{"id":85635,"date":"2016-01-18T10:19:09","date_gmt":"2016-01-18T18:19:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=85635"},"modified":"2023-09-07T02:24:09","modified_gmt":"2023-09-07T10:24:09","slug":"the-gospel-according-to-trump","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=85635","title":{"rendered":"The Gospel According to Trump"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Donald is simply keeping it real. If you are a Seventh-Day Adventist, all other religions seem weird if not evil. If you are Jewish, other religions seem false. If you are Christian, other religions seem false. If you are Catholic, Protestants seem like heretics. <\/p>\n

The stronger your in-group identity, the more likely you are to find outsiders strange and threatening.<\/p>\n

The United States was created by WASPs and their ethic ruled the country until the 1950s. <\/p>\n

From the New York Times<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\nBy MCKAY COPPINS<\/p>\n

\"download\"<\/a><\/p>\n

To him, if you\u2019re not a mainline Protestant, you\u2019re exotic, even sinister.<\/p>\n

IT is no secret that Donald J. Trump\u2019s ruinous rise in the Republican presidential primaries has been powered, in large part, by a naked agenda of religious division and fear-mongering \u2014 an agenda that will likely inform his speech today at Liberty University, a conservative Christian college in Lynchburg, Va.<\/p>\n

But while his anti-Muslim provocations have rightly drawn the largest share of public outrage, Mr. Trump has in fact been using his bully pulpit throughout this election season to attack religious minorities of all stripes. He deploys this tactic on the campaign trail whenever it suits his political purposes, and his religious digs and dog whistles are often so cartoonishly retro that they sound as if they\u2019re being delivered by a billionaire Archie Bunker.<\/p>\n

In the Gospel According to Trump, there is only one blessedly normal, all-American faith: mainline Protestant Christianity. The Presbyterians, the Methodists, the Baptists \u2014 those believers who once made up this country\u2019s midcentury religious mainstream \u2014 are Mr. Trump\u2019s \u201cchosen ones.\u201d He regards their customs and values as essentially as American as apple pie, while all other faith communities, even other forms of Christianity, seem to rest somewhere on a spectrum from exotic to sinister.<\/p>\n

Take Mr. Trump\u2019s bizarre speech last month to the Republican Jewish Coalition, where he kept inexplicably returning to the same well-worn tropes that anti-Semites have been using for a century. \u201cI\u2019m a negotiator, like you folks,\u201d he proclaimed to the crowd. Later, he sought to signal defiant distance from the Republican establishment by informing them: \u201cYou\u2019re not going to support me because I don\u2019t want your money.\u201d<\/p>\n

While speaking to a crowd of Florida supporters in October, Mr. Trump publicly hinted that there might be something nefarious about Ben Carson\u2019s Seventh-day Adventist faith. \u201cI\u2019m Presbyterian,\u201d Mr. Trump said. \u201cBoy, that\u2019s down the middle of the road, folks, in all fairness. I mean, Seventh-day Adventist, I don\u2019t know about. I just don\u2019t know about.\u201d<\/p>\n

More recently, he tried to blunt Ted Cruz\u2019s surge in the Iowa polls by using the senator\u2019s Cuban heritage to exoticize his Christian faith. \u201cI do like Ted Cruz,\u201d Mr. Trump said at a rally in Des Moines, \u201cbut not a lot of evangelicals come out of Cuba.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is an absurdity in seeing Donald Trump trying to play the role of 2016 religion referee. This is a man whose sincerest praise for the Bible is to deem it even better than his best-selling book \u201cThe Art of the Deal,\u201d a man whose most famous religious experience is having reportedly struck up a romance with his second wife among the pews of a Manhattan church (while he was still married to Ivana).<\/p>\n

But Mr. Trump\u2019s religious posturing is not about theology, it\u2019s about branding \u2014 and if his religious worldview seems impossibly dated, that\u2019s by design. His entire message, right down to his \u201cMake America Great Again\u201d campaign slogan, is rooted in a gnawing nostalgia and economic anxiety that grips much of the country\u2019s white working class. Mr. Trump\u2019s target demographic is not America\u2019s most devout, but its most anxious and aggrieved, and what he\u2019s selling isn\u2019t salvation, but a bygone era of plentiful factory jobs, robust pension funds and safe, monochromatic suburbs dotted with little white churches that everyone in town attended on Sundays.<\/p>\n

By focusing his rhetorical firepower largely on minority faiths that have grown in size and influence in the United States over the past 60 years \u2014 displacing the old Protestant monopoly \u2014 Mr. Trump is stoking a tribal hostility toward those who worship differently, one that hucksters have seized on throughout history to infect and co-opt America\u2019s faith communities. It is the same visceral force that animated the witch trials in Salem and set fire to the crosses in front of black churches.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Donald is simply keeping it real. If you are a Seventh-Day Adventist, all other religions seem weird if not evil. If you are Jewish, other religions seem false. If you are Christian, other religions seem false. If you are … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21791,35,29752,29620],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-85635","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america","category-christianity","category-donald-trump","category-wasps-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85635","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=85635"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85635\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":151222,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/85635\/revisions\/151222"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=85635"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=85635"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=85635"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}