Tag: faith
Donald Trump’s ‘Alleged Christian Faith’

Donald Trump’s ‘Alleged Christian Faith’

In recent presidential years, Catholics and white evangelical Christians joined in favoring the Republican candidate. A key reason was a shared opposition to abortion.

This time, Catholics appear to be deserting the candidacy of Donald Trump, and one can understand why. Trump is the most vulgar, least moral presidential candidate in modern memory — by Christian or any other ethical standards.

But why are 78 percent of white evangelicals reportedly sticking with a mobbed-up casino con man gone six-time bankrupt? How can they support a thrice-married libertine who brags about his genitalia?

Do note that some prominent Christian conservatives are appalled by this alliance. Moral Majority co-founder Michael Farris saw the “pilgrimage” of 1,000 evangelical leaders to Trump Tower as “the end of the Christian Right.”

Farris was not invited. The event was a Trump sales job, not a discussion.

David Cay Johnston offers a full account of Trump’s un-Christian behavior — personally and in business — in his new book, “The Making of Donald Trump.” Though he’s been covering Trump for decades, the Pulitzer Prize winner still expresses shock at the depths of Trump’s moral depravity.

Johnston devotes a chapter to Trump’s vindictive campaign to deny health coverage to his nephew’s desperately ill baby. The candidate’s actions stand out for their satanic cruelty.

In 1999, William Trump was born in crisis. The infant immediately developed seizures; his breathing stopped twice. (He later developed cerebral palsy.) The medical bills to save the infant were enormous.

Fortunately, the patriarch, Fred Sr. (who died days earlier), had provided all family members with health insurance through his real estate business — or so it was assumed. The Trump family lawyer instructed the family health plan to cover “all costs related to baby William’s care.”

Then Donald stepped in. When Fred Sr.’s will was filed in probate court, William’s father, Fred III, learned that his father’s line had been pretty much left out of the estate, leaving Donald and the other siblings all the richer.

Fred Sr. had apparently disapproved of Fred Jr.’s decision to become a pilot and of the flight attendant he married. And Donald had his elderly father’s ear.

William’s parents challenged the will. Donald retaliated by denying the family health coverage.

The New York Daily News queried Trump about William. Donald replied, “Why should we give him medical coverage?”

At a meeting last year with evangelical voters in Iowa, Trump was asked whether he felt bad about William. He responded that he never had a reason to seek God’s forgiveness.

“Why do I have to, you know, repent, why do I have to ask for forgiveness if (I’m) not making mistakes?” Trump said the following day. In reporting on the event, The Christian Post carried the quote and referred to Trump’s “alleged Christian faith.”

“Always get even,” Trump wrote in one of his books. “When you are in business you need to get even with people who screw you. You need to screw them back 15 times harder … go for the jugular, attack them in spades!”

In “An Appeal to Our Fellow Catholics,” 37 leading Catholic thinkers wrote that Trump’s record and campaign “promise only the further degradation of our politics and our culture.” They urged Catholics to reject him.

Trump, meanwhile, has given Christian conservatives almost nothing, not even on the abortion issue. Farris notes that Trump “took at least three conflicting positions on abortion in a 24-hour period.”

Others may explain why people purporting to be socially conservative would back a mocker of morality while portraying Hillary Clinton, a devoted Methodist, as some kind of monster. They may not like Clinton on a number of counts. We get that. But surely, there are convictions worth defending.

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached atfharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators webpage at www.creators.com.

Photo: Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump attends a church service, in Detroit, Michigan, U.S., September 3, 2016.   REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

Analysis: How The Presidential Campaign Got Religion

Analysis: How The Presidential Campaign Got Religion

By Melinda Henneberger, Bloomberg News (TNS)

WASHINGTON — On Sunday, Hillary Clinton stood at the pulpit of Foundry United Methodist Church, which she’d attended as first lady, and said she’d just gotten some excellent, Bible-based advice from her former minister, J. Philip Wogaman: In keeping with the reading of the day, from Romans 12, he told her, “You’ve got to be nicer to the press.”

“I certainly will take that to heart,” she promised, and the congregation laughed.

Though she didn’t specify which lines in particular he was referring to, these seem to fit:

Verse 14: “Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not.”

