Explains much. Slate - "Bad Religion...How Trump is warping Christianity for his own gain"

[NRaleighLiberal]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/02/trump_s_sick_successful_pitch_to_american_christians.html

by William Saletan

Three minutes into his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, Donald Trump ridiculed Arnold Schwarzenegger, his successor on The Apprentice. “It’s been a total disaster,” Trump said. The show’s producer, Mark Burnett, who introduced Trump at the breakfast, “will never, ever bet against Trump again,” he continued. “And I want to just pray for Arnold, if we can, for those ratings.”


On one level, Trump was joking. On another, he was dishing out his usual spite. Trump talks this way to all audiences, including religious ones. He has no sense of reverence or transcendent values. He fills his emptiness with the creed of Trump: narcissism, profit, and demagoguery.

To Trump, Christians are a curious sect (“such nice religious people,” they “have that great religious feel”), and the Bible is a foreign text (“2 Corinthians”). At a closed-door meeting of conservative evangelicals last summer, Trump said he wanted to get America back to the days when going to Sunday school was “automatic.” He understands rote observance, not belief.

Lacking a sense of God, Trump focuses on his usual object of worship: himself. A year ago, Trump opened his remarks at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University by bragging about the attendance: “The first thing I said to Jerry and Becky when I got here [was], ‘Did we break the record?’ ” He talked about his polls, his book sales (“I wrote many best-sellers”), his education (“I went to a great school, Ivy League school”), and his uncle (a professor at MIT, “if you believe in genes”). He described the November 2015 terror attacks in Paris, which killed 130 people, as the incident that had launched him to the front of the Republican pack. Months later, in a speech to the Faith and Freedom Coalition, Trump lauded his children: “Through God, they were born intelligent. They went to top colleges.”

snip

a few other nuggets - my bolding

Real Christians measure themselves by their fidelity and service to God. Trump measures them by their fidelity and service to Trump.

It would be unfair to dismiss Trump as merely vain or transactional. He also delights in exploiting prejudice.

By reducing Christianity to a message of tribal warfare and transactional advantage, as others on the right have done, Trump has rallied many American Christians behind three immoral ideas (read the article for these)

last sentence -

There is a sickness in American Christianity, and Trump is feeding on it. Pray on that.

[teach1st]

1. Top comment to the article

"Remember during the days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, when the world was on edge, the three martini lunch was socially acceptable? I totally get that now."

[Wounded Bear]

2. Trump ain't "warping" shit...Christianity is already kind of warped...

at least the most vocal part of it. How Evangelicals can morph this asshole into some kind of savior blows my mind.

[Takket]

3. Trump exploits the pre-existing warping of Christianity

The GOP has for years been preaching amoral behavior contrary to Christianity while at the same time they are saying their values are Christian values. It is a complete paradox but son of a bitch if it doesn't actually work for them.

If modern evangelicals actually read and believed in the Bible, they would all vote democrat.

[D_Master81]

4. As someone who's an "evangelical Dem"

Many people in church have just been raised their whole life to be a Republican and thats just what you do every 4 yrs, you go vote Republican. That and the Dems being pro choice has kept many out of the Dem tent.

[elmac]

5. tRump voters in my town who never attended Church

are flocking to churches now thinking that God put him on the throne. Its sickening, its like a mass hysteria.

[SleeplessinSoCal]

6. that's about the scariest thing I've heard all night.

[elmac]

7. seriously, it reminds me of Invasion of the Body Snatchers

scary stuff.