- This thread isn’t for bashing all Christians. This thread is about Christian groups that supported Trump but have changed course due to recent developments…if such groups actually exist.
- Press isn’t given so much as it is taken.
As a conservative Christian friend of mine put it, there is strife within every family, within every congregation, and it may take generations to recover.
On the one hand, there are those who are doubling down on their Trump fanaticism and their delusion that a Biden presidency will destroy America.
On the other hand, many Trump supporters have been shaken to the core by the sight of a sacrilegious mob blasting Christian pop music and chanting “Hang Mike Pence.” There have been defections and second thoughts. The Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, who delivered a prayer at the Trump inaugural, told his congregation Sunday, “We must all repent. Even the church needs to repent.”
The Trump-supporting Texas pastor John Hagee declared, “This was an assault on law. Attacking the Capitol was not patriotism. It was anarchy.” After staying basically level for four years, Trump’s approval ratings dropped roughly 10 points across several polls in a week.
The most popular piece on the Christianity Today website is headlined, “We Worship With the Magi, Not MAGA.”
You should probably take this up with the person who claimed that the insurrection was a Christian one.
I don’t know of any major Christian groups that were pro-Trump that have backed off but since I have no interest in them I’d be the last to know. I did come across this Facebook post by Jeremiah Johnson Ministries (which is also mentioned in GreenWyvern’s link). I don’t know how influential he is but he apparently has a TV show. So there is some backlash, if perhaps not enough.
Christians on the left have been against Trump from the beginning.
On the right … it would kind of be odd if sedition against America was the thing that finally got Evangelical Conservatives off the Trump Train. Sedition is a crime against a nation-state, and the Bible has very little to say about nation-states one way or another … and what it does say is often quite un-complimentary.
On the other hand, it does have a shit-ton to say about not oppressing the alien and stranger in your land. Anyone who glossed over the last four years of trampling on that principle but considers an attack on their country a bridge too far … well, okay, they’ve got some principles but they’re not the religious sort of principles.
Those Christians that underpin the insurrection have not made any public retraction of their position.
The idea of Christians in the U.S. generally being right-wing is a more recent thing than you might imagine. A lot of the opposition to the Vietnam War and support for civil rights in the 1960s was based in various Christian groups, for instance. There were a lot of left-wing Christians at that point. It was around that time that there began to be a movement of people from mainstream Protestant denominations (and to a small extent Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox people too) into churches that weren’t members of any denomination. These churches were often the ones that call themselves evangelical today and often were explicitly right-wing. Slowly from the 1960s to today people began to think of Christian groups as right-wing rather than left-wing. However, it’s an exaggeration both back then and now to think that most American Christians were clearly left-wing then and clearly right-wing now. The average political views have perhaps changed, but there has always been people of various political views who belong to Christian churches in the U.S. (or who don’t even belong to any Christian church but who call themselves Christian):
Got a cite for that? Because it doesn’t match what I’ve heard from prosecutors. They say, “If I’m advancing a complex case against the accused, I need smart jurors to understand it.”
It may be getting a bit far afield for the OP, but my answer is … yeah … kinda:
Litigating tends to involve a lot of showmanship and sales, the goal being to appeal to the passions of the juror. There are a lot of kinds of litigation where – to the article’s primary point – “A Blank Slate In The Jury Box” is a significant asset.
But from the article and to your point and mine:
And not all lawyers today look for jurors who are coming to a case with little knowledge of the subject matter. Asked about how he would pick jurors for Mr. Shkreli’s trial, Robert J. A. Zito, a longtime white-collar defense lawyer who will soon become a professor at Marist College, said, “I would want financial people on the jury, because the underlying transactions are very complicated.”
The thing is, though, American evangelicals largely buy into the idea that this nation-state is God’s favored nation. I agree that that’s totally unscriptural and a ridiculous thing for Christians to believe. But by and large, they believe it anyway.
So it would make sense that a seditious attack against America might get some of them to realize that, despite all the right-wing judges to protect the unborn baybeez, maybe Trump really isn’t God’s chosen.
The rejection only confirms their belief. ‘the stone that was cast aside’ Psalm 118:22 gets recycled during rejection.
Hence the words ‘might’ and ‘some’ in my concluding sentence.
Perhaps so - but that’s not the way I’d bet.
Oh, I would - I’m sure that some of them have gotten a wake-up call here about Trump.
Most of them? Nope.
But it makes sense that, for the reasons I gave, sedition might be the bridge too far for a decent number of them.
I suspect you do not live in Alabama or Northern Florida.
As a political group Christians are sneaky, hypocritical, and dishonest. The overt supporters of Trump among them were in it for the personal enrichment, the rest don’t make feelings known that clearly. They’ll be non-committal about supporting Trump and his ilk, stating only that they agree with his views on abortion and the economy. However, you won’t hear them object to anything until it carries a price with it.
Broad brushes are not conducive to reasonable discussion. For example:
As a political group white people are sneaky, hypocritical, and dishonest. The overt supporters of Trump among them were in it for the personal enrichment, the rest don’t make feelings known that clearly. They’ll be non-committal about supporting Trump and his ilk, stating only that they agree with his views on abortion and the economy. However, you won’t hear them object to anything until it carries a price with it.
Sure, some of the political groups that purport to represent white people and their values are much more blatant racists than that, but none of them less so.
I’ve got decades of experience with evangelicals, including five years as a math professor at an evangelical college in Appalachia, and a few decades of being married to a woman who grew up Southern Baptist in central Florida, and whose in-laws are still there and still Southern Baptist.
ETA: I should be specific that I’m talking about their attachment to Trump, not to American far-right conservatism in general. They’ll still be enthusiastically a part of that.
It’s worth noting that according to the Pew Research Center, only about 36% of all Christians in the US are Evangelicals.
Evangelicals 36%
Catholics 30%
Mainline Protestants and Black Churches 30%
Mormons and other 4%
The Pew site is actually quite interesting in many ways. For example:
Party affiliation among Christians
% of Christians who identify as…
Republican/lean Rep: 43%
No Lean: 17%
Democratic/lean Dem: 40%
Views about size of government among Christians
% of Christians who would rather have…
Smaller Government; Fewer Services: 54%
Bigger Government; More Services: 39%
So Christians in the US (at least in 2014) were more conservative than liberal, but there is a substantial population of liberal Christians.
And then there is this:
Views about abortion among Christians
% of Christians who say abortion should be…
Legal in all/most cases: 45%
Illegal in all/most casts: 51%
Views about same-sex marriage among Christians
% of Christians who …same-sex marriage
Strongly favor/favor: 44%
Oppose/Strongly oppose: 48%