhetoric.”
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Helm said that, among the evangelicals he works with who support Trump, “their sense of being under attack has gone up a lot,” leading to a “feeling of a binary choice in a lot of those folks — like, ‘I have to back Trump, because we’re in the middle of a war for our country.’ ” That sort of defensiveness can make organizing difficult. But Helm also seemed concerned about its spiritual costs.
“I’ve seen a lot of evangelicals making arguments that I cannot imagine them making two or three years ago,” Helm remarked, “like trying to play devil’s advocate on things like the immigration policy, or locking up kids.” Justifying Trump’s policies regardless of whether they fit into a Christian ethical framework is, in Helm’s reckoning, “very much a devil’s bargain of like — yes, he’s awful; yes, he does not represent our values; but he’s allowing us to pack the courts with justices who do.”
So many invocations of the Devil at once left me wondering what Helm and Vinson would make of the prospects of their politics: Did they, too, feel, as Jeffress had, that American Christians are destined for ever-greater cataclysms in public life, until the eventual apocalypse resolves in the return of Christ? It struck me that, in the contest between conservative and liberal values Jeffress envisioned his community on the losing side of, nobody seemed to feel he or she was winning: Even Vinson and Helm felt they were undertaking a difficult and oftentimes uphill battle against forces material and intangible.
For Helm, much of the agony many evangelicals experience as citizens has roots in private pain: “If we’re talking about Trump voters, people don’t react with this kind of hatred or fear unless there’s pain at the root somewhere, and if you don’t address that pain, you’re never going to break through the hatred and fear.” But neither Vinson nor Helm seemed to think that some kind of values consensus — and shared work across the divide — is altogether impossible. They didn’t envision any easy victories. But they did have hope.
“I’ve got hope for everybody,” Helm said; “yeah, likewise,” Vinson added. “So I choose to see the God in everyone and hope that that’s for everyone, even the people who are on the other end of the spectrum from where I sit and believe. … I wouldn’t be able to get up every day and do the work that I do if I didn’t.”
On Holy Saturday, the day before Easter, I met Joe and Daniel Aguilar, both evangelical, 65 and 33, father and son. While age has increasingly defined political divisions nationwide — most notably inside the Democratic Party — research has revealed a surprising continuity between older and younger evangelicals. As Professor Ryan Burge of Eastern Illinois University has found using survey data, while younger evangelicals show signs of parting from their elders when it comes to prioritizing issues such as immigration, young white evangelicals voted for Trump at roughly the same rate as their parents and grandparents. But a fraction — less than 20 percent — didn’t, and Daniel was among them.
To see Joe and Daniel sitting together side by side, as I did, in a Fort Worth taco restaurant, you might guess they’re related; you might also guess that there’s some tension between them, at least where it comes to politics. Joe, a retired CPA, was warm-skinned and a little slighter than his son, with a white beard and a bright yellow T-shirt sporting a prominent icon of Texas situated on the breast. Daniel, an attorney, had his father’s hazelnut eyes and dark, short-cropped hair with a frontal cowlick. They eyed each other warily as I broached the subject of Trump.
“You know,” Joe said, over chips, salsa and beer, “we created Trump. He’s a result of everything that happened before, it could have been someone else with that same kind of ridiculous, outlandish outbursts and thoughts and actions. I mean, we got what we deserved. I mean I don’t like everything he says, but I’m going to vote for him again.” Joe said his 2016 vote for Trump came down to a comparison between Republicans and Democrats — he printed out the two party platforms, considered them and came away convinced Trump was the only way to go.
Daniel intervened, skeptical. “Looking back in the primary starting in 2015, I mean — evangelicals put Trump over the top among, what? 16 other otherwise sane candidates. [He] was riding this wave of evangelical support.”
“He was married several times,” Joe acknowledged, a little grudgingly.
“Yeah, and I shouldn’t lead off with that because it’s not even the main reason — it’s demonizing immigrants” and remarks about keeping out people from “shithole countries,” Daniel said.
“Basically,” Joe argued, “Trump is everyone, without the filters. I’m sure at some time you’ve thought some horrible things, but you had a filter there to keep you from saying it.”