Or 18: “If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.”

Or 19-20: “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink: for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of fire on his head.”

Recently, her friend-turned-rival Donald Trump, the billionaire leading the GOP field, declined to single out any of his favorite Bible verses, though he often mentions that it’s his favorite book, just ahead of “The Art of the Deal.”

“I wouldn’t want to get into it, because for me that’s very personal,” he said on “With All Due Respect.”

But Clinton had no such qualms, and said Sunday’s reading happened to be a favorite, because of what it says about how we all have gifts, and all have different gifts we have a duty to put to good use.

She suggested that it is important to acknowledge our own gifts: The directive to “love your neighbor as yourself doesn’t mean much,” she said, “unless you love yourself first.”

Using our talents is “how we honor God,” she said, “who gave us these gifts in the first place.” It’s in doing so, she said, that “we can unlock the potential of every American…and of America itself.”

That feeling — and even some of the words she used to express it — echo the only other woman in the crowded presidential race, Republican candidate Carly Fiorina, who often talks about learning in Sunday school that we all have different gifts from God, and that how we use them is our gift to God.

From Ben Carson questioning Trump’s faith to Joe Biden telling Stephen Colbert how much solace he draws from saying the rosary to Clinton’s return to her D.C. church, it was an unusually godly week on the campaign trail.

At Foundry United Methodist Church, which was celebrating the 200th anniversary since it was started by the lay-preaching owner of a Georgetown foundry, Clinton referred to herself as a “Methodist by birth and by choice.” As she has often in the past, she again spoke about the ways she’s been shaped by that experience, including when a minister took her all-white church youth group to visit various inner-city Chicago churches. And on one memorable occasion, to hear Martin Luther King, Jr. preach. “I left that hall a different person,” she said, “thanks to my church.”

These days, Democrats are no less likely than Republicans to speak this way; Jesuit-educated former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley once said that his Catholic faith taught him “to search for Christ in the faces…of the homeless men who lined up for a meal every morning” and to “recognize and confront the enemy within _ the original sin of our own culture and environment that would have us think less of people who because of race or class or place are not like us.”

If anything, it’s Bernie Sanders, a secular Jew, whose lack of “God talk” is unusual for a presidential candidate.

That wasn’t always the case, particularly among Democrats; when John Kennedy talked about his Catholic faith, it was to assure America that he wouldn’t be taking orders from Rome. But John Kerry’s decision not to talk about his faith during his ’04 run was a mistake, he said later:

“Despite this New Englander’s past reticence of talking publicly about my faith,” he said in an ’06 address at Pepperdine University, “I learned that if I didn’t fill in the picture myself, others would draw the caricature for me. I will never let that happen again.”

Like Kerry, Biden has not often spoken of his faith in public, and even now, he seems to feel it’s a little unseemly to do so: When Colbert asked him point-blank on his show last Thursday how his faith had helped him deal with the death of his first wife, their daughter, and now his son Beau, he said this:

“First of all, it’s a little embarrassing to speak about me. There’s so many people — maybe some people in the audience — who have losses as severe or worse than mine and didn’t have the incredible support I have. I have such an incredible family. And so I feel self-conscious talking about — loss is serious and it’s consequential, but there’s so many other people going through this.

“But for me, you know my wife when she – she’s a professor – when she wants to leave me messages, she literally tapes them on my mirror when I’m shaving, and she put up a quote from Kierkegaard, and Kierkegaard said, ‘Faith sees best in the dark.’ And for me, my religion is just an enormous sense of solace. And some of it relates to ritual, some relates to just comfort and what you’ve done your whole life. I go to Mass, and I’m able to just be alone, even in a crowd; you’re alone. I say the rosary. I find it to be incredibly comforting. What my faith has done is it sort of takes everything about my life, with my parents and my siblings and all the comforting things and all the good things that have happened have happened around the culture of my religion and the theology of my religion, and I don’t know how to explain it more than that, but it’s just the place that you can go. And, by the way, a lot of you have been through this; the faith doesn’t always stick with you. Sometimes, it leaves me. So I don’t want to come off like …”

Colbert finished his thought: “You don’t want to come off as pious or a holy Joe.” In an interview that was intentionally short on laughs, they both pretended that that last play on words was funny, just to lighten the moment.

