10-07-2018, 08:14 AM
(10-06-2018, 09:16 PM)Galen Wrote:(10-06-2018, 10:08 AM)pbrower2a Wrote:(10-06-2018, 06:49 AM)Galen Wrote: Consider for a moment why evangelicals would continue to support Trump even in spite of Stormy Daniels. There is an easily accessible reason for this that the (Democrats or liberals) will never admit to.
H-Y-P-O-C-R-I-S-Y.
Trump may be a rogue, but he tells people what they want to hear. Evangelical Christianity is largely flim-flam, and people who get snookered for one thing often get snookered for another.
This is what I would expect you to say because you really haven't given the issue much thought and you really don't care what they think anyway.
The real reason is that he is not actively hostile to Christianity the way the left is. They will accept a flawed President that will give them some things that they want rather than have a president that either disregards their beliefs or is actively hostile to them. Consider for a moment how more Christian refugees are being accepted by the Trump Administration than under Obama.
The Christian refugees would have been from Daesh/ISIS when Obama was President. Daesh compelled conversion and prohibited escape of people who had been Christians. Those Christians were not fundamentalist Christians; they were Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Monophysite Christians. Under Trump there are more Christians in need of refuge from thug regimes, especially in Syria. Needless to say, the gangster regime in Syria also produces many Muslim refugees, as Syria is predominantly Muslim. There has been more time and opportunity for them to escape while Trump has been President.
It is worth remembering that the Christianity that the Left has most trouble with is the part of the fundamentalist-evangelical segment itself hostile to modernity of any kind, including everything left of center. Modernists of all kinds are hostile to a world-view that promotes pseudoscience and intolerance. Although not all fundamentalist Christians are on the Right (the Sojourners are fundamentalist, but they are clearly Left on social justice for seeing unbridled capitalism as a violation of Christian ethics, the legacy of the Moral Majority is. Paradoxically, Protestant fundamentalism is a new phenomenon in the history of Christianity despite being so clearly anti-modern, and it even ante-dates feminism, socialism, pacifism, environmentalism, humanism, and of course the whole Enlightenment, all of which are older than itself (Again, I am discussing the right-wing Moral Majority and its political and philosophical legacy, itself appearing only in the 1970s). It clearly opposes any economic values dating from before the New Deal, sponsoring an unbridled capitalism that elevates greed, selfishness, and inequality to virtues that Jesus Himself excoriated. It promotes superstition and pseudoscience (including young-Earth creationism). It disparages psychology, making its believers particularly gullible. It is hostile to non-Christian religion of any kind, and even to other forms of Christianity. It is clearly for patriarchy (anti-feminism), plutocracy, a pre-scientific worldview, and science except for technologies of production.
Liberals might be in opposition to the teachings of the Catholic Church on sexuality... but if they oppose Pope Francis on politics and economics it is for being too far to the Left. Many conservatives find the fundamentalist agenda troublesome because those conservatives are moderates. They may consider capitalism in general a good idea, but the capitalism that those moderate conservatives believe in is one that gives the common man a stake in the system necessary for keeping the masses from facing the temptation of Marxist demagoguery. Such moderate conservatives do not want the capitalist order to create a Hell-hole resembling Russia on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution. It is bad capitalism, typically a capitalism that still has feudal characteristics (Russia under the Romanov dynasty) or in which cronyism and corruption are the norms (Cuba under Batista, China under Chiang Kai-Shek), that makes Marxist insurgencies and revolutions possible.
The discord between the Religious Right and what you call the Left (liberals are not social democrats, who themselves are not Communists) is mutual. The Religious Right is for a premodern, hierarchical, inequitable, repressive society contrary to even the moderate Right, let alone liberals, social democrats, and Communists. That it can lionize someone so immoral as Donald Trump as a leader without calling him to account for his blatant violations of Christian ethics in his sex life and his business practices demonstrates hypocrisy. Sure, it could attack Bill Clinton for his 'sexcapades' (and understandably so) -- but not Trump.
On a long-defunct forum I nicknamed Bill Clinton the "First Fornicator" even if I approved most of his policies. Really, I do not disagree that much with Jerry Falwell and Billy Graham on promiscuity. Neither is alive, and I cannot speak for them... but I wonder what either would have said about grabbing women by their crotches and by the overall sexual infidelity of Donald Trump. Maybe I can accept homosexuality so long as it has all of the characteristics of the old heterosexual ideal except for allowing same-sex relationships, but that is all that is reasonably available to a large group of people. I used the conservative principle of law and order to justify homosexuality as I use for justifying the Civil Rights movement. We get along or we get destructive, dehumanizing tragedy.
Do you call yourself a Christian? Then I challenge you to read the Sermon on the Mount, the Core Teachings of Jesus. He showed no respect for the ruling elite of His time. He was practically a socialist.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.