More About the Religious Right and Trump

I didn't know one-time New York Times reporter Michael Luo is now editor of The New Yorker.  That is quite a big deal, and I am glad he has a great job with one of  the best magazines in the country.

About eight or ten years ago, when Luo was with the NYT, he was doing a feature piece on people who were struggling after being laid off from their jobs.  At that time I was a member of a discussion board which was for unemployed people.  Somebody must have known him and tipped him off about the site.  Luo contacted a number of unemployed people from around the country, and I was one of them he contacted.  I corresponded with him via email, and I might have even interviewed with him over the phone, but I think it was exclusively email, about my struggles, which are still ongoing.  It was quite an honor to be interviewed  by a well-known reporter from the Newspaper of Record.  He and the editors decided on someone else to profile, IIRC a woman who was living in a motel, but it was still quite a feat to be interviewed.

Anyway, I thought I would note Luo here.  I did mention him a couple of times on this blog way back nine years ago this month, December of 2010.  I noted then I didn't get back to him in time for him to get my story printed.

Why did I mention him?  Well, two days ago I wrote a blog post speculating as to why the religious right--misnamed by the media as "evangelicals"--continues its dogged support of Donald Trump.  Michael Luo wrote a piece the other day doing the same thing.  Luo does note this about the word "evangelical":

“ ‘Evangelical’ used to denote people who claimed the high moral ground; now, in popular usage, the word is nearly synonymous with ‘hypocrite,’ ” Keller writes. Last year, a group of evangelical pastors, nonprofit leaders, college presidents, and scholars convened at the Billy Graham Center, at Wheaton College, in Illinois, to discuss ways to revitalize the movement in light of its turn toward Trumpism. The meeting disbanded with little to show for it, but the organizers issued a press release that states that an “honest dialogue about the current state of American evangelicalism” had occurred.

Some, like Luo, call this either Christian populism or Christian nationalism, but these people, since around 1980, have been labeled the "religious right." "Evangelical" is a wrongheaded label because most "evangelicals" are not of the religious right, let alone dominionists, let alone followers of the New Apostolic Reformation, which is simply a rebranding of dominionism or Christian Reconstructionism to make it more palatable to the public. These people have long been fascistic in bent, but now, with an insane person in the White House who doesn't hide the fact he is crazy and corrupt, they believe their fantasy of permanent rule is at hand.

And, as I noted the other day, they are nostalgic for an era that has long passed, the 1950s, and was out of reach for many (women, people of color, and so forth) during that era.  Good riddance to it.

As for Trump's followers, they are NEVER going to change.  They are lost.  They are steeped in xenophobia, racism, and especially sexism.  They were raised with such beliefs.  If they were to question those beliefs, their tenuous hold on reality would shatter.

A Long Life

This morning I woke up to the news that celebrated evangelist Billy Graham, the first television religious superstar, had passed away at his home in North Carolina.  He would have turned 100 this year.

Graham's charisma, his considerable public speaking skills, and his matinee-idol good looks made him a major celebrity in addition to being a major religious figure in the second half of the twentieth century.  Periodically he would have televised specials of what he called "crusades" from all over the world.  Usually singer George Beverly Shea, who like Graham lived to a ripe old age (he died in 2013 at the impressive age of 104) would sing a hymn before Graham took the stage.  Graham would always get crowds in the tens of thousands, like a major rock star, and he would deliver fiery sermons.  However, as I recall, few if any of them were overtly political.  They were nonpartisan as I remember, mostly talking about various tenets of Christianity and the need for people to get their lives right for Jesus.  He would be parodied by comedians, but he continued on well into old age until Parkinson's disease slowed him down for good and he had to retire.

At that point, one of his four children, Franklin Graham, who resembled his dad in his looks but not in any other way, took over and has turned into a real piece of work. That is not meant to be flattering to the younger Graham.  Any resemblance to him and his dad is purely coincidental.  While his dad was known to pal around with various presidents of both parties--especially Richard Nixon, which tarnished Graham when Nixon and his presidency went down in scandal--Franklin has been overtly political, a real religious extremist.  His dad wasn't that way at all. He was friends with Martin Luther King, Jr.  I had heard the late Tammy Faye Messner once say Billy Graham was in fact a registered Democrat.  I don't know how true that it is.  However,  I do know he was relatively benign on the political front compared to a lot of others.

Graham was married to Ruth Bell for many years until she died in 2007.  He met her at Wheaton College, where she was also a student.  She was a Presbyterian, while he was a Baptist, but they didn't seem to have any problem with it.

From the article:

Graham built his ministry by bringing the gospel message of tent-revival preachers into the modern media age, using any tool at his disposal -- from telegrams to telephones to satellites and the Internet -- to "win souls for Christ."

In doing so, Graham formed a bridge between the itinerant preachers like Dwight Moody and Billy Sunday who once crisscrossed the country in search of lost souls and contemporary Christian pastors like Joel Osteen, Rick Warren and T.D. Jakes.

"He saw himself as using new media to deliver a very old message," said Randall Balmer, an expert on American religious history at Dartmouth College.

That message, as Graham said during thousands of altar calls, was that salvation is offered to one and all, black and white, rich and poor, men and women, sinners and saints, so long as they believed in Jesus.