Hillary Clinton, however, was never among those in her party who’ve felt that faith in God is too personal a thing to share in the public square. In a 1993 cover story in the New York Times Magazine called “Saint Hillary,” the late writer Michael Kelly made her out to be someone who overdid it, and was quite a moralizer, both tedious and grandiose on that account.

The piece began, “Since she discovered, at the age of 14, that for people less fortunate than herself the world could be very cruel, Hillary Rodham Clinton has harbored an ambition so large that it can scarcely be grasped. She would like to make things right.”

More than 20 years later, “Saint Hillary,” evangelizer for the “politics of virtue” as portrayed in that story, is not how much of the public sees her; on the contrary, a recent poll found that 30 percent of the Democrats surveyed said they don’t find her honest and trustworthy, while only 4 percent said that of Sanders and 5 percent of Biden.

Trump, meanwhile, says outright _ and here he does get points for honesty — that no, he’s never really felt the need to ask God to forgive him — yet he nonetheless ranks at or near the top with evangelical voters. When he takes communion, he said, “When I drink my little wine — which is about the only wine I drink — and have my little cracker, I guess that is a form of asking for forgiveness.”

Could it be that even strongly religious voters no longer take professions of faith from candidates at face value — or hold the lack of such professions against them? Until another candidate besides Trump threads the same needle, of course, it will be hard to say.

And when Pope Francis visits Washington, New York and Philadelphia later this month, even Trump may be tempted to murmur a mea culpa under his breath.

Photo: America: Where religion meets patriotism. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

U.S. Has Become Notably Less Christian, Major Study Finds

U.S. Has Become Notably Less Christian, Major Study Finds

By David Lauter, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — The U.S. has become significantly less Christian in the last eight years as the share of American adults who espouse no systematic religious belief increased sharply, a major new study found.

For what is likely the first time in U.S. history — certainly the first since the early days of the country — the actual number of American Christians has declined. Christianity, however, remains by far the nation’s dominant religious tradition, according to the new report by the nonpartisan Pew Research Center.

The rapid increase in the number of adults without ties to traditional religious institutions has strong implications for other social institutions and for politics.

Whether a person attends religious services regularly is among the strongest predictors of how he or she will vote, with traditional religion strongly tied to the Republican Party, at least among white Americans.

The decline in traditional religious belief adds to the demographic challenges facing the GOP, which already faces difficulties because of its reliance on white voters in a country that has grown more racially diverse.

The interaction between religion and politics may work both ways. Some scholars believe that close ties between traditional religion and conservatism, particularly on issues such as same-sex marriage, have led many younger Americans to cut their ties with organized religion.

Almost one in five American adults were raised in a religious tradition but are now unaffiliated, the study found. By contrast, only four percent have moved in the other direction.

Because the U.S. census does not ask questions about religion, the massive religion surveys by the Pew Research Center have become a chief source of information on the U.S. religious landscape.

The current survey questioned 35,071 U.S. adults last summer. Its huge size allows detailed analysis of even fairly small religious groups. The margin of error for the full sample is plus or minus six-tenths of a percentage point.

The U.S. still remains far more religious than most other economically advanced countries, but the significant increase in the share of Americans who do not follow a traditional religious belief mirrors trends in Europe and elsewhere.

Just short of one in four Americans now describe themselves as being agnostic, atheist, or simply “nothing in particular,” up from roughly one in six in 2007, according to the new study. The ranks of the “nones,” as the study labels them, have grown in large part from people abandoning the religion in which they were raised.

By contrast, Christian ranks have eroded. Roughly 173 million adult Americans identify as Christian, just under 71 percent of the U.S. population. That’s down from 178 million, or 78 percent of the U.S., in 2007. The total U.S. adult population grew by about eight percent during that eight-year period.

Protestants, who once dominated the U.S. population, no longer form a majority, the study found. About 47 percent of the U.S. population identifies with some Protestant denomination, down from just over half in 2007.

The decline has been uneven, with mainline denominations, such as Methodists and Presbyterians, shrinking more quickly than evangelical churches.

Slightly fewer than one in six adult Americans identify with the mainline Protestant churches, according to the survey. Evangelicals, by contrast, make up about one-quarter of the adult U.S. population. They now form a majority among those who identify as Protestant.

