Donald Trump: ‘nobody Has Done More For Christianity Than I Have’
The former President of the United States says no one has done more for the Christian faith than he has.
Donald Trump has been making an appearance, via telephone, on the Christian TV station The Victory Channel.
Speaking to Gene Bailey on Flashpoint, he said: “Nobody has done more for Christianity, or for evangelicals, or for religion itself, than I have.
“So many different things, getting rid of the Johnson amendment, Mexico City policy, and we could go down a list of items.”
Trump also took time to criticise his successor, labelling Joe Biden’s administration “far worse that anybody ever thought”.
He said: “You talk about abortion, you talk about all of the subjects that you do every Sunday and during the week, and he’s terrible on these subjects.
“I said it was going to happen, but I had no idea was going to be this bad. You take a look at what they’re doing. It’s, it’s destructive.”
In a conversation which he appeared to be seeking further support, the 45th President also highlighted his work in the Middle East.
“Nobody’s done so much for Israel, as I have, with Jerusalem, and ending the Iran nuclear deal, which is a disaster.
“In the evangelical community I actually get probably more credit for that than I do with Jewish people. But Israel is a very important element.”
In recent weeks, Donald Trump has increased the number of media engagements, most of which come via telephone.
Trump Might Be The Most Pro
No doubt some Christian leaders have gone too far in rationalizing Trumps past personal behavior and excusing his offensive comments while in office. He is a deeply flawed man. But Trump does have one moral quality that deserves admiration: He keeps his promises.
Trumps election came as religious liberty was under unprecedented attack. The Obama administration was trying to force the Little Sisters of the Poor to violate their religious conscience and facilitate payment for abortifacient drugs and other contraceptives. During oral arguments in the Obergefell v. Hodges case, President Barack Obamas solicitor general told the Supreme Court that churches and universities could lose their tax-exempt status if they opposed same-sex marriage.
Hillary Clinton promised to escalate those attacks. In 2015, she declared at the Women in the World Summit that religious beliefs … have to be changed perhaps the most radical threat to religious liberty ever delivered by a major presidential candidate. Had Clinton won, she would have replaced the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia with a liberal jurist, giving the Supreme Court a liberal judicial-activist majority.
Indeed, Trump has arguably done more in his first year in office to protect life and religious freedom than any modern president. Little wonder that religious conservatives stick with him.
What Trump Reportedly Says In Private About His Christian Supporters
In public, Donald Trump presents himself as someone who honors and celebrates military service, but in private, it appears to be a very different story. Earlier this month, Jeffrey Goldberg wrote a stunning piece in The Atlantic about the Republican president denigrating those who wear the uniform, dismissing fallen heroes as “losers” and “suckers.”
Similarly, Trump also presents himself in public as a hero to people of faith, most notably Christian conservatives who are at the heart of his political base. It’s against this backdrop that The Atlantic has a new piece today from McKay Coppins, reporting that the president is quick behind closed doors to mock and show contempt for theistic allies.
In speeches and interviews, Trump routinely lavishes praise on conservative Christians, casting himself as their champion…. But in private, many of Trump’s comments about religion are marked by cynicism and contempt, according to people who have worked for him. Former aides told me they’ve heard Trump ridicule conservative religious leaders, dismiss various faith groups with cartoonish stereotypes, and deride certain rites and doctrines held sacred by many of the Americans who constitute his base.
In other words, Trump saw these preachers as con artists, and if the reporting is correct, he recognized their skills as familiar because of his own expertise in the area.
Almost certainly not.
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Christianity Will Have Power
Donald Trump made a promise to white evangelical Christians, whose support can seem mystifying to the outside observer.
Elizabeth Dias covers religion for The New York Times.
SIOUX CENTER, Iowa They walked to the sanctuary in the frozen silence before dawn, footsteps crunching over the snow. Soon, hundreds joined in line. It was January 2016, and the unlikely Republican front-runner, Donald J. Trump, had come to town.
He was the boastful, thrice-married, foul-mouthed star of The Apprentice. They were one of the most conservative Christian communities in the nation, with 19 churches in a town of about 7,500 people.
Many were skeptical, and came to witness the spectacle for themselves. A handful stood in silent protest. But when the doors opened and the pews filled, Mr. Trumps fans welcomed him by chanting his name. A man waved a Silent Majority Stands With Trump sign. A woman pointed a lone pink fingernail up to the sky.
In his dark suit and red tie, Mr. Trump stood in front of a three-story-tall pipe organ and waved his arms in time with their shouts: Trump, Trump, Trump.
I will tell you, Christianity is under tremendous siege, whether we want to talk about it or we dont want to talk about it, Mr. Trump said.
Christians make up the overwhelming majority of the country, he said. And then he slowed slightly to stress each next word: And yet we dont exert the power that we should have.
