LogFAQs > #945192918

The TC's post has essentially highlighted the problem - we've gotten to the point in our culture where being a "religious Christian" is essentially dependent on how vociferous you advocate for Republican policies, including things such as free market economics and military intervention in foreign countries, neither of which has anything to do with the Christian religion whatsoever, and if anything, are rather antithetical to what the religion actually teaches.

But back in the 70's and 80's, a significant portion of Southern Evangelicals threw their hats in with the Republican Party. Or rather, the Republican Party went out of its way to court southern evangelicals by adopting socially conservative and anti-communist stances. Folks like Billy Graham (he admitted as much in his later years) found themselves drawn to the Republican Party due to its strong anti-communist and anti-Soviet stance. This resulted in an uneasy marriage between the GOP and Evangelical Christianity - in the Election of 1980, for example, the GOP supported the lifelong-irreligious Ronald Reagan from hippie California over Jimmy Carter, who was, you know, an actual Southern Evangelical. This basically brought Republican policies and ideology into Church, and since the church was the center of American life back in the 70's and 80's South, being a 'Godly' individual basically meant supporting Reagan, fighting for lower taxes, and strong advocacy of military intervention.

In the years since, a couple of things have happened that have served to energize the ultra-conservative wing of the Republican party:

1. Churches are less influential than they have been before; church attendance is dwindling, but nonetheless the politics that the church brought into everyday southern/rural life have stayed, so you now have people who are irreligious who nonetheless still steeped deeply in to conservative identity politics, except they identify even stronger with the political aspect now that religion is out of the picture - this is basically what the "alt-right" is - they're people who have essentially dropped the Christian religion but they've retained the desire for belonging and the persecution complex, and thus they cling even stronger to conservative politics and become even more extreme. Some prominent Evangelical denominational leaders and pastors spoke out strongly against Trump back in 2016, but their congregations didn't really listen to them.
2. Some churches have tried to combat this lack of influence by trying to capitalize on people's fear and doubling down on their political stances. Politics gets people riled up *much* better than religion does. Trump draws crowds far better than pastors do, so they're basically trying to leech off him.

Combine these things, and, well, you have an even stronger attachment between Southern Evangelical Christianity and the Republican Party than there was in the 80s. Not a good sign. The thing is, the folks I know who are the most pro-Trump and pro-Republican are not usually the ones who are most well-studied of the Bible or the ones most active in church life - it's always the "Christian identity" and "Christian values" types, and those folks, from my experience, generally have a very poor understanding of the Bible to begin with, so I'm not particularly shocked that they'd be attracted to a charlatan like Trump.

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