TITLE: ‘We have to be voting biblically’: the Courage Tour rallies Christians to get Trump in office
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/aug/02/trump-christians-courage-tour
EXCERPT: Serving as a voter registration drive and hub for recruiting poll workers, it was no mistake that the Courage Tour came to Wisconsin just three months ahead of the presidential election in November. The tour had already visited three other swing states: Georgia, Michigan and Arizona.
Heavy-hitting Maga organizations – including America First Policy Institute, TPUSA Faith and America First Works – had a presence outside the tent. Inside, headlining the event was Lance Wallnau, a prominent figure in the New Apostolic Reformation – a movement on the right that embraces modern-day apostles, aims to establish Christian dominion over society and politics and has grown in influence since Trump was elected president in 2016.
“‘Pray for your rulers,’ that’s about as far as we got in the Bible,” said Wallnau, setting the tone for the day, which would feature a series of sermons focused on the ideal role of Christians in government and society. “I think what’s happened is over time, we began to realize you cannot trust that government like you thought you could trust, and you can’t trust the media to tell you what’s really happening,” he exclaimed.
What followed in Wallnau’s morning sermon were a series of greatest hits of the Maga right: January 6 (not an insurrection), the 2020 election (marred by fraud) and Covid-19 (a Chinese bioweapon).
Many of the attendees had learned of the event from Eau Claire’s Oasis church – a Pentecostal church whose congregants were already familiar with the movement’s goal to turn believers into activists with a religious mission.
“This is wonderful,” said Cyndi Lund, an Oasis churchgoer who attended the four-day event. “I teach a class on biblical citizenship – the Lord put in my heart that we have to be voting biblically, and if nothing else, we have a duty in America to vote.”
According to the preachers who sermonized on Monday, the correct biblical worldview is a deeply conservative one. The speakers repeatedly stated their opposition to abortion and LGBTQ+ rights and inclusion, ideas that were elaborated on in pamphlets passed around the crowd and on three large screens facing the audience. (“Tolerance IS NOT A commandment,” read one poster, propped up in front of the pro-Trump Turning Point USA stall outside the tent.)
After Wallnau spoke, Bill Federer, an evangelist who has written more than thirty books weighing in on US history from an anti-communist and rightwing perspective, offered a brief and often intensely inaccurate, intellectual history of the US and Europe. During his talk, Federer dropped references to the villains of his historiography – among them Karl Marx, Fidel Castro, the German philosopher Hegel and, “a little closer to home”, the political theorist of the New Left, Saul Alinsky. The crowd, apparently already versed in Federer’s intellectual universe, groaned and booed when Federer mentioned Alinsky.
Federer also railed on “globalists”, tapping into the longstanding antisemitic idea of a shadowy cabal led by wealthy Jewish people who dictate world events.
“Globalists,” Federer said, “are giving money to LGBTQ activists to get involved with politics.”
It would be up to God-fearing Christians with a biblical worldview to push back against “wokeism”, by influencing what New Apostolic Reformers refer to as the “seven mountains” of society: religion, family, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and, most important at the Courage Tour, government.
The stakes, emphasized many of the speakers, couldn’t be overstated.
“What we’re up against aren’t people,” said Mercedes Sparks, speaking on the topic of the secularization of US life. “These are spirits.” Sparks made clear her explicit goal – shared by the other speakers on the tour – of bringing Christianity into politics and government.
TITLE: Our Perennial Political Temptation
https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2024/july-web-only/perennial-political-temptation-carter-reagan-trump.html
EXCERPTS: The political choice for American Christians is not between Republican Donald Trump and whomever the Democrats nominate in Chicago this month. It is between Christ and a corrupting, power-centric vision of Christendom.
This decision has confronted believers since we first dreamt of influence instead of the nightmare of persecution. The battlefield conversion of the Roman emperor Constantine created the possibility of using the state to spread Christianity, and the quandary of how to navigate faith and politics, church and government, has not left us since.
Christendom refers to a society or civilization that is not just majority Christian, but one that officially denigrates other faiths and, ironically, poses risks for our own. Though historic versions of Christendom had their benefits—and it is right for Christians to bring our faith and ethics to the public square—this kind of Christian quest for power, even for the best reasons, can eclipse Christ or hamper our witness.