Another seven percent of American adults identify with historically black Protestant churches, a share that has remained relatively stable.

Catholics, about one in five Americans, have also seen some decline in numbers since 2007, the study found, although some other studies have found a more recent uptick. Almost 13 percent of American adults are former Catholics — the largest single group of people who have left a faith in which they were raised.

Among non-Christian faiths, Judaism remains the largest in the U.S., although only about two percent of the U.S. population identifies as Jewish. The number is up very slightly from what the survey found in 2007.

Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism each have less than one percent of the U.S. population, although the Muslim and Hindu population have both grown rapidly, reflecting immigration from Asia.

Photo: Mor via Flickr

A Senator’s Faith — And Humility

A Senator’s Faith — And Humility

WASHINGTON — There are few moments of grace in our politics these days, especially where conflicts over religion are concerned. Last week, I witnessed one. Perhaps it was a mere drop in an ocean of suspicion and mistrust, but it was instructive and even encouraging.

The venue, in a small meeting room at a Holiday Inn not far from the Capitol, was a gathering of members of the Secular Coalition for America whose mission is “to amplify the diverse and growing voice of the nontheistic community in the United States.” One cause of the contentiousness of our politics is that both secular and very religious Americans feel misunderstood and under assault.

Enter Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE).

The Secular Coalition invited Coons to speak because, as he said of himself last Thursday night, he is “dedicated to the separation of church and state and to the equal protection under the Constitution which I swore to uphold, whether you are religious or secular.”

More than that, Coons told the crowd that he is uneasy with “rigid certainty” on religious questions. He understands that many are skeptical of faith, both because “religion [has] come to be so closely associated with right-wing politics” and because the Bible “has been used as a document, as a foundation, to justify discrimination.” The revered text is, to some, “the basis of intolerance, based on outdated teachings and moral codes and has been a source of pain and distance and discomfort for many.”

If Coons had left it at that, this would have been another in a long series of Washington speeches in which a politician tells his allies how much he agrees with them. But as “a practicing Christian and a devout Presbyterian,” Coons had a second message.

Early on, he quoted the very Bible others find offensive, noting that Jesus’ command in Matthew 25 to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and visit the imprisoned had “driven” him throughout his life. As a young man, he spent time in Kenya and South Africa working with the poor and with leaders of the South African Council of Churches, including Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

And then he told a story. As a Yale Law School student, he decided to pursue a separate degree from the university’s divinity school, and what he encountered was a long way from tolerance and open-mindedness.

“I was very active in the progressive community in my law school and most of my friends were politically active progressives,” he said. “But I was unprepared for their response when word started filtering out that I had enrolled in divinity school. Some of them literally disowned me; my own roommates moved out. Several folks literally stopped speaking to me, and acted as if I had lost my mind.”

His own background was thrown in his face, with friends saying: “Chris, you’re a scientist, you’re a chemist, you trained as a chemist as an undergraduate, how could you possibly believe this insane stuff?”

What he experienced, Coons said, was “real bigotry.”

“Frankly, we were a group of progressives who were really proud of how welcoming and open we were and how virtually any possible lifestyle or worldview or attitude was something we would embrace — right up until the moment when I said I believed in God.” For many progressives, “accepting someone of expressed faith was one of the hardest moments of tolerance and inclusion for them.”

Believers among you are probably cheering Coons at this point. But ever the peacemaker, he didn’t stop here. The other lesson he learned was that many nonbelievers “had personal experiences of deep pain and of alienation … that had driven a big wedge between them and religion.”

And he offered this: “When I think about this country’s founding, the central tenet of secular governance, I also think about the importance of doubt and of humility. As a person of faith, I think it’s foundational to our country that if we allow people to choose their path of faith, they must of course be also free, welcomed, celebrated, to choose not to have faith in a supreme being.”

It’s to the credit of the Secular Coalition crowd that they cheered a speech that was as challenging as it was affirming. Coons’ message was deceptively simple: that we must find ways of “getting past some of our misunderstandings of each other.” The problem: Respecting each other on matters of faith and politics seems beyond our current capacities.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne@washpost.com. Twitter: @EJDionne. 

Photo: Wyoming_Jackrabbit via Flickr