- In response to consecutive nights of protesting, including some rioting, in response to the death of George Floyd, Trump threatened military action. Then, once the police cleared the streets before him with tear gas and rubber bullets, Trump walked some 100 metres from the White House to the “Church of the Presidents.” As he held the Bible aloft, black cover stark against the white-walled church, the reporter asked the question, “Is that your Bible?”
- “It is a Bible,” was the President’s answer. A curiously, insightful response. In the change of words — from possessive pronoun (“your”), to indefinite article (“a”) — there is a kind of depersonalisation that takes place. Suddenly, the Bible lacks a human companion. If not “your” Bible, then whose?
That stunt had the intended effect, it galvanized the fundie base and gave them the symbol structure that they need to feel good about themselves and their worldview. But nobody actually believes in any of that stone bashing nonsense, this isnt about religion at all! Nothing has ever been about religion! It's a relationship right???
I get that I'm not really focusing on the point of the article here, but "Bernie Porn"? Wtf? More on topic, apparently some of Trump's own people are wondering whether he's trying to lose.EPIC-MRA pollster Bernie Porn...
Yes, yes it is. Found it related to the “trying to lose” statement.
You wouldn't know it form the coverage, but this isn't a loss for Trump or a victory for the "dreamers". It's a victory for the rule of law. Clearly Trump can unwind the rules--if something is done by executive order surely it can be undone by executive order. What the Court said was that the process violated the Administrative Procedures Act. Trump can never get over the fact that not everything is about him. For what it's worth, he's been running ads in Michigan that basically say, "Make America great again, again!" I thought he was trying to lose in 2016, but like everything, he just didn't try very hard. Gonna put the extra effort in this time, apparently.
And I recieve emails twice a week from the leaders of congregations numbering in the thousands about what a good job the president is doing exposing all the false Christian's. To a person who has a fundamentalist Evangelical faith anybody who stopped supporting the president because he hurt liberals was never a true Christian to begin with. Some of them are losing their stomach for violence, sure. Some aren't.
So, I too grew up in a fundamentalist christian family, going to church, learning to evangelize from the likes of Ray Comfort, believing in a literal six day creation about 6-10 thousand years ago, etc. etc. I get it. My parents and siblings are still there; the reason I'm not is my parents made the mistake of letting me go to a state university instead of a christian one. It seems to me that the negativity you're expressing here requires you to buy their "false christians" argument. You see christians who equate "being christian" and "supporting Trump" as the ones who matter to you; the rest are less significant. I see a bunch of christians realizing that maybe Trump has been pulling the wool over their eyes and that they don't actually want four more years of this guy. And from my outsider's perspective, that's good news. I'm interested in christianity as a social, economic, and political structure. If christians are starting to question their politics, that means a slow shift in what those church structures support. If Trump is inadvertently starting to fracture the Religious Right, even if that just means a depressed conservative vote rather than votes for progressives, that's a good thing. That all said, November is months away, and this very well might all be rearranging the deck chairs on H.S.S. Four More Years.
If you ever feel like sharing about what, if anything, caused your conversion away from that lifestyle, I think you'd find a very interested audience here. It's so fascinating the assumptions we all grow up with. I think most Americans share 90% the same assumptions about how the world works, which comes from the stories we're told, the education we receive, all the other collective institutions we interact with, etc. So it's fascinating to me to learn about people who grew up with completely different assumptions about the nature of the world, and even more fascinating to learn how one can have a change in their basic, supposedly unalterable world view as an adult. Definitely not asking you to share any personal details you're uninterested in or uncomfortable with sharing.
I'm going to start working on a longer post on this because I've recently started a conversation with one of my sisters and it's drawn out some memories I hadn't seen in a while and it would be good to have those saved while I can still recall them. It's a lot to talk about because, as you said, it's a whole worldview, and unwinding one of those that you were exclusively exposed to as a kid is not a short process. It's been a decade and I'm still not really done. And it touches on some quite personal details, so there will be parts you'll just have to take me at my word for. But, the really short version is: I moved away to college, which gave me a social and institutional structure that wasn't tied to church and family. My parents had heavily tied the truth of young earth creationism with the truth of christianity, and learning physics and biology disabused me of the former, so I felt that the latter was maybe suspect too. By dint of making woman, queer, and non-white friends I narrowly avoided falling into New Atheism or alt-lite libertarianism (although it certainly did help that those groups tended to fall for some of the same conservative fallacies I was by that point quite allergic to). Ironically, the christian groups I grew up in pay lip service to a lot of good ideals; perhaps my saving grace was that I took those ideals a bit more seriously than everyone around me.