Moral Bankruptcy Of White Evangelicals

What is new and epitomizes what’s gone wrong with American religion is the moral bankruptcy of the single largest group of white evangelicals. A recent poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute placed white evangelical approval of President Donald Trump at 75 percent, a level of adulation higher than when he was elected. Only someone that is feeble-minded would not see the moral conundrum

President Trump’s effort to remove restrictions on church political activism has encouraged evangelical leaders to organize their troops to vote Republican in the 2018 midterm elections, delivering the coup de grace to a belief long held by Americans that places of worship are the most reliable sources of moral instruction. However, the disaffected young aren’t likely to expose their children to preachers who tell them that women count for less than men, that their gay friends are going to hell, and that white men with locker room language should rule.

Time magazine declared 1976 The Year of the Evangelical. In the 1980 election, this is where it gets strange, in the 1980 election the newly confident evangelical movement, in its self-understanding as the Moral Majority, supported not its co-religionist Jimmy Carter but the divorced former Hollywood actor Ronald Reagan. And that inaugurated the affiliation of white American evangelicals with the Republican Party that has lasted to this day.

Jerry Falwell's forming of the Moral Majority freed [Falwell] from tax regulations against direct political advocacy by churches. Unlike [Billy] Graham, Falwell did not begin by seeking access to the top levels of power. Instead, he sought to mobilize fundamentalists and evangelicals to change the occupants of political offices. He told Christians that it was sinful not to vote. Asking pastors to hold voter registration drives, Falwell told them that they needed to get people “saved, baptized, and registered” to vote. The agenda of the Republican evangelical insiders was born.