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'Heretic': Trump Adviser Comparing Him With Jesus Enrages Right-Wing Christians

Right-wing media figures are lashing out at President Donald Trump’s personal spiritual adviser and senior adviser to the White House Faith Office Paula White-Cain for likening Trump to Jesus during an Easter event, labeling her an “unabashed heretic” and “batsh*t crazy.”

White-Cain is a televangelist, pastor, and Trump’s longtime spiritual adviser who has “long been a prominent and polarizing figure in evangelical circles.” White-Cain has an extensive history of extreme rhetoric, including declaring that opposition to Trump is equivalent to opposition to God. Now a senior adviser to the White House Faith Office, White-Cain is part of Trump’s effort to expand “the power and influence of conservative Christians in government” in his second term.

At an April 1 closed-door Easter speech at the White House, White-Cain spoke next to Trump and directly likened him to Jesus, saying, “No one has paid the price like you have paid the price. It almost cost you your life. You were betrayed and arrested and falsely accused. It’s a familiar pattern that our lord and savior showed us.” The White House deleted video of the speech, which “was initially posted on the official White House website and YouTube channel,” and clips continued to circulate on social media.

On April 4, Fox host (and the president’s daughter-in-law) Lara Trump hosted White-Cain to share a message for Easter, in which she said it was her “favorite subject to talk about” to “give honor to God and to president Trump for being bold and unwavering with his faith.”

Right-wing media figures labeled White-Cain a “heretic” and “batsh*t crazy”

Reprinted with permission from Media Matters

New Poll: Most Republicans Identify As 'Christian Nationalists'

A new survey from the Public Religion Research Institute reveals that more than half of Republicans don’t understand America and would like either Jesus Christ or Donald Trump to lead us to a God-ordained promised land flowing with milk, honey, unchecked grift, and bottomless cheese fries.

According to PRRI, 55 percent of Republicans qualify as Christian nationalists, per the survey’s criteria, as opposed to just 25 percent of independents and 16 percent of Democrats. At the same time, 83 percent of Democrats can be considered “skeptics” or “rejecters” of Christian nationalism, compared with just 43 percent of Republicans who feel the same way.

Meanwhile, those Christian nationalist views are, as you might have guessed, strongly predictive of support for Donald Trump.

According to PRRI, “Among those who hold favorable views of Trump, 55 percent qualify as Christian nationalists (21 percent Adherents and 34 percent Sympathizers). Only 15 percent of those who hold favorable views of President Joe Biden qualify as Christian nationalists (four percent Adherents and 11 percent Sympathizers).”

In other words, there’s a good reason the current House Speaker Mike Johnson thinks he’s Moses and the Alabama Supreme Court thinks eight-celled frozen embryos are human beings. Republicans are all hunkered down in a hermetically sealed room sniffing the same glue.

PRRI based its survey results on a five-point definition of Christian nationalism. Respondents were asked if they agreed or disagreed—either “mostly” or “completely”—with the following statements:

The U.S. government should declare America a Christian nation.
U.S. laws should be based on Christian values.
If the U.S. moves away from our Christian foundations, we will not have a country anymore.
Being Christian is an important part of being truly American.
God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.

The fact that so many Americans agree with even one of these statements means Thomas Jefferson must be rolling over in whatever golf course shed Trump stashed him in after stealing his corpse and wrapping it in top secret nuclear documents like a day-old order of fish and chips.

The fact that a majority of the U.S. population still identifies as Christian does not make America a Christian nation, and it never has—any more than, say, the overwhelming prevalence of white hockey players makes the NHL the KKK.

Nope! We are a religiously diverse country with a Constitution that—in theory, at least—protects the rights of all citizens regardless of creed, and explicitly prohibits religious tests for public office.

But even though U.S. Christian nationalists have a completely (M)ass-backward view of religion’s proper place in a pluralistic liberal democracy, they nevertheless wield outsized influence. And consider the current makeup of the Supreme Court, and the ascent of Speaker Mike Johnson—who’s called the principle of church-state separation a “misnomer”: That influence only continues to grow.

Ja'han Jones, writing for MSNBC’s The ReidOut Blog, noted this out-of-whack power dynamic:

PRRI found “three in ten Americans qualify as Christian nationalism Adherents (10%) or Sympathizers (20%), compared with two-thirds who qualify as Skeptics (37%) or Rejecters (30%).”

So adherents and sympathizers of Christian nationalism make up about 30% of the American population — and evidently about 66% of the Supreme Court bench, if the Dobbs ruling is any indicator.

