TITLE: Trump tells conservative Christians they're 'going to make a comeback' if he wins 2024 election
https://www.christianpost.com/news/trump-tells-christians-theyre-going-to-make-a-comeback.html
EXCERPT: Former President Donald Trump told Christian conservatives on Monday that they will "make a comeback like just about no other group" if he wins the 2024 presidential election.
Trump, the presumptive 2024 Republican nominee for president of the United States, delivered a pre-recorded message to the Danbury Institute's Life & Liberty Forum on Monday. The Life & Liberty Forum was one of several events that took place as part of the Southern Baptist Convention's annual meeting in Indianapolis, Indiana.
In his remarks, which lasted almost two minutes, Trump expressed gratitude to the attendees for their "tremendous devotion to God and to country" and their "tremendous support of me."
"I hope I've earned it because we've done things that nobody thought were possible to have gotten done," he said.
"These are difficult times for our nation and your work is so important," he added. "We can't afford to have anyone sit on the sidelines. Now is the time for us to all pull together and to stand up for our values and for our freedoms."
Trump told the crowd not to vote Democrat because "they're against religion; they're against your religion in particular."
Reiterating that "you cannot vote for Democrats," he insisted that "you have to get out and vote."
"We have to defend religious liberty, free speech, innocent life and the heritage and tradition that built America into the greatest nation in the history of the world," he said. "I know that each of you is protecting those values every day, and I hope we'll be defending them side-by-side for your next four years."
Trump assured Life & Liberty Forum attendees that "these are going to be your years because you're going to make a comeback like just about no other group."
"I'll be with you side-by-side" he said, urging religious leaders "to get their incredible people that love them so much and respect them so much ... out to vote."
TITLE: ‘Hello, Trump Warriors!’ Little-Known Preachers and Rabble Rousers are the Unregulated Id of the Felon’s First Rally
https://religiondispatches.org/hello-trump-warriors-little-known-preachers-and-rabble-rousers-are-the-unregulated-id-of-the-felons-first-rally/
EXCERPT: When Trump ran in 2016, the political press didn’t get his religion. It was the prosperity gospel, “health and wealth,” kick some cash up to the preacher so he can drive a Rolls and prepare to receive God’s blessings. In 2020 it was the bastardized American gnostic gospel, secrets within secrets, Deep State conspiracies like the “waterless canals” spoken of in the ancient Dead Sea Scrolls, a metaphor for the sterile corruption of the powers-that-be, the establishment that only pretends to virtue.
But even then he was moving toward martyrdom, reciting at his rallies roll calls of “Americans”—a pretty blonde, a promising football player—murdered by “illegals.” But it wasn’t until January 6 and the death of Ashli Babbitt in his name—Trump’s—that MAGA’s age of martyrs began in earnest. Babbitt was always a placeholder, just as were the January 6 “political prisoners,” their role in this passion play merely to keep the cross warm until Trump was ready.
He’s ready.
He’s coming.
The state GOP chair—an ex-cop long linked to Proud Boys and III Percenters, a fat man with criminal strip-club ties, Boss Hog in a black suit—walks [onto the Las Vegas rally state] to AC/DC’s “Back in Black.” Head rocking. “Thank God we’re here in Sunset Park, to worship and bring back the greatest President we’ve ever known!”
He’s here.
If I showed you a picture of him, you’d see a baggy-eyed scowler with a clenched little rictus for a mouth, an ill-fitting suit, fake hair, fake tan, a stupid hat. But if you were close to the front in Las Vegas—if you believed? My god, a good-looking man, so full of force and humor, pride and thick, dense masculine fury. Open-necked white shirt, shoulders like a house, a sweep of blond hair; who cares if it’s dyed, it’s how you carry the color that counts, and he carries it like he’s going to make you carry it for him. Which you will, because it’ll feel like a blessing to be bullied—to be chosen—by the strongman. Only now he’s not just strong. “I would crawl over glass to vote for him now,” says a conservative editor who’s never voted for him before. Look at Trump’s eyes. A man with a gaze. Down from the cross, and he has brought with him The Word:
“Bullshit.”
What a beautiful word! So funny, so mad. “Bullshit-Bullshit-Bullshit!” They don’t even know what he means, or, they do—bullshit. The world is so packed with deception, raw deals, rigged games, lying bitches, lost chances, idiot bosses, fucking morons, your own shitty kids. Other people’s victories. Trump says it like it is. “He says what we all want to say.” He says: “bullshit.”
His people roar. He steps back. “Oh!” he says, his voice startled, because he’s humble even in his pride. He turns to take in the men behind him shouting bullshit like wind in his sails, the word making him strong.