The rise and fall of social and political structures do not reflect the rise and fall of Jesus, who remains eternally on his throne. And though it is possible to pursue Christ and power together, the struggle to keep them in perspective is constant.
That struggle is vividly evident right now among politically conservative evangelicals in America. Since the 1970s, the Christian Right has acquired access and influence to pass laws and shape the judiciary. Christian Coalition architect Ralph Reed asked for just a “seat at the table” where the real decisions get made, but that seat came at the price of political loyalty. And such loyalty, even in the pursuit of the good, can be twisted beyond what Christian witness can bear.
[W]e think misplaced loyalty to any party risks the exchange of hope in Christ for faith in Christendom, and white evangelical support for the GOP has been so overwhelming that this risk feels close to reality.
In 1980, Christianity Today ran an editorial on the upcoming election season. It argued for the necessity of a broad issue agenda for evangelicals, one that would reflect the full witness of Scripture: care for the poor and peacemaking alongside pro-life principles and demands for good character.
“Too narrow a front in battling for a moral crusade, or for a truly biblical involvement in politics, could be disastrous,” the editorial concluded. “It could lead to the election of a moron who holds the right view on abortion.”
That wisdom has been ignored. A thin agenda combined with fervent partisan loyalty left many believers feeling like the pursuit of Christendom through the Republican Party was their only option. That loyalty encouraged Christians to defend what was indefensible only a few years before. Continued loyalty requires even more.
In Matthew 10:16, Christ sends out his disciples as “sheep among wolves.” This is an apt description of the Christian’s peril in the field of politics. It is often a dirty game, full of compromise and complications. But the stakes and danger of the game are no excuse to ignore, defend, or grow comfortable with sin.
TITLE: The Christian Case Against Trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/02/opinion/trump-christianity-fundamentalism-evangelical.html
EXCERPT: To organize Christian voters against Trumpism, Doug Pagitt, an evangelical pastor, founded the nonprofit Vote Common Good, which aims to engage Christian voters. He’s driving across the country in a bus to swing states to rally these voters against Mr. Trump.
“We’re specifically targeting those who want to detach their voting habits from the MAGA movement,” Mr. Pagitt told me. It seemed to work in 2020, he noted, citing heavily white evangelical West Michigan, where Mr. Trump’s support dropped to 62 percent from 80 percent in two critical counties, delivering Democrats their win.
Evangelicals like these hew more closely to the original identity of evangelicals in America, which emerged from the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries, during which many Christians committed themselves to personal piety and a duty to address the ills of the world, as Jesus called his followers to do. Among other things, they campaigned for the abolition of slavery, ministered to the poor and aided immigrants — all informed by their reading of Scripture.
This strain of Christianity is closer to the mainline Protestant tradition that I grew up in, which saw the Bible as poetry, metaphor and history. I was not brought up to read Scripture literally, as many evangelicals do. As an adult, I am not a regular churchgoer. Yet I find that the convictions of these ardent evangelicals who stand against Mr. Trump — even as a vast majority of white evangelicals have rallied to him — cast a rare and hopeful vision of America’s moral heart.
“We refuse to cede Scripture to the right,” Jonah Overton, a 37-year-old pastor from Milwaukee, told me.
Instead of casting Mr. Trump as a holy martyr, these Christians offer an alternative vision of him as an Antichrist, who abuses his power and in many ways resembles the emperors of Rome. (The Antichrist is sometimes likened to Nero, who persecuted Christians and sometimes crucified them.)
These other evangelicals also commit to following word for word Jesus’ moral teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, in which he commands people to “give to the needy,” as well as “love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you,” among other practical but difficult tasks. This provides a blueprint for the Christian ethic. “There is no following Jesus without following his teachings on helping the poor and oppressed,” Lisa Sharon Harper, an evangelical theologian, told me.
Some American evangelicals justify Mr. Trump’s decidedly unchristian acts like cheating on his wife with a porn star, in service of advancing abortion restrictions. But adherents’ beliefs about how to follow Jesus’ teachings vary. And evangelicals who have found the weaponization of Scripture distasteful are showing us that their vote is very much up for grabs.