“But is that a defense?” Daniel asked.
“No, that’s just —”
“A fact to you?”
“Just an explanation of why. I mean, he is a raw personality with all filters removed. … I think he pretty much exemplifies this sin that we all carry with us. He just doesn’t know how to repress it.”
Daniel nodded, and pressed: “But it would seem like a natural question would be, you just sounded like you just described some pretty good reasons not to support the man.”
Back and forth like this, on and on: the Green New Deal, taxes, climate change, abortion, with Joe holding that Trump’s essential toughness set him apart from the other slick, polished Republican alternatives, and Daniel pressing as to whether that belligerent approach to politics really accomplishes evangelical goals. “Trump accepts evangelicals,” Joe said, unlike the Democrats. “I think ‘accepting’ is probably a friendlier term than ‘exploits the talking points they want to hear,' ” Daniel parried. There were the usual sparring sessions over media dishonesty and the extremes of Trump’s policies, such as family separation at the border, which Joe admitted he didn’t approve of.
Even as father and son staked out a mostly generational conflict between the evangelicals who readily accepted Trump, and those, like Daniel, who remain skeptical, they still shared signs of affection: little jokes (“You know, Daniel, I can change my will at any time …”), an arm around the shoulder, a hand resting on the back of a neck.
Whatever the costs have been — and for many, the price of Trump’s policies has been cruel and devastating — the Aguilars seemed to exhibit that faint hope that Helm and Vinson live on: that evangelicals attached to Trump and those who oppose him can find some common humanity to hold them together, even in the heat of contention; that there might be better things on the horizon than continual decline; that the promise of pursuing those beautiful things might be the key to sealing the rift between Trump’s Christians and all the rest.
Easter Sunday
I had set out to Texas with the intention of spending Easter Sunday with my own family; my uncle, aunt and cousin are evangelical Christians, and have been for as long as I can remember, stretching back to days spent at Sunday school, when my aunt would teach and my cousins would sit together in semicircles to read, play and sing. It was only much later in life, long after I had left Texas and spent time among vastly different political and religious climates, that I realized not everyone knew evangelicals personally, and that their world was in some sense exotic to a vast number of commenters who write about them.
In the end, I couldn’t summon the objectivity to commit my family’s views to the page. I wonder if anyone can, whether they have intimate connections to evangelicals or similarly charged connections to those who fear evangelical politics will endanger their lives, loves, livelihoods or families. There scarcely seems to be a neutral approach to this curious group of voters, whose essence reaches for the extremes — incorporating the deeply spiritual and the basely practical, focusing primarily on matters of love, sex and reproduction, envisioning both a legal regime transformed by friendly Supreme Court justices and a world set apart from the dominant culture in which their increasingly unusual way of life can flourish.
However he reached them, Trump has undoubtedly made greater inroads with his evangelical adherents. Jeffress predicted an even bigger win for Trump among evangelicals this time around, surpassing his record-setting success last time; all of the Farmersville Christians were prepared to vote for him in 2020, as was Joe Aguilar. Much depends on the many months between now and the general election, but I would no longer underestimate the possibility that evangelicals will turn out in stronger numbers for a second Trump term than they did in 2016, partly to ensure another Supreme Court pick and partly because the backlash against them has cemented so much of what they already suspected about liberals’ attitudes.
However he reached them, Trump has undoubtedly made greater inroads with his evangelical adherents. Jeffress predicted an even bigger win for Trump among evangelicals this time around.
Which raises a series of imponderables: Is there a way to reverse hostilities between the two cultures in a way that might provoke a truce? It is hard to see. Is it even possible to return to a style of evangelical politics that favored “family values” candidates and a Billy Graham-like engagement with the world, all with an eye toward revival and persuasion? It is hard to imagine.
Or was a truly evangelical politics — with an eye toward cultural transformation — less effective than the defensive evangelical politics of today, which seems focused on achieving protective accommodations against a broader, more liberal national culture? Was the former always destined to collapse into the latter? And will the evangelical politics of the post-Bush era continue to favor the rise of figures such as Trump, who are willing to dispense with any hint of personal Christian virtue while promising to pause the decline of evangelical fortunes — whatever it takes? And if hostilities can’t be reduced and a detente can’t be reached, are the evangelicals who foretell the apocalypse really wrong?...