In other words, because two presidents who were originally elected by a minority of voters have appointed five of our current SCOTUS justices, the majority of Americans—who would prefer to keep the country as Jefferson and James Madison envisioned—are already living under a quasi-theocracy. And Christian nationalism’s enduring popularity only promises to make this tyranny of the minority worse.

That a movement so antithetical to clearly defined and long-held American values has overtaken one of our two major parties is truly disturbing. But as this same survey makes clear, we are still the majority. Which means there’s still plenty we can do to push back, even if the game is rigged against us, thanks to the same Constitution that’s supposed to confer inalienable religious freedoms.

It starts with this November’s elections—but hopefully doesn’t end with them. After all, our own little MAGA Moses remains determined to lead us into a promised land that very few of us ever signed up for.

Needless to say, we can’t let him.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

Danziger: What Would Jesus Tweet?

Jeff Danziger’s award-winning drawings are published by more than 600 newspapers and websites. He has been a cartoonist for the Rutland Herald, the New York Daily News and the Christian Science Monitor; his work has appeared in newspapers from the Wall Street Journal to Le Monde and Izvestia. He is represented by CWS Syndicate and the Washington Post Writers Group. He is the recipient of the Herblock Prize and the Thomas Nast (Landau) Prize. He served in the US Army in Vietnam as a linguist and intelligence officer, and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Air Medal. Danziger has published ten books of cartoons and a novel about the Vietnam War. Born in New York City, he now lives in Manhattan and Vermont. A video of the artist at work can be viewed here.

Francis Decries Holiday Commercialism, Urging World Focus On Dispossessed

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Francis said on Saturday that Christmas had been “taken hostage” by dazzling materialism that puts God in the shadows and blinds many to the needs of the hungry, the migrants and the war weary.

Francis, leading the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics into Christmas for the fourth time since his election in 2013, said in his Christmas Eve homily that a world often obsessed with gifts, feasting and self-centeredness needed more humility.

“If we want to celebrate Christmas authentically, we need to contemplate this sign: the fragile simplicity of a small newborn, the meekness of where he lies, the tender affection of the swaddling clothes. God is there,” the Pope said at St. Peter’s Basilica.

At the solemn but joyous service, attended by some 10,000 people as well as dozens of cardinals and bishops, Pope Francis said the many in the wealthy world had to be reminded that the message of Christmas was humility, simplicity and mystery.

“Jesus was born rejected by some and regarded by many others with indifference,” he said.

“Today also the same indifference can exist, when Christmas becomes a feast where the protagonists are ourselves, rather than Jesus; when the lights of commerce cast the light of God into the shadows; when we are concerned for gifts, but cold toward those who are marginalized.”

He then added in unscripted remarks: “This worldliness has taken Christmas hostage. It needs to be freed.”

Security was heightened for the Christmas weekend in Italy and at the Vatican after Italian police killed the man believed to be responsible for the Berlin market truck attack while other European cities kept forces on high alert.

St. Peter’s Square was cleared out six hours before the mass started at the basilica so that security procedures could be put in place for those entering the church later.

Francis, who has made defense of the poor a trademark of his papacy, said the infant Jesus should remind everyone of those suffering today, particularly children.”Let us also allow ourselves to be challenged by the children of today’s world, who are not lying in a cot caressed with the affection of a mother and father, but rather suffer the squalid mangers that devour dignity: hiding underground to escape bombardment, on the pavements of a large city, at the bottom of a boat over-laden with immigrants,” he said.

Outside the basilica, thousands of people who could not get into the largest church in Christendom watched on large screens in the chilly night.

“Let us allow ourselves to be challenged by the children who are not allowed to be born, by those who cry because no one satiates their hunger, by those who do have not toys in their hands, but rather weapons,” he said.

On Christmas Day, Francis will deliver his twice-yearly “Urbi et Orbi” (“To the City and to the World”) blessing and message from the central balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica.

(Reporting by Philip Pullella, editing by G Crosse)

IMAGE Pope Francis greets faithful as he leads the Christmas night Mass in Saint Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican December 24, 2016. REUTERS/Tony Gentile

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Smart. Sharp. Funny. Fearless

'Heretic': Trump Adviser Comparing Him With Jesus Enrages Right-Wing Christians

Right-wing media figures labeled White-Cain a “heretic” and “batsh*t crazy”

New Poll: Most Republicans Identify As 'Christian Nationalists'

Danziger: What Would Jesus Tweet?

Francis Decries Holiday Commercialism, Urging World Focus On Dispossessed

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