Theories, and rationalizations, abound:
One Cannot Really Love Jesus And Wish To Follow Him And Also Vote For A Person Who So Clearly Embodies The Opposite Of Everything Christ Taught Died For And Demands Of Us
1:05 PM on Nov 6, 2016 CST
As sociologists of religion, we are intrigued by the surprisingly large number of self-identified Christians, especially evangelicals, who support Trump and have voted for him over the more vocally religious Ted Cruz. In past elections, such voters were motivated by moral convictions around abortion, same sex-marriage, and the perceived deterioration of traditional values, and voted predictably for candidates such as Huckabee, Santorum, and most consequentially, George W. Bush.
These issues and their 2016 equivalents have never been central features of Trumps life history, let alone his candidacy, and on many of them he has confused, moderate or unclear positions. Whatever the appeal of Trump to evangelicals might be, it is not due to these conventional stances.
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1. He lacks compassion.
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He Will Vanquish All Our Foes
Micah Schouten cannot remember exactly why he did not go to hear Mr. Trump that morning. Probably it was just too cold, or maybe he was working.
As a child he dreamed of being a farmer like his father, but land was too expensive. Now he worked at a cattle reproduction company or, as he explained with a smile, I.V.F. for cows.
At the time, he supported Ben Carson. But Mr. Trump was a celebrity, and Dordt University, 10 minutes down the road, was Mr. Schoutens alma mater. The school was named for a major church assembly in 1618 and 1619 that declared salvation was only for Gods chosen ones, and expelled from Dutch territory anyone who disagreed. Its students are Dordt Defenders, represented by a knight in gray armor, wielding a sword like a cross.
So that night, after his three children went to bed, Mr. Schouten pulled up YouTube to hear it for himself.
Soon Mr. Trump made him laugh. The candidate bashed the media. He said the thing about shooting someone on Fifth Avenue. But the thing Mr. Schouten remembered most was that he defended Christianity.
Mr. Schouten, 36, is proud of his town and during a tour pointed out a community hospital and water park for children. Asked about the growing Latino population in Sioux Center, he drove to an area he did not know well and pointed out a trailer park where he said new arrivals, many of them Latino workers, live.
They prayed: With our God we shall be valiant, he will vanquish all our foes.
Trump Steadily Fulfills Goals On Religious Right Wish List
NEW YORK When Donald Trump assumed the presidency, conservative religious leaders drew up wish lists of steps they hoped hed take to oppose abortion and rein in the LGBTQ-rights movement. With a flurry of recent actions, Trumps administration is now winning their praise for aggressively fulfilling many of their goals.
Mat Staver, president of the legal advocacy organization Liberty Counsel, said Trump has fulfilled about 90% of the goals on a list that Staver and other conservative leaders compiled.
In the first two years of his administration, hes achieved more than all of the presidents combined since Ronald Reagan, Staver said. Hes been the most pro-religious freedom and pro-life president in modern history.
The same phenomenon being celebrated by religious conservatives is viewed with alarm by liberal activists.
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Ahead Of The 2020 Election Supporters And Critics Of President Donald Trump Are Sparring Over His Religious Freedom Record
Pastor Paula White, left, and other faith leaders pray with President Donald Trump, center, during a rally for evangelical supporters at the King Jesus International Ministry church, Friday, Jan. 3, 2020, in Miami.
Lynne Sladky, Associated Press
SALT LAKE CITY President Donald Trump cites his defense of religious freedom as a reason why Christians should support him in the 2020 election. But some critics say his approach to faith-related policies has done more harm than good.
Yes, hes stood up for religiously affiliated adoption agencies that, for religious reasons, dont want to screen same-sex couples. However, in the process, hes made it possible for some agencies to turn away people of faith who dont share their beliefs.
Yes, hes enabled most employers with a moral objection to birth control to exclude it from company health plans and supported the Catholic sisters who brought their contraception concerns to the Supreme Court. But his administration also rejected a Catholic dioceses efforts to retain control of land along the U.S.-Mexico border since it would interfere with border wall plans.
And yes, hes committed more government resources to preventing religious persecution around the world. Yet hes made harmful remarks about religious minority groups within the United States.
Its left room for both critics and supporters to stake positions on the president and religious liberty.
Trump and religion
Questioning Trumps record
The Advancement Of Christian Nationalism To Cover For Harmful Policies
The Trump administration has used religious nationalism to cover for policies that, far from reflecting many faith values, actually threaten the most vulnerable in society. In addition to serving as a cover, religious nationalism is a threat to the core American principle of the separation of church and state and risks the right of people of faith to freely exercise their faith in a pluralistic society. The nations highest political office has offered a distorted interpretation of Christian and faith values, and faith communities have been on the front lines of confronting this threat. One prominent example was the launch of a Christians Against Christian Nationalism campaign in August 2019.66
The Trump administration has most explicitly advanced this agenda through the widespread use of harmful religious exemptions. These exemptions have allowed even for-profit institutions to discriminate against religious minorities, LGBTQ people, women, and others, if they cite a religious reason for doing so.67 To date, the Trump administration has proposed or finalized more than 25 new regulations and five executive orders expanding religious exemptions and joined in litigation on numerous court cases to allow for the expansion of religious exemptions.
