Christians get president’s ear — and museum
President Trump’s born-again-like embrace of evangelical politics was the biggest religion story of the year, but a shooting at a Texas church, a wedding cake that a Christian baker refused to make and the status of Jerusalem also grabbed headlines.
All told, it was a year in which America seemed more divided than it has been in a long time, while continuing trends of disaffiliation didn’t keep faith — in particular the conservative Christian kind — from playing an outsized role in the leadership of our nation.
After decades waiting in the wings to influence American politics at the highest level, a who’s who of evangelicals, including figures such as Florida preacher Paula White and Texas pastor Robert Jeffress, showed up regularly at the White House for photo ops and policy consultations. Their “unprecedented” access was offered perhaps as a reward for their support, and Vice President Mike Pence was thought to have been key in arranging it.
While the president’s sexual history made them believers in situational ethics, on issues they cared about he followed a religious right playbook with the zeal of a convert.
Trump appointed Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch, whom they believe will help chip away at Roe v. Wade. The president also rolled back contraceptive coverage, backed a bill to ban most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, and sought to fulfill his campaign pledge to delete the Johnson Amendment, which places limits on politicking from the pulpit.
And he declared that America recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, triggering protests in the Muslim world and exciting apocalyptic fervor in America among some premillennialist Christians.
As the nation grew increasingly polarized, many pointed fingers at the role allegedly played by social media and tech giants in altering online debate. On Yom Kippur, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg atoned for the divisive role played by Facebook. And Silicon Valley teamed up with the Anti-Defamation League to combat hate speech.
Still, haters were emboldened. In Portland, a white supremacist told a black train commuter and her hijab-wearing friend to “go back to Saudi Arabia.” When bystanders stepped up in their defense, he stabbed them, killing two. Nationwide, assaults against Muslims surpassed the level registered after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
And a surge in antiSemitism also was reported: Synagogues were vandalized and Jewish tombstones desecrated, though a wave of bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers turned out mostly to be the result of a hoax by an Israeli-American teenager.
At a “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Va., — held to protest the removal of Confederate statues — a man linked to white supremacist groups rammed his car into a crowd of counter-protesters, killing one woman and injuring 19.
Churches also were targets. On Nov. 5, a man dressed in black tactical gear gunned down 25 people attending a service at First Baptist Church of Sutherland Springs. It was Texas’ deadliest mass shooting and the fifth deadliest and worst in a place of worship in modern American history.
And it wasn’t the only church shooting this year. On Sept. 24, a gunman fatally shot a woman at a church in Nashville and left a note describing it as retaliation for the mass shooting at an AfricanAmerican church in Charleston two years ago.
Sexual harassment became a leading news topic, and it cost Alabama Republican senatorial candidate Roy Moore what should have been an easy election.
Moore, a former state supreme court judge who once had a granite statue of the Ten Commandments installed in the courthouse lobby, was reluctant to accept defeat and decried what he said was “immorality” sweeping over the land.
The hashtag #metoo trended globally with thousands upon thousands of women sharing similar stories of sexual assault or harassment. In France, the Paris prosecutor’s office opened an investigation into accusations of rape by the respected Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan.
Speaking of cultural shifts, two years after the Supreme Court ruling legalizing same-sex marriage nationally, a Colorado baker asked the same tribunal for the right to conscientiously refuse to make a custom wedding cake for a gay couple.
While many conservative Christians see themselves as discriminated against, surveys continued to document a shift in the nation’s religious makeup away from traditional Christianity, especially among the young. And a new record low was reached in the number of Americans who believe the Bible is the literal word of God.
Still, the Congress that was sworn in on Jan. 3, 2017 was about as Christian as it was in the 1960s.
A few blocks from the Capitol, a $500 million Museum of the Bible opened amid much prayer, ribbon-cutting and a sigh of relief by its main backer, antiquities collector Steve Green. A few months earlier, Green’s Hobby Lobby agreed to pay a $3 million fine imposed by the Justice Department and to return thousands of illegally imported artifacts to Iraq.