By Bill Hounslow
Author
Rosa Rubicondior
Their craven whoring of basic principles for the sniff of political influence that support for Donald Trump promised, is beginning to backfire on the Evangelical Christian right.
The ‘Evangelical’ brand name has become toxic – and deservedly so. Now the 50 year-old Christian organization, “Evangelicals for Social Action’ a moderate, apolitical organisation that advocates for social justice, has changed its name to “Christians for Social Action” in order to distance themselves from Donald Trump and those ‘Christians’ who associate with him.
According to Christianity Today:
The election of President Donald Trump, who embraced his white evangelical backing, represents an inflection point for evangelical identity in the US. Fifteen percent of those who considered themselves “evangelical” or “born again” in 2016 had stopped using either label by the following year, according to one voter survey, even though the overall number of evangelicals had held steady.
Yes, you read that right. 15% of self-identified Evangelicals in 2016 were so embarrassed by Trump and the evangelical association with him that they stopped using the term to describe themselves within a year of his election! In 2016, 81% of self-identified evangelical Christians had voted for Trump.
As Ron Sider, founder of the former Evangelicals for Social Action, put it:
Popular media learned … that evangelical has often meant unjust and unbiblical.
That neatly sums up Donald Trump and those hypocritical conservative Christians who call themselves evangelicals, but still support him – unjust and unbiblical.
The tantalising promise of power and influence was enough for white evangelicals to abandon the pretence of human decency and reveal their true, hate-filled, self-interested casual disregard for the basic rights of others. Not surprisingly, the few remaining decent Christians now want to distance themselves from the repugnant racism, greed and selfishness that characterises their fellow white evangelicals, to whom the purpose of Christianity is to provide them with excuses.
As an earlier article in Christianity Today argued:
The 2016 presidential election heightened an ongoing discussion over the allegiance of American evangelicals to the Republican Party.
As countless articles and social media posts have observed, Donald Trump’s presidency has led many church leaders to warn against a too-warm embrace of politics and politicians, as well as led many Christians to rethink their involvement and identity as evangelicals.
If a militant Atheist had wanted to devise a trap to expose the hypocrisy of conservative evangelical Christians, he/she could scarcely have done any better than to put up Donald Trump as a presidential candidate.
If any good can come from the Trump presidency it is to expose the hypocrisy and self-interest of the white evangelical Christians who supported him no matter how unjust and unbiblical he became. Hopefully, his legacy will be a millstone round the necks of those conservative Christians whom history will remember were this most morally bankrupt, divisive, dishonest, incompetent and ‘un-Christian’ of US president’s core supporters.
Originally published by Rosa Rubicondior, 09.17.2020, under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license.