Trump Is Delivering on the Religious Right’s Evangelical Sharia Wet Dream

Last updated on: May 1, 2017 at 12:12 pm by Frank Schaeffer

Trump Is Delivering on the Religious Right’s Evangelical Sharia Wet Dream 2017-05-01T12:12:03-06:00 Frank Schaeffer

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White evangelicals love Trump because he’s delivering what his core constituency craves: the real possibility of a white supremacist male-dominated Christian theocracy. Judging by Trump’s first 100 days he’s off to a resoundingly failed legislative start. Trump is however a resounding success at one thing: he’s delivering for the religious right.

One of the most extreme of the religious right leaders is Jerry Falwell Jr., the Liberty U college president. He’s the son of an old friend of mine Jerry Falwell Sr., who used to invite me to speak at his church and school before I fled the religious right. Back in my days as a religious right leader and sidekick to my evangelist father Francis Schaeffer, in the 1970s and 1980s, I helped Jerry Falwell Sr., spread his message of hate. Thus Trump’s rise as the New Great White Hope of my old misguided theocratic comrades strikes a personal note with me. (I tell the story of my flight from the religious right and change of mind in my memoir CRAZY FOR GOD: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back. In a new ABC interview Falwell berated moderate Republicans, who he said “make my blood boil.” Falwell Jr., enthusiastically praised Trump’s first 100 days of office. “I think evangelicals have found their dream president,” Falwell said in an interview with “Justice With Judge Jeanine” on Fox News. Here are some other ways the “dream” lives on for evangelicals:

Closing the door to the “Other” (in other words to brown, black, Muslim and Hindus)

White evangelicals love Trump for lots of reasons but one reason stands out: many of them are racists. Trump is too.

The history of the “Christian school” movement is the history of white flight and segregation. Jerry Falwell Sr., for example, started Lynchburg Christian Academy in 1967, when his town’s public schools integrated. Because Brown did not apply to private schools, institutions like Falwell’s could practice segregation while still receiving federal tax benefits. But all of this changed with the series of Supreme Court decisions in the late ’60s and early ’70s that forced public schools to integrate and declared racially discriminatory private schools ineligible for tax-exempt status.

Thus it was no surprise when Franklin Graham, son of the famed preacher Billy Graham, and leader of the charity Samaritan’s Purse, delivered a prayer from the inaugural podium of a white supremacist president. Graham defends Trump’s religion-based attempted ban of Muslims. “It’s not a biblical command for the country to let everyone in who wants to come, that’s not a Bible issue,” Graham told The Huffington Post.

In an interview with The Washington Post, Ralph Reed, chairman of the Faith and Freedom Coalition and the political strategist who spearheaded voter turnout efforts for Trump among right-wing evangelicals, called the executive order “an entirely prudent move.”

Trump said to CBN’s Brody that in the “extreme vetting” to be set in motion as a result of the order, persecuted Christians seeking asylum would be given priority over other persecuted people — a move whose constitutionality is highly questionable.

“We are going to help them,” Trump told Brody. Trump’s assertion that Christians have a harder time winning asylum in the US than do Muslims is rated by PolitiFact as false.

And Trump’s education secretary Betsy DeVos, is all about deconstructing public schools in favor of private religious schools- including the many all-white schools set up specifically (though often secretly so) to “save” white children the Other… READ THE REST HERE

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