Trump: “defending American (white) Christians”

Trump: “defending American (white) Christians” June 25, 2016

 

Love her or hate her we know more about Hillary Clinton’s faith than about any political leader’s faith since Billy Graham was kissing up to Nixon and praying with him in the oval office. This was before Kissinger took over that pray-with-Nixon task while Graham ran for the hills to cover his Nixon-endorsing butt after Watergate.

Post-Nixon, Billy Graham told my dad (the late evangelical evangelist and religious right founder, Francis Schaeffer) that he’d sworn off politics, let alone endorsing candidates. Too bad Franklin Graham didn’t get the memo!

“We don’t know anything about Hillary in terms of religion,” said Donald Trump, while speaking to a group of evangelical leaders in New York.

“Now, she’s been in the public eye for years and years, and yet there’s no — there’s nothing out there,” Trump, said to many an “Amen” from the faithful…

Sigh…

…another outright Trump lie the media seems incapable of correcting.

Hillary is on the record — and then some.

In a 2007 New York Times interview,  Hillary Clinton responded to questions including the intrusive — “How do you feed [your] personal relationship with God?,” and amazingly for the Times–“Do you believe that the resurrection of Jesus actually happened?,” and (believe it not) “Do you believe on the salvation issue . . . that belief in Christ is needed for going to heaven?”

Hillary more or less said “YES!” to all these “do you believe in Jesus” questions. And the Times editors must have then changed the brands of weed they’d been smoking because they never asked any political leader anything this intrusive again.

So we DO KNOW Hillary loves Jesus.

Billy Graham couldn’t have pried loose a clearer deceleration of faith.

Trump must not read his hometown paper. Here’s how the Times‘ story opened:

Long before her beliefs would be tested in the most wrenching of ways as first lady, Hillary Rodham Clinton taught an adult Sunday school class on the importance of forgiveness. It is a lesson, she says, that she has harked back to often.

“We all have things that oftentimes we’re upset about, or ashamed of, or feel guilty over, and so many people carry these enormous burdens around,” Mrs. Clinton said… “One of the great gifts of faith is to let it go.”

The themes of wrongs, forgiveness and reconciliation have played out repeatedly in Mrs. Clinton’s life, as she has endured the ordeal of her husband’s infidelity, engaged in countless political battles and shared a deep, mutual distrust with adversaries.

It’s no secret that Hillary’s Methodist faith, has guided her as she sought to repair her marriage, forgiven some critics who once vilified her and struggled in the bare-knuckles world of politics to fulfill the biblical commandment to love thy neighbor, as the Times and others have noted. A close personal friend of mine who worked in the Clinton White House spoke of the Bible studies Hillary led there. This pal of mine is a secular Jew and found these Bible studies odd and unnerving “for such a bright lady to do.”

Trump expressed “concern” to the evangelical conservatives gathered in New York on June 21, 2016, that the United States is being damaged because Christianity is on a slide to becoming “weaker, weaker, weaker.”

Trump said, “my greatest contribution to Christianity — and other religions” will be “religious liberty. ” In the Trump dictionary apparently religious liberty translates as: appointing antiabortion Supreme Court justices; deporting Mexicans, making department store employees say “Merry Christmas” and letting public school coaches lead prayer on the field.

Reportedly he won a standing ovation from the evangelicals as the only candidate promising to kill the families of suspected terrorist, torture people, back automatic assault weapons ownership without background checks