Debating Christianity and Religion

bjs1 wrote: ↑Mon Oct 26, 2020 5:56 pm [Replying to Mithrae in post #1]

I am stupefied by the number of Christians, especially evangelicals, who support Trump. I think that racism must play a role in this, but I am not sure how significant that role is. This issue is certainly more complex than just racism.

Most notably, it appears that right now in America people are more likely to vote against a candidate instead of for one. That is, many people who say that they will vote for Trump do so mainly because they oppose Biden or the Democratic Party in general.

One piece of evidence for this hypothesis is that while the majority of Christians say that they will vote for Trump, the majority of Christians also have an unfavorable view of his presidency. This suggests that they are more voting against Biden than for Trump.

https://www.newsweek.com/trumps-approva ... ws-1514684

Mithrae wrote: ↑Wed Oct 28, 2020 8:32 am

bjs1 wrote: ↑Mon Oct 26, 2020 5:56 pm [Replying to Mithrae in post #1]

I am stupefied by the number of Christians, especially evangelicals, who support Trump. I think that racism must play a role in this, but I am not sure how significant that role is. This issue is certainly more complex than just racism.

Most notably, it appears that right now in America people are more likely to vote against a candidate instead of for one. That is, many people who say that they will vote for Trump do so mainly because they oppose Biden or the Democratic Party in general.

One piece of evidence for this hypothesis is that while the majority of Christians say that they will vote for Trump, the majority of Christians also have an unfavorable view of his presidency. This suggests that they are more voting against Biden than for Trump.

https://www.newsweek.com/trumps-approva ... ws-1514684

Simple opposition to the Democrat party could help explain polling and voting prior to the general election, but not the Republican primary results in which 93.99% of the popular vote went to Trump against other Republican contenders. "Donald Trump's over 18 millions votes he received in the Republican Primary is the most ever for an incumbent President in a primary."

Presumably that doesn't much reflect reactions to the emerging Covid19 death toll, but if George W. Bush had "fallen in love" with Saddam Hussein (etc. etc) would he even have managed to secure a second Republican nomination, let alone break records of overwhelming support?

bjs1 wrote: ↑Wed Oct 28, 2020 1:20 pm This seems like an apples to oranges comparison. We started with Christians supporting Trump, but this is about Republicans in general.

bjs1 wrote: ↑Wed Oct 28, 2020 1:20 pm Also, virtually every incumbent president, both for Republicans and Democrats, has set a new voting record in their primary. This is more about population increase than anything else. I will note that Trump had a larger bump in numbers than most, suggesting that he has a very supportive base.

bjs1 wrote: ↑Wed Oct 28, 2020 1:20 pm However, Trump does not compare well with other Republican incumbents. George W. Bush was unopposed. George H.W. Bush received more than 95% of the vote when he ran as an incumbent against Pat Buchannan. Ronald Regan won all but two delegates, both of whom abstained.

So Trumps primary victory as an incumbent strikes me as less significant.

Mithrae wrote: ↑Sun Oct 25, 2020 5:57 pm (I was considering putting this in the C&A forum, but I think that I know the answer and it probably belongs better here.)

A Pew poll from just a couple of weeks ago suggests that support for Donald Trump among Christians has slipped a little but still remains very strong - among white evangelical Protestants leading by 78% to Biden's 17%!

I suspect - and this is hardly an original point - that if Ted Cruz had denied, downplayed and mismanaged a national crisis contributing to even half as many American deaths as Donald Trump his support would have absolutely plummeted. If John McCain had repeatedly divorced, cheated, grabbed pussies and been accused by even a fraction as many alleged victims, America's self-appointed moral guardians would have thrown him to the outer darkness without a second thought. If any of the Bushes had lied as brazenly and constantly about issues big and small, or "fallen in love" with communist dictators, or made nice with Russia while undermining NATO... well, you get the idea.

So what miracle is responsible for this inexplicable level of Christian support for a man who has even openly said that he doesn't ask God to forgive his wrongdoing?

Is it some kind of mass demonic deception, or God himself "sending a strong delusion that they should believe the lie" to their own destruction?

Or has Donald Trump tapped into something much deeper than mere truth, common decency, geopolitical alignments, moral virtue signalling or even religious doctrine? It's not Christians per se who support Trump; black and hispanic Christians overwhelmingly reject him, as do Jews and all other groups except for white Christians. None of those other Republican politicians has even come close to the level of inflammatory, ambiguous and occasionally outright racist rhetoric as Trump. Surely many if not most old politicians have or had their prejudices ('clean and articulate' Biden obviously being no exception!) but they're usually at least nominally concealed behind a veneer of respect and respectability.

Is racism among white American Christians - perhaps a sense of being God's "chosen people" as the Israelite ethnicity had once been - the best way to understand their otherwise seemingly inexplicable support for this man?