{"id":402739,"date":"2019-04-09T01:20:14","date_gmt":"2019-04-09T00:20:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/trump-and-the-global-rise-of-the-christian-right\/"},"modified":"2019-04-09T01:20:14","modified_gmt":"2019-04-09T00:20:14","slug":"trump-and-the-global-rise-of-the-christian-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/trump-and-the-global-rise-of-the-christian-right\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump and the Global Rise of the Christian Right"},"content":{"rendered":"<div itemprop=\"articleBody\">\n<div id=\"attachment_110675\" style=\"width: 520px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-110675\" class=\"size-full wp-image-110675\" src=\"https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2019\/04\/Donald_Trump_delivers_remarks_at_the_Liberty_University.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"510\" height=\"340\" srcset=\"https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2019\/04\/Donald_Trump_delivers_remarks_at_the_Liberty_University.jpg 510w, https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2019\/04\/Donald_Trump_delivers_remarks_at_the_Liberty_University-300x200.jpg 300w, https:\/\/uziiw38pmyg1ai60732c4011-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com\/wp-content\/dropzone\/2019\/04\/Donald_Trump_delivers_remarks_at_the_Liberty_University-768x512.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 510px) 100vw, 510px\"\/><\/p>\n<p id=\"caption-attachment-110675\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Photograph By Shealah Craighead \u2013 Public Domain<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>If Donald Trump goes to church regularly, he\u2019s kept it a pretty good secret.<\/p>\n<p>He and his wife have made sure to alert the press on the few times he does attend services, for instance on <a title=\"Christmas\" href=\"https:\/\/www.apnews.com\/997cabb84d48449f9f9669db2e792acf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Christmas<\/a> and <a title=\"St. Patrick\u2019s Day\" href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/video\/politics\/trump-goes-to-church-on-st-patricks-day\/2019\/03\/17\/c4e7efd5-40c9-4c56-a065-c2312af88a53_video.html?utm_term=.6f8991b52efc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">St. Patrick\u2019s Day<\/a>. Otherwise, the president seems to worship regularly only at the Church of the Hole in One. Since inauguration, he has made <a title=\"165 visits\" href=\"https:\/\/trumpgolfcount.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">165 visits<\/a> (and counting) to golf courses, often on Sundays.<\/p>\n<p>Trump is like a secular Elmer Gantry, the hot-blooded preacher of Sinclair Lewis\u2019s eponymous 1927 bestseller. Gantry preaches on Sundays about the heavenly virtues even as he drinks, commits adultery, and breaks one commandment after another on every other day of the week. Trump, meanwhile, has acted irreligiously all his life and only recently made any pretense to churchgoing piety. He confines his preaching to the political realm. In both cases, however, loyal congregations gather around these hypocrites, convinced that they are true representatives of God.<\/p>\n<p>Trump a representative of God? During the 2016 presidential campaign, evangelical Christians voted in large numbers for Trump not because of his religious convictions but despite his lack of them. They viewed Trump as an imperfect vehicle for God\u2019s will, which was presumably expressing itself about the composition of the Supreme Court, government funding for abortion, and the eroding wall between church and state.<\/p>\n<p>Give us a virtuous president, the evangelicals&#8230;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2019\/04\/08\/trump-and-the-global-rise-of-the-christian-right\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Photograph By Shealah Craighead \u2013 Public Domain If Donald Trump goes to church regularly, he\u2019s kept it a pretty good secret. He and his wife have made sure to alert the press on the few times he does attend services, for instance on Christmas and St. Patrick\u2019s Day. Otherwise, the president seems to worship regularly [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-402739","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=402739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/402739\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=402739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=402739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=402739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}