Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
More Bad News: Persistent slaveholder religion among evangelicals for Trump
https://religionnews.com/2018/03/22/author-points-to-persistent-slaveholder-religion-among-evangelicals-for-trump/Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove is a Christian activist in North Carolina working with youth, prisoners, and neighborhoods. Much of his work these days is part of The Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival.
He’s also an author, most recently of Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion, just released from InterVarsity Press. In it, Jonathan draws a strong distinction between true evangelical Christianity and what he calls “slaveholder religion,” to which he fears many American evangelicals have fallen captive.
{snip}
For the Trumpvangelicals, this is a redemption presidency. In their imagination, they have deracialized a faith formed by the justification of race-based slavery. No one wants to think of themselves as racist. So they say the problem was not that Obama was black but that he was liberal, which to them equals immoral and ungodly in the same way that Reconstruction equaled immoral and ungodly in the minds of the redemptionists. But of course in both cases it had everything to do with race.
{snip}
For my son, with his experience of living in a black body, the idea of Trump as God’s man made absolutely no sense. Yet I could see that my grandfather, who had been told for generations that liberalism is immorality, and that immortality is what the Bible is against, was trying to reconcile that even if Trump was not a perfect candidate, he represented a way of winning that could defeat what my grandfather saw as liberal immorality.
He’s also an author, most recently of Reconstructing the Gospel: Finding Freedom from Slaveholder Religion, just released from InterVarsity Press. In it, Jonathan draws a strong distinction between true evangelical Christianity and what he calls “slaveholder religion,” to which he fears many American evangelicals have fallen captive.
{snip}
For the Trumpvangelicals, this is a redemption presidency. In their imagination, they have deracialized a faith formed by the justification of race-based slavery. No one wants to think of themselves as racist. So they say the problem was not that Obama was black but that he was liberal, which to them equals immoral and ungodly in the same way that Reconstruction equaled immoral and ungodly in the minds of the redemptionists. But of course in both cases it had everything to do with race.
{snip}
For my son, with his experience of living in a black body, the idea of Trump as God’s man made absolutely no sense. Yet I could see that my grandfather, who had been told for generations that liberalism is immorality, and that immortality is what the Bible is against, was trying to reconcile that even if Trump was not a perfect candidate, he represented a way of winning that could defeat what my grandfather saw as liberal immorality.
Much more at the link...