‘He gets it’: Evangelicals aren’t turned off by Trump’s first term
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/08/14/evangelicals-view-trump-their-protector-will-they-stand-by-him/?noredirect=on
This is probably the longest COMMENT I have dealt with on NT! So I will do my best to break this big honking thing down into workable portions. Note: I have not completed reading the whole of it at this point. But I must get started.
1. What 'change' in particular is Mr. Jeffries and these "Christian Evangelicals" (AKA. The Christian-Right) hoping for? I think it is mentioned later on down the page, but the question needs to be noted here.
The Christian-Right was "disappointed" in Carter's presidency, that is a fact. Mr. Carter was 'Christian-qualified.' What traits did the Christian Right want to issue forth from a Christian "born again" President. Incidentally, a major validation for a believer is to see in another person the Spirit of Truth.
Jeffress was disappointed in his choice of a model "born again" president, but satisfied with his choice of a "divorced" figure of a president.
I remember this occasion (aired in a clip on television). In Jeffries studied announcement:
1. Romney is the good moral person.
2. Rick Perry is the "born again" follower of Jesus.
Some years earlier Jeffries was disappointed in the activities and acts of the Born again President (Carter). Can we chalk this up to how times change a person's heart or just as an inconsistency in Jeffries thinking?
Worst "scandal" Dubya had IMO was the mass dismissal of all those US states attorney's and i disagreed with that decision wholeheartedly I'm sure you won't agree that's the worst and point to Iraq etc. But that was less a scandal and in retrospect more of a very poor decision made on bad intelligence. Dubya was hardly the only one fooled by that intelligence. Many Dems were as well.
Hang your hat on Scaramucci if you want but it appears he has developed a bad case of TDS as well. Or perhaps it was always there. Or perhaps it developed after exposure to his latest wife who helped him along. You do know she donated to nearly all of Trumps opponents right? And deleted her twitter account when Tony made his brief stop in the Trump Admin. Gee ..... i wonder why she did that?
Scaramucci's comments have a familiar ring to them. Lots of "Republicans" came out against Trump in 2015. Right about this time.
SOSDD
Stop right here. I will not finish up reading the remainder of your comment after the (above) period. You can't have it both ways here.
Trump can't have true friends and professional friends, because he is a most disloyal human being. You are setting yourself up as delusional (and you really should not do it) if you think for one brief second Trump is above the truth being told about him from those who share his sphere. BTW, Scaramucci has been in Trump's inner circle. Unless you have such familiarity with Trump, you would be wise to not discount the "Mooch's" message. People do not just have it in for Donald Trump. The point being Trump never seems to know when to stop pushing people to give him more or all of themselves and their consciences.
So there you go. The reason a lot of folks well never grow. Refusing to read that which may not support the narrative they are pushing. Not considering all possibilities and/or angles.
If one remains comfortable, only in their own biases, the view never changes. One will remain .... biased. I offer realistic possibilities, potential reasons for an individuals actions and you refuse to even read them let alone consider them. Not that it would matter if you did.
Like i said ..... SOSDD.
You wrote that, o ye of the "open-mind." Perhaps all of us have a type of fever as far as acronyms go. I suggest not to overplay them. Believe what Donald Trump tells you at your own peril - not mind. While we are on the subject: We do not know if Scaramucci is given to lying in any given situation, but surely adults can concern Donald J. Trump is an accomplished, compulsive, liar. A man who delights in lying and calling it by a different name!
You would not let me lie to you repeatedly; you certainly would not take the time to attend a rally on my behalf to hear me lie to your face. Why do you think I am going to accept your ask to buy in to Trump foolishness?
As for Donald and me; I don't let 'clowns' dance in my head. Donald Trump is clowning throughout his presidency! He is throwing so much "mad-hatter" fhit at his rally supporters that I wonder if they are asking for towels to wipe down at the end of each event. You can see it; if you look for it.
That's all.
I'm not asking you to do anything except consider all possibilities. Not just the ones that fit neatly into one of your preferred narratives. It's ignorant as hell to not do so IMO.
