An attraction of opposites
As readers might recall, I opposed Donald Trump’s candidacy from the very outset. I could find nothing in his personal record or his checkered but often financially-lucrative business career that would suggest he was qualified to lead the world’s wealthiest, most powerful nation.
Although I understand Trump’s support by the blue-collar community, I could never quite grasp the uncritical devotion by southern evangelicals to a man whose personal life is the very antithesis of what professing Christians claim to believe.
Trump’s religious faith, if any? He was baptized in his teens in the Presbyterian Church and Prosperity Gospel minister Norman Vincent Peale presided at the first of his three weddings. But he has never even pretended to have a religious or spiritual commitment of any kind. Then what’s behind this strange attraction of opposites? What attraction does Trump hold for evangelicals and fundamentalists, particularly the Southern variety?
Franklin Graham, the evangelist’s son, uncritically sees Trump as “a gift from God for our troubled times.” He is similarly endorsed by Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. What kind of attraction does he have for these selfprofessed servants of God?
When we reflect that 150 short years ago southern evangelicals were among slavery’s and white supremacy’s most ardent defenders, things begin to come into focus a bit. This group once believed that certain scriptural passages, when interpreted literally, might be understood to support slavery and slavery’s later stepchild, segregation. If God tells us how to buy, sell and punish slaves in the Old Testament, and the Apostle Paul advises slaves to obey their masters, couldn’t we surmise God might approve of slavery? It is also interesting that both sides in the Civil War relied heavily on scriptural passages to justify their respective causes and both were dead certain God would lead them to victory. No wonder today’s evangelicals are so confirmed in their convictions.
When we trace evangelicals’ origins to their present support of a thricemarried serial adulterer who thumbs his nose at conventional morals and values, it blows my mind. On one hand Trump flaunts his sexual prowess and conquests, but then spends tons of hush money through his attorneys to hide his illicit affairs from public view. His boudoir exploits could rival Bill Clinton’s. But could today’s evangelicals be interpreting acceptance and forgiveness in new ways with which some of us are as yet unfamiliar?
I fear for a nation that would choose someone like Donald Trump as its leader and claim it was by God’s direction. Or could his election be America’s version of the neo-populist movement already well underway in Europe. Many young people here and abroad are losing faith in democracy as an effective means of governance. This was highlighted by the British withdrawal from the European Union, the Brexit, led by a narrow populist majority.
A growing anti-immigrant movement in France gave the centrist coalition majority there a scare in last year’s elections and is making disturbing inroads in Germany, Belgium, Poland, Hungary and elsewhere.
In 1933 Adolf Hitler, a crazed lunatic with a hypnotizing persona, convinced one of the world’s most highly-educated, highly-cultured and devoutly-religious people that their world was caving in, it was the fault of the Jews, and only he could restore Germany to its former greatness. Sound like anyone we might know?
George B. Reed Jr., who lives in Rossville, can be reached by email at reed1600@ bellsouth.net.