Jesus or Trump? Conservative Christians Face Growing Rift

[jojoju1998]

https://www.newsweek.com/conservative-christians-evangelical-donald-trump-rift-1821698

""There are actually people who are not in any recognizable sense Christian but who identify as evangelical, partly because of the way that term has been kind of associated with Donald Trump and with a right-wing political orbit," Carter said."

[jojoju1998]

Trump didn't start this and if you think he's entirely to blame for this phenomenon then you've missed the fact that Christian America has been almost entirely apostate for decades now. They know nothing about even some of the most universally recognizable stories from the Bible, and it's entirely a cultural movement. That's all it is to them and that's all it's been for many years. The current culture war accelerated it, but this has been a long time coming.

The same trajectory has been noted for Judaism and the LDS Church. 

Back in the 1980's, an article was published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion that examined the beliefs of LDS church members regarding evolution, going back decades (can't remember whether the polls started in the 30's or 50's).  First of all, LDS, whatever else you may think it teaches, has not had a problem with an old geological earth since ~1900 and with evolution - even human evolution - since the 1960's.  But, since then, the percent of LDS members who 1) disapproved of these concepts and 2) thought that their church disapproved of these concepts, had increased.  The authors correlated that with other political views of LDS church members which had grown more conservative in the previous 20 years.  The authors concluded that numerous LDS members were adopting more conservative political positions to align themselves with the evangelical/fundamentalist Protestant tide, even to the point of (unknowingly) contradicting their own church.*

Starting in about 1980 (note year), I was perceiving that numerous fellow Jews, across the religious spectrum, were not just leaving the Democratic Party to vote GOP because of opposition to Carter's peace treaty with Begin and Sadat, but were also adopting all sorts of anti-environmentalist, racist, anti-science positions that aligned with evangelical/fundamentalist Protestants, even if they contradicted Jewish teaching.  Here I was this kosher Conservative Jew, who walked miles to synagogue on Yom Kippur, and I was being called a commie by totally irreligious Jews who literally knew not a word of Hebrew, and who laughed at things like the aforementioned dietary laws or Yom Kippur observances.  Because they supported Reagan and I did not.  Meanwhile, my own rabbi, who once gave the most blistering anti-Goldwater sermon I had ever heard, had started preaching like "Reverend Falwell" (my father's words - I mean, he only co-founded the congregation).

Cut to the present, and I'm reading all sorts of examples about Chassidic rabbis breaking all sorts of Talmudic animal treatment laws, because animal rights is for liberals.

*In the years since, I have read that numerous people have left the LDS and RCC for fundamentalist Protestant churches when, to their horror, they find out that the church that they have grown up in was not a fundamentalist one. 

Alot of the Fundamentalist Evangelicals are converting to Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox because of the supposed " conservativism " that these churches have, and a growing obsession with " classical " things.



Then they freak out when Pope Francis talks about caring about the environment....