I believe the Republican base wants to be told “You’re right to be frightened. You should be frightened. But I will save you.”
I wonder if using the label “evangelical” was a fad that peaked in the 2000s? I literally never heard the word “evangelical” in my life (albeit in the Northeast) until around the time G.W. Bush got elected, and then it was suddenly everywhere overnight.
Just because unions have gotten greedy doesn’t mean management isn’t greedy any more themselves. Neither side is good; everyone wants more money for themselves in return for doing less. Whenever I have argued against the bad things unions have done, I always get told “look at all the things they did in the past!” which is like calling Republicans the party of Lincoln, and “the management is even more greedy than us”, which basically turns it into a Israeli/Palestinian conflict, where both sides do terrible things and think that they deserve support because of how terrible the other side is.
Don’t listen to him, 'luci.
I’m on my way over to his house to short-sheet his bed.
But, in that sense, the evangelical bloc still exists and will continue to vote as it does now and has been voting for decades. What practical political difference does it make how many of them are really devoted to Jesus?
“Gorgias said that you should kill your opponents’ earnestness with jesting and their jesting with earnestness; in which he was right.”
– Rhetoric, Aristotle
Yeah, well, the difference is, management badness is still relevant in a way union badness is not, with only 11% of American workers belonging to any labor union, but all American workers dependent on the decisions of management.
Read my paragraph again: Supply side economics? Nativist nationalism? Gun rights? Military interventionism? Union-busting? Really, they were first religious positions?
You (twice now) make a specific point about “greedy unions” – but yourself recognized hostility to unions did not become an issue until very very late, so it was NOT a primary Christian-doctrinal issue and like others have suggestes, if it were a matter of Christians rejecting greed when they see it, they would have been all over the OWS sit-ins (… but of course, that was not rejection of greed, that was acting out of envy, right?). You looked like you were ignoring most of the question in order to make your pet point, and that earned you the snarky responses.
But to address you seriously: the gist was, you CAN be pro-life, anti-gay, creationist, these being being presumably Evangelical positions, YET, at the same time, without being outside the Gospel as it has been understood by most of christendom for most of its history(*), be for either liberal or conservative positions on things like gun control, ethnoracial integration and military posture.
The Falwell types of the 70s and the political conservatives who welcomed them were the ones that, as a counterreaction to the 60s, put together a “package” deal of the conservative political values with the traditionalist religious values as if the ones mandated the others in both directions.
But what’s more the point of the thread is that the Moral Majority/Christian Coalition types fostered among the GOP and CPAC a myth that “Traditional Values” voters were close to a 1:1 set with committed Evangelical believers, and their votes were theirs to deliver as kingmakers; they are discovering that this is not really so, that after a generation and a half of commingling the values, a bunch of people have grown up calling themselves “Evangelical” taking it for granted their primary defining values are not really theological ones but political ones… and so are the leaders they will follow.
The problem for the “Evangelical Establishment” is this leaves them as hollowed out as the GOP establishment: if they can’t promise to deliver the votes any more, power and influence goes away…
(*here hedging as to how Modern American Fundamentalism is a relative Johnny-come-lately to Christian theological history)
BTW Flyer picked weak examples to tie in to a scriptural basis for unorganized labor or capitalism. There are better ones. The quote from Luke 3:14 “And the soldiers likewise demanded of him, saying, And what shall we do? And he said unto them, Do violence to no man, neither accuse any falsely; and be content with your wages” when studied in context is understood as an exhortation to the soldiers to* not shake down the citizens or accept bribes*.
Unions are usually corrupt now. But historically they created the middle class. Which we should all be grateful to have lived during the era of. Our descendants might not be so lucky.
It would be completely absurd to attack the “problem” of unions without acknowledging the problems of wealth concentration and capitalism. Jesus was not so unsubtle.
Beat me to it. Under Flyer’s logic, “render to Caesar” would mean you couldn’t try to get your taxes lower. Or the stuff about respecting authority would be anti-democracy, as you couldn’t vote against those who were currently in authority.
That scripture doesn’t mean you can’t negotiate for higher wages. It means to be content with the wages once you get them instead of taking money under the table.
Hence why modern translations read something more like the NIV: “Then some soldiers asked him, ‘And what should we do?’ He replied, ‘Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people falsely–be content with your pay.’”
