Fading white evangelicals have made a desperate end-of-life bargain with Trump

[kpete]

Fading white evangelicals have made a desperate end-of-life bargain with Trump
Robert P. Jones, Opinion contributor Published 6:00 a.m. ET Sept. 6, 2017
They are a grieving community. After decades of equating growth with divine approval, they're on the losing side of demographics and LGBT rights.

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The engines of white evangelical decline are complex, but they are a combination of external factors, such as demographic change in the country as a whole, and internal factors, such as religious disaffiliation, particularly among younger adults who find themselves at odds with conservative Christian churches on issues like climate change and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights. As a result, the median age of white evangelical Protestants is now 55, while the median age of religiously unaffiliated Americans is 37. While 26% of seniors (ages 65 and older) are white evangelicals, only 8% of Americans under the age of 30 claim this identity.

The evangelical alliance with Trump can only be understood in the context of these fading vital signs among white evangelicals. They are, in many ways, a community grieving its losses. After decades of equating growth with divine approval, white evangelicals today are finding themselves on the losing side of demographic changes and LGBT rights, one of their founding and flagship issues. In the 1980s, a term like “the moral majority” had a certain plausibility; today, such a sweeping claim would be met with a mountain of counter-evidence from public opinion polls, progressive religious voices, changing laws and court decisions.

Thinking about white evangelicals as a grieving community opens up new ways of understanding their behavior. Drawing on her interactions with dying patients and their families in the 1960s, psychiatrist Elizabeth Kübler-Ross identified at least five common “stages” of grief, which have become staples of understanding responses to loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. As Kübler-Ross found, when the stubborn facts of one’s own demise don’t yield to denial or anger, people commonly attempt to make a grand deal to postpone the inevitable.

While there are some lingering pockets of denial, and anger was an all-too-visible feature of Trump’s campaign, thinking about the white evangelical/Trump alliance as an end-of-life bargain is illuminating. It helps explain, for example, how white evangelical leaders could ignore so many problematic aspects of Trump’s character. When the stakes are high enough and the sun is setting, grand bargains are struck. And it is in the nature of these deals that they are marked not by principle, but by desperation.


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the rest:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/09/06/fading-white-evangelicals-made-desperate-end-of-life-bargain-with-trump-robert-jones-column/635115001/

[dalton99a]

1. The sooner they go home to Satan, the better we'll all be

[Iliyah]

2. They made a pack with the devil.

Selfish sobs, the USA will suffer for this shit. They can never tell me how Godly they are.

[workinclasszero]

9. Totally agree

I think Bill Clinton is a choir boy compared to Trump and yet....

The "moral majority/white evangelicals" roundly condemned him for his transgressions but pussy grabbing adulterer, 3 times married Trump is God's holy instrument somehow!?

They also demonized President Obama and his awesome wife and their beautiful girls. A fine christian family!

They HATED them!!!

[Girard442]

3. I used to stick up for the evangelicals.

Although I thought many of their beliefs were misguided, I felt that they arose from a certain basic decency and an urge to do the right thing.

In the age of Trump, it's so obvious I was dead wrong. Conservative Christianity should be something only spoken of in history classes and museums, like the dodo.

[Initech]

4. I hope these people go away and never come back.

The damage they have done to this country in the name of Jay-sus has been incalculable. They are miserable enough. Why drag us down with them?

[yardwork]

5. I think that this gives them too much credit.

The white evangelical leaders in the U.S. are mostly con artists who use religion as a way to enrich themselves and bully others. They're not engaged in any grand bargain with Trump other than the big obvious one: how can we take even more money away from everybody else.

[Johonny]

7. +1

It's a dirty business. It's sick to watch these con men fleece poor and middle class people out of thousands while claiming the word of God. You see people eating cat food to save enough money to give these people to do Gods work.

[Phoenix61]

6. I think this is probaby true of the followers

Not so much for their leaders. I think they recognize Twitler is one of them, a con who will say or do anything to make a quick buck.

[crazycatlady]

8. They've turned an entire generation away from Christianity

The Millennial generation (and younger) doesn't know life before the evangelical GOP marriage. To many (including myself), Christianity was always about conservative politics.

[workinclasszero]

10. They have just about destroyed the gospel of Jesus Christ IMO

Republicans/prosperity doctrine and dominionism have laid waste to the gospel of Jesus in America.

It's terrible thing.