The Bible is against ownership or investment income, then. Not very capitalist at all.
Here is the context:
This passage says nothing about unionization. It’s about the wrongness of stealing money from the people whose taxes you are collecting.
Actually Roman soldiers frequently spent their free time extorting money or other goods from civilians all over the Empire.
This was not on behalf of, nor passed on to, the authorities.
George Lakoff, the originator of the theory that conceptions of family explain liberalism or conservatism, discusses Donald Trump: AGEN138 ©️ Link Daftar Situs Slot Online Gacor Hari Ini & Agen Slot Terbaru
He delineates white Evangelical Christians, laissez-fair free market conservatives, and pragmatic conservatives. Trump is in the last camp.
Acts 4-5 describes the very first Christian church established in Jerusalem. Sounds pretty socialist–even communist–to me:
I think earlier than that it was maybe “Moral Majority” or “fundamentalist”?
I don’t think that’s right, because we never saw significant numbers of them vote for someone so obviously irreligious and profane as Drumpf. And while Drumpf got the plurality of self-proclaimed evangelical voters in some states, he certainly didn’t get the overwhelming majority–some of whom presumably share these evangelical leaders’ disgust for him. So really, they aren’t the “bloc” these evangelical leaders thought they were. There may be some real bloc, but it’s a significantly smaller group than they always thought.
Thank you for that link.
Makes perfect sense; if you’re willing to believe what some fictional book thumping clown says, you’re sure as hell ripe for Trump’s leadership - all praise.
An interesting line in Measure for Measure’s quoted Lakoff article, is to the effect that most the people who upon having a religious awakening choose an Evangelical church are those who already lean towards traditionalist-conservative values in their lives.
Which would correspond with a scenario in which those who do vote based on Conservative Evangelical *pastoral *guidance may have stayed with Cruz, but they are not enough to make him the winner. ( FWIW they have never been enough to be the ones to decide the winner of the Republican nomination by themselves. Both Bushes, Dole, McCain, Romney… not exactly a Hall of Fame of pious Bible-thumpers. Just that this time around the bluff got called.)
Makes sense.
That supposition was already upended with conservative-Christian support for divorced-and-remarried non-churchgoing Hollywood celebrity Ronald Reagan in 1980.
It may be hard to remember what an eyebrow-raiser that was at the time: in fact, Reagan remains the only POTUS so far to have been divorced.
But conservative Christians get divorced a lot too, so it didn’t bother them as long as he verbally endorsed socially conservative values.
Same thing for Sarah Palin, a mother of young children (one of them a special-needs infant) who didn’t stay home to care for her family but was actively involved in time- and travel-intensive national political campaigning, and whose eldest daughter is a single mother twice over.
As long as a self-professed social conservative candidate is vociferous enough about slamming liberals, conservative Christians don’t seem to mind much if they don’t practice conservative Christian values in their own lives.
Consequently, I don’t see Trump’s success among them as in any way anomalous.
It’s not so much that the “evangelical” vote has collapsed. It’s more that evangelicals were never as monolithic as widely assumed.
To use an analogy, people sometimes talk about “the” Catholic Vote. But there ISN’T “a” Catholic vote, and never was. "The"Catholic vote consists of multiples parts that don’t have much in common with each other. Many people who identify as “Catholic” on a survey rarely or never go to Church. Many more go to Church regularly, but ignore most Church teachings while in the voting booth. Some embrace Catholic doctrine on abortion but reject Catholic teachings on poverty or the death penalty (while others do just the reverse).
So, if Pope Francis condemns Donald Trump’s policies on immigration, Trump can safely tell the Pope to go jump in the lake without worrying about alienating the Catholics who already support him. A blue-collar, Irish-American, nominal Catholic in “Southie” Boston probably thinks it’s GREAT that Trump told the Pope where to stick it!
It’s no different in parts of the South widely perceived as dominated by evangelical Christians. Some people who identify as “Baptist” or “evangelical” rarely go to Church. Some affirm all of the Bible’s teachings but either don’t know or care what the Bible actually says. Some don’t vote at all, some vote only occasionally, some vote their pocketbooks without worrying about social issues, some CARE about Church teachings but have more immediate personal priorities (a Granny in Alabama may hate abortion and gay marriage, but she’ll still vote Democrat if she’s more worried about cuts to Social Security), and so on. Only a certain number of evangelical Christians are BOTH committed to their faith’s core teachings AND determined to vote only for candidates who share those principles.
That’s always been the case. Remember that, until the Sixties, both parties shared pretty much the same stances on social issues. In 1956, a devout Baptist in Mississippi would have voted for Adlai Stevenson, because that made good economic sense, and there was no sense that Adlai would do anything to change the moral order.
There are STILL plenty of Southern Christians who are inclined to vote their pocketbooks, regardless of moral issues. Donald Trump is speaking THEIR language.
From what I remember reading, the Catholic vote is significant in a different way. It almost always goes to the winner of the popular vote. So it is a key swing vote, or at least reflective of the nation at large.
Growing up Catholic in the Mid-Atlantic region, we never had lectures from priests telling us who to side with, and we never had a guest politician speaking at our pulpit like most evangelicals do. A Southern Baptist church can have any number of people talking politics at homily time, mixing and comparing their faith(s) to things like republican “family values”, “god-given rights”, etc.
I would give MORE sway to evangelicals siding with their preachers in Cruz’s latest upswing than giving credit to Romney and other desperate republicans trying to downplay Trump.
Interesting, so it could be a coincidence. That would explain why Rubio is not benefiting.
Another NPR story sheds some light:
Thanks to everyone for the linked articles and the intro to Vox. . . . and the snarky comments.
Good thread.
Reminds me of an old joke: Never take one Baptist (or one Mormon) fishing with you; they’ll drink all your beer. The solution: take two Baptists (or Mormons). 
And what’s the difference between a Baptist and a Methodist?
A Methodist will say “Hi!” to you in the liquor store.
Ha! Good ones, both of you.
Terry Mattingly at the Get Religion blog is one of my favorite writers on religion. On the subject of “the Catholic vote,” he has written that there are really four distinct and very different “Catholic Votes.” And I think something very similar holds true for the “Evangelical” vote.
1 Ex-Catholics. Solid for the Democrats. GOP has no chance.
- **Cultural Catholics **who may go to church a few times a year. This may be an undecided voter – check out that classic Atlantic Monthly tribes of American religion piece – depending on what is happening with the economy, foreign policy, etc. Leans to Democrats.
3 Sunday-morning American Catholics. This voter is a regular in the pew and may even play some leadership role in the parish. This is the Catholic voter that is really up for grabs, the true swing voter that the candidates are after.
- **The “Sweats The Details” Roman Catholic **who goes to confession. Is active in the full sacramental life of the parish and almost always backs the Vatican, when it comes to matters of faith and practice. This is where the GOP has made its big gains in recent decades, but it is a very small slice of the American Catholic pie.