12/15/2019

Why are evangelicals so in the tank for Trump?

I just wanted to get this insight down on virtual paper and for the record I will be painting with broad strokes.

Why are evangelicals so in the tank for Trump? I’ve seen some discussion online about how he fulfills their goals or how he is a “Cyrus”, or just an imperfect politician used by a God for godly purposes. And while some of that is what evangelicals will say, I am really intrigued that the craziness and cruelty of Trump seems to focus the evangelical enthusiasm from a practical allegiance to him for their political purposes to a white hot devotion.

The insight springs from an article linked to below, but my re-working of it is that central to the evangelical worldview is a STRONG authoritarian God, and with Trump their psyche is in love with him subconsciously because Trump's erratic behavior is on the same wavelength as their conception of God.

The more I thought of it the clearer it became. If you actually read the Old Testament, God is a really messed up deity. He is viciously cruel, unfair, and mercurial in judgments. And that is SO Trump! The whole thing falls into place with amazing clarity.

Of course there is the "Jesus" thing that is supposedly the Christian reason for the season, but when you can only hold one idea in your head at a time, cruelty generally wins out. And that is another amazing thing about evangelicals, they seem to somehow never notice any of the liberal and compassionate stuff in the Gospel and by some religious alchemy they filter away anything that an authoritarian sees as weakness.

So while I might see the Beatitudes as a temptation to join a Christian cult where there are irrational ideas like,
  • Blessed are the poor in spirit
  • Blessed are the meek
  • Blessed are they who hunger
  • Blessed are the merciful
  • Blessed are the peacemakers
These thoughts are ignored by any notable evangelical and in the age of Trump such revolutionary thoughts are actually anathema to the Trump/Republican way of life. Trump is always about being “strong”, being “really wealthy”, being bellicose, belligerent, and always threatening. Basically modern evangelicals have adopted Trump and anti-Beatitude framework.

The short version is evangelicals worship a cruel, confusing, mercurial God and Tump is a cruel, confusing, mercurial president. The connections make themselves.

the article is not perfect but still worth reading

https://evonomics.com/lakoff-no-one-knows-why-trump-is-winning/

2 comments:

bloftin2 said...

Trump really zeroed in on their particular cravings, didn't he?

ZeppoManx said...

"Trump really zeroed in on their particular cravings, didn't he?"

Yeah, but I bet he didn't really realize how successful he would be, after all, on paper he is is the opposite of an evangelical. But he was just being himself and wandered, unsuspecting, into a network of people and there was an almost chemical reaction that bonded them together.

In addition to an affection with authoritarianism I read that Trump was impressed with megachurch televangelists, and my theory is that he appreciated their brazen hucksterism and they feelthe same for him. They may come from wildly different backgrounds but Trump and Evangelicals have the same brain patterns.