That said, the more some people call all Trump supporters stupid, the more i realize just how obtuse those folks are to react in such a silly, overgeneralizing manner. Some wise words i heard in a movie once:
"Stupid is as stupid does"
- Forest Gump
Let me be clear. I try hard not to be impressed by other folks BS. Donald Trump is a fhit-starter. It would seem that is what he is hired to do, whether than be a leader of a great people. He operates more like a 'herder,' putting people in slots, boxes, and stalls. I do not have to like what he is serving up- politically-and I don't want any of his BS.
"Ignorance is as ignorance does." - CB.
You might attempt sharing that with the vacant and absent leader sitting in the White House. If he does not wish to grow in office - to learn the duties and responsibilities of a leader - then he and this nation would have been and can be better served if he had not ran for hire and now resigns and go "Home."
At the least, he would not have all these questionable legalities and political skirmishes flourishing in his so-called, "Administration" —consisting mostly of him and a few good "friends." The so-called, "deep-state" which was largely career people doing the nation's business to the best of their abilities are sorely missed by an aching, flailing, and strained set of government systems as Trump stupidly dismisses his friends from their apparently temporary positions in public service with no other suitable or learned replacements.
We are done here CB ... have a great weekend!
Ditto! Let's do this (or better) again soon!
Well said. You expressed yourself exactly right here. It is so typical on the left that they refuse to read or discuss when a debate reaches beyond their comfort zone.
You are the one who refused to accept that Trump could have friends, regular in life’s path or professional related.
Scaramucci (interesting "last name" to sound out by the way) is a Republican, and if you keep throwing republicans 'off the Island' it means your numbers are dwindling. "The Mooch" must have reached the limits of his "Trump-zone" and that is when he got 'daggered' by your 'guy.'
My comfort zone? Not to worry. Just talk and don't try to waste my time on consuming talking points. I will call it out!
The people Trump are loyal too likely are not in his service. —I thought you knew! (Cross Donald and, "You're fired!")
Trump ditches people like a burned out car engine. Watch out! If you're are a DC Trump insider—you could be next!
Trump will never ditch or abandon his base.
Never say, "Never!" Furthermore, you should test that theory - 'the base' should slam Trump on the wall. After all, didn't I hear the base early on in this administration (circa 2017) say that no wall is a "deal breaker."
Is the 'wall':
Did Ann Coulter ditch Trump over a fail promise to 'build that wall'? Yes, she did. And, Trump, the habitual liar, called her a 'wack-job'! Y'all should try it out! See what Trump says about ya!
https://www.conservativedailynews.com/2019/08/watch-best-trump-re-election-commercial-ever-nsfw/
Thankfully the Trump lovers in my family cut me off years ago (long before Trump was elected) when I left their church and rejected their brand of faith. My 10 year old has only met them twice so far and we didn't stay long. If they can't talk about anything other than their faith or Trump I see no reason why anyone would want to spend any time with them so I'm not surprised others are finding the same thing true in their extended families.
I hear you. Some people just want to keep talking about stuff I'm against, and it's painful to smile and nod and eat my food without throwing up. I have for and against Trump people in my family. If they're together, I do my best to steer conversation to something else like sports. Then again, we have several camps when it comes to sports too, so that doesn't always stop arguments. Stupid Calgary Flames!
Sports work. Even here in California fans of say the Oakland A’s or San Francisco from the city are very liberal and the ones coming in from the Central Valley or mountain foothills for the game are all dressed in team colors and wearing team caps and that’s what matters then and there, not the political stickers on the auto or SUV bumper.
But they are your own flesh and blood. Some it seems would cut off their families like the seeded article describes and avoid contact with them, and yet come here and argue with near total physical strangers who believe as the estranged family does all day every day.
I didn't cut them off, they cut me off because they didn't appreciate having holes constantly poked in their flawed theories and beliefs. They didn't want my nephews and nieces to hear about truth, they want to keep them steeped in indoctrination. To them, I'm an apostate that they need to keep far away from their pools of ignorance for fear I might infect the whole brood with logic and reason contrary to their already accepted and invested in doctrines.