It's one of the mysteries of the past presidential election cycle — how did Biblical illiterate, serial philanderer, Mammon worshiper trump rope the evangelicals of America into supporting him?
Maybe it was a marriage made in heaven if you know the actual roots of the American Evangelical movement:
[T]he campaign represented nothing short of a battle for the soul of the Christian right. By backing Trump, white evangelicals were playing into the hands of a new, alt-right version of Christianity—a sprawling coalition of white nationalists, old-school Confederates, neo-Nazis, Islamophobes, and social-media propagandists who viewed the religious right, first and foremost, as a vehicle for white supremacy....
In the end, conservative Christians backed Trump in record numbers. He won 81 percent of the white evangelical vote—a higher share than George W. Bush, John McCain, or Mitt Romney. As a result, the religious right—which for decades has grounded its political appeal in moral “values” such as “life” and “family” and “religious freedom”—has effectively become a subsidiary of the alt-right, yoked to Trump’s white nationalist agenda. Evangelicals have traded Ronald Reagan’s gospel-inspired depiction of America as a “shining city on a hill” for Trump’s dark vision of “American carnage.” And in doing so, they have returned the religious right to its own origins—as a movement founded to maintain the South’s segregationist “way of life.”
“The overwhelming support for Trump heralds the religious right coming full circle to embrace its roots in racism,” says Randall Balmer, a historian of American religion at Dartmouth College. “The breakthrough of the 2016 election lies in the fact that the religious right, in its support for a thrice-married, self-confessed sexual predator, finally dispensed with the fiction that it was concerned about abortion or ‘family values.’ ”....
In fact, it wasn’t abortion that sparked the creation of the religious right. The movement was actually galvanized in the 1970s and early ’80s, when the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University and other conservative Christian schools that refused to admit nonwhites. It was the government’s actions against segregated schools, not the legalization of abortion, that “enraged the Christian community,” Moral Majority co-founder Paul Weyrich has acknowledged....
[T]here is plenty of evidence that white evangelical voters are more receptive than nonevangelicals to the ideas that drive the alt-right. According to an exit poll of Republican voters in the South Carolina primary, evangelicals were much more likely to support banning Muslims from the United States, creating a database of Muslim citizens, and flying the Confederate flag at the state capitol. Thirty-eight percent of evangelicals told pollsters that they wished the South had won the Civil War—more than twice the number of nonevangelicals who held that view....
That’s why white evangelicals were the key to Trump’s victory—they provided the numbers that the alt-right lacks. Steve Bannon, Trump’s most influential strategist, knows that the nationalist coalition alone isn’t big enough “to ever compete against the progressive left”—which is why he made a point of winning over the religious right. If conservative Catholics and evangelicals “just want to focus on reading the Bible and being good Christians,” Bannon told me last July, “there’s no chance we could ever get this country back on track again.” The alt-right supplied Trump with his agenda; the Christian right supplied him with his votes.
So those old-fashioned Christians who foolishly believe that all men are brothers and children of God and should be treated with love and charity are now being laughed at by their Evangelical peers as “cuck-Christians.”
I guess Jesus himself would be a cuck-Christian.
These nutcases want to base modern American life on the writings they selectively choose from the Bible — including public stonings.
To them the Confederate flag is a Christian flag.
To them democracy is a failed experiment that has to go.
Trump is their standard bearer, but not nearly as extreme as they want him to be, because he's not racially and ethnically nationalist enough for them.
If there's any good thing about trump having been elected, it's the chance that when he falls he'll bring the racist hypocrites of the religious right down with him.
And it won't be a moment too soon.