That this is, in fact, bullshit, just ordinary BS, a hustle and a bad act, should go without saying. The point of this story isn’t to claim that Trump possesses magic powers. Trump doesn’t really possess anything anymore. He traded it all in for bullshit. He’s barely even a singular man now. Instead he’s a million little Trumps, standing on each other’s shoulders inside a Trump suit. That’s why the suits are so awkward and boxy. It’s a balancing act, what the million little Trumps are doing. They wobble sometimes. They wobble a lot, really. That’s what we need to look for: the wobble. It’s there. Thirty-four times guilty—they wobbled. Trump’s own wattling chin—they wobble.
But the bullshit is strong. The rest of his speech? Bullshit, of course.
You can read about in the papers. They’ll speak of “familiar refrains” like that’s a weakness. Like he’s ever had more than one thing to sell, and like he hasn’t managed to sell it over and over again, like a whole lot of us won’t keep buying. There are no new products. But there have for so long been so many new buyers. That’s what a Trump rally is. “A gathering of the MAGAlos.” A recognition, a relationship, the thousands all buying it together. You can see it in their faces. He can see it in their faces. That’s why the million little Trumps in the Trump suit are still standing, even as they wobble. He is his people.
TITLE: At Florida homeschool convention, an education in MAGA politics
https://religionnews.com/2024/06/12/florida-homeschool-convention-is-an-education-in-maga-politics/
EXCERPT: For decades, Christian nationalist leaders have denounced public schools for allegedly promoting secularism and waging war on family values, while economic ideologues have condemned schools as purported hotbeds of socialism. Together they characterize the existing system of public education as “an indoctrination factory” or “camp.” The unspoken assumption in Kissimmee, however, was that all education is indoctrination — it’s just a matter of deciding who gets to do the indoctrinating.
So when the sessions actually got down to covering teaching, especially history and science, counterprogramming liberals was a main concern. At “Wild World of History: Teaching Globalism, its Rise and Decline,” Larry Schweikart, a retired rock-and-roll drummer-turned-professor whose curriculum goes by the “Wild World” tag, announced that he was “teaching Patriots History.” “I wrote this textbook because we didn’t like all the liberal textbooks we were dealing with,” he said, adding, “I was on the Glenn Beck show in 2010 and I gave him a copy. He held it up every night on his show.”
In the vast exhibition hall, quite a few nonreligious vendors had made it into the mix: The Nectar Group specializes in helping with dyslexia and other learning challenges, and there was First Frets Online Music Lessons, Match Champs Tutoring Services and the American Sign Language Virtual Academy. But it appeared that half of the booths or more were of the genre of Master Books, which offers books on “science” by the infamous creationist Ken Ham.
In “Climate Change for Kids,” Ham assures readers, “Man cannot destroy the earth. God promised that. But God’s Word makes it clear that one day, Jesus, who returned to the Father in Heaven after His Resurrection, will one day return to this fallen, groaning earth and judge this earth and the whole universe with a fiery end!”
From the Christian nationalist movement’s education wing was the Child Evangelism Fellowship, an organization that seeks to evangelize children in public elementary schools; YWAM (Youth With a Mission) Publishing; Abeka, the publishing company affiliated with Pensacola Christian College that has dominated the homeschooling and conservative Christian schooling field for decades; Classical Conversations: Classical Christian Community; and Christian Light, which produces books on science, math and social sciences that it says reflect a biblical worldview.
A Christian Light social studies textbook for homeschoolers offers a glimpse of what it means to teach from a “biblical perspective”: “Another contributing factor to the disintegration of solid family life is the confusion of roles for men and women, emphasized by such movements as Women’s Liberation, the Gay Liberation movement, and others. Satan sometimes uses these movements as a tool to destroy God’s plan for the role of men and women.”
For older children there were missionary organizations such as Teen Missions International and Pioneers, whose representatives distributed stickers that read “No More Unreached People Groups,” and on up to representatives of faith-based colleges such as Regent University, Liberty University and Cedarville University.
For many of the speakers, the education of children appeared to be of concern in large measure to the extent that it involves rearing a generation of future staffers for an American theocracy, in which taxpayer dollars can be funneled to raise more reactionary leaders. Florida, the state with the fastest-growing homeschool population, already provides up to $8,000 per year per homeschooled child for materials or other expenditures that can be tied in any way to their education.
Florida also aids the homeschooling mission by siphoning money from the public education system. The underfunding of public schools, along with declining enrollment, has resulted in school closures in multiple public school districts.