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Nominating Neil Gorsuch To The Us Supreme Court
There was arguably no more important issue to conservative evangelical voters going into last Novembers election than appointing a staunch constitutionalist to fill a Supreme Court seat left vacant by the death of the late Justice Antonin Scalia.
Evangelicals and social conservatives desperately wanted a justice to be nominated who could be counted on to side with conservatives in cases involving abortion and religious freedom. Many knew that if Democrat Hillary Clinton were to win the election, they would get the exact opposite and would further tilt the balance of the court to favor the political lefts social agenda.
During the campaign, Trump vowed to nominate a strict originalist jurist and even produced a shortlist of nominees, a list that was praised by many conservative activists and pro-life leaders.
On Jan. 31, Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch, a U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals judge who had previously sided with Hobby Lobby against the Obama administration in a 2013 contraception healthcare mandate case. By April, Gorsuch was confirmed by the Senate.
Gorsuchs nomination and confirmation was roundly praised by evangelical and social conservative leaders, even those who had expressed their concerns about Trump.
‘clearly Trying To Save Face’: Trump Endorses Two Gop Rivals In Same Race
Over the weekend, Herschel Walker addressed the Faith and Freedom Coalition, a gathering of social conservatives in Nashville, Tennessee. His speech came just days after Walker’s campaign publicly acknowledged he had three children by women he was not married to in addition to his son by his ex-wife.
Was the crowd skeptical of the Georgia Republican Senate nominee? Quite the contrary. reported that Walker “received resounding applause from evangelical Christian activists on Saturday.”How to explain that seeming contradiction? Enter , a professor of history at Calvin University. Du Mez is the author of The New York Times bestseller “,” a book that has had a profound impact on how I understand the rise of Donald Trump and his acolytes, like Walker.I reached out to Du Mez to chat about Walker, Trump and the broader Republican Party. Our conversation — conducted via email and lightly edited for flow — is below.Cillizza: Herschel Walker was cheered by a social conservative crowd over the weekend, just days after he acknowledged he has four kids, not the one most people thought he had. What gives?Du MezCillizza: In your book, you write that the rise of Donald Trump fits into a long pattern within the evangelical community. Explain.Du MezbecauseDu Mez
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Associate Professor Political Science And Policy Studies
We asked respondents on a range of 16 issues, Are you generally closer to the Democratic Party or the Republican Party when it comes to ? I selected six issues particularly relevant to the 2020 presidential election for deeper analysis: the economy, healthcare, gun control, immigration, the environment and abortion. In order to control for factors related both to issue preferences and to being an evangelical, I estimated logistic regression models that controlled for age, gender, income, education and whether a respondent lived in a rural, suburban or urban county. The figures below report results from those models. They compare the predicted likelihood of a respondent saying their views are closer to the Republican Party depending on whether a respondent identifies as evangelical or not. All figures are limited to white non-Hispanic registered North Carolina voters.
Some of the impact of evangelical identification is likely attributable to a mismatch in party registration and psychological party attachmenta legacy of historically conservative Southern Democrats who still have not changed their official party registration to Republican. However, these effects exist even when controlling for age and residence in a rural county. Thus, I expect the gap is driven more by religion presenting a partisan cleavage among a minority of Democrats in the swing state.
Evangelicals: Key for shoring the Republican base and persuading the middle
Donald Trump Quotes That Should Horrify His Evangelical Supporters
After months of campaigning, flip-flopping on important issues, and generally wreaking havoc on the party that for decades has presented itself as defenders of Christian America, Donald Trump took to the stage at the Republican National Convention and thanked the evangelicals who helped him get there.
At this moment, I would like to thank the evangelical and religious community because Ill tell you what. Because the support theyve given me, and Im not sure I totally deserve it, has been so amazing. And has had such a big reason for me being here tonight. True. So true.
So true, its cringeworthy.
White evangelical Protestants are a considerable force in the elections making up one-fifth of all registered voters. While a number of evangelical leaders have pointed out that Trumps policies and actions are decidedly un-Christian, rank-and-file white evangelical Americans have in fact thrown their support behind the candidate. According to the Pew Research Center, 78 percent of white evangelical voters say they would vote for Trump if the election were held today.
But if you place Trumps quotes, principles and policies next to the ideals set forth by Christianitys founder, the gap is startling. Trump has little regard for some of the fundamental teachings of Jesus Christ showing love for your neighbor, welcoming the stranger, and asking for Gods forgiveness.
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