I mean, he had just gotten through telling the tax collectors not to take more money than they were required–telling them not to cheat people by keeping some money for themselves–the very reason why “tax collectors and sinners” was common phrase.
Even literalists look at the Scriptural context, do you don’t wind up, for example, handling venomous snakes for fun.
Though, to be fair, Wallis identifies himself as part of the Evangelical Left so his view is a bit different on the whole affair.
True. Evangelical can mean left or right depending on where the Gospel stands vs. the “World” at a given place and time, as you interpret it, asking for guidance from the Spirit.
And I suspect the OP may want us to get over the whole union thing and consider whither the Political Evangelical Movement is headed.
(Bolding, mine)
Cite?
I’m guessing, based on you quoting this here, that you’ve never in your life asked for a raise? Or left one job for another one because it paid better? And why does that injunction only apply to unions looking to get more money for their workers, and not to the businesses, who are trying to keep their own profits up by paying their workers less? Why are the unions the only ones being greedy and covetous there? And if Luke 3:14 is the Bible being anti Union, how is Luke 3:11 not the Bible being anti-capitalist?
For that matter, are you sure that “wages” in Luke 3:14 refers to money? Because his first instruction to the soldiers is to “do violence to no man.” Which, being soldiers, is kind of their job. If they follow his first instruction, it seems likely to me that they’re not going to get any wages. So either John the Baptist is saying that they should be destitute (also a pretty anti-capitalist message) or that the “wages” they should be content with are moral, not financial. “Stop poking people with swords, and you’ll get something more valuable than money,” seems a pretty Christ-like sentiment.
Although not, generally speaking, terribly Christian.
I don’t quite follow the logic of the OP.
Where is the “collapse”? And why is it a huge, important development?
The NPR article simply states that some honest Christian leaders don’t like Trump (mostly because of his non-churchgoing lifestyle and gambling, apparently. Not because of his political ideas).
And the article explains that these leaders seem surprised that millions of their flock do like Trump. So some of the leaders have decided to change their self-imposed label of “Evangelical” to something else, because they want to emphasize that they are not Trump supporters.
Where is the “collapse”? The millions of Trump supporters will still vote for Trump, even if their pastors don’t. They constitute a massive bloc of voters, whose support Trump can definitely count on when election day arrives.
NPR is trying to deny that, and trying to call it a huge change. But that denial is merely wishful thinking by liberals… who remain baffled and unable to believe that there are citizens out there who don’t follow the rules of political correctness.
The millions of Evangelicals who support Trump do so for social reasons, not theological ones.
Churches in general exist for social reasons, not theological ones.
Look at any congregation,in any neighborhood near you, and you will find that almost all of the people in the pews are from the same socio-economic segment of society. Humans are social animals, and they attend church mostly for social reasons. A little Gospel is nice, but only if , when the service is over, you feel socially comfortable chatting with the person in the pew next to you. A Wall street lawyer who wants to chat about the stock market, and a factory worker who wants to chat about his new hunting rifle don’t usually attend the same church, even if they both have the same religious beliefs.
The evangelical pastors that NPR quotes surely have noticed this. (even if NPR is unaware of it because its reporters have lived their entire lives in Manhatten and don’t understand life in the red states.)
So, I don’t see the OP’s claim that there is a collapse of the voting bloc.
There is a huge bloc of scared voters who support Trump.
Many of them attend evangelical churches.
They will continue to do both.
Those that are evangelical not being a simple and overwhlemingly cohesive block isn’t necessarily news. Obama got 20 and 26% of the evangelical vote in the last two elections. Evangelicalism is just a movement within the diverse protestant traditions. Evangelicals lean towards certain social stands that tend to line up with other social conservatives. They don’t all line up exactly with those issues or vote only on social issues.
The news is claims about the cohesiveness of evangelicals are certainly in public question. That can have an impact even if their actual cohesiveness hasn’t changed.
Yeah, you’re a Sith. What do you know?
So was the last Pope.
Given his skills with the Force, probably more than you expect. 
We generally associate this with communism: it was actually part of the 1936 Soviet Constitution, via V. I. Lenin, who was excessively fond of this injunction — being a sour little puritan — and also by that point as dead as St. Paul ( bis ).
However the more libertarian wing of the GOP and the Tea Partyiers are pretty well bolshevik in all but name, in logic, brutishness, primacy of economics and shrill intolerance, and aught else save for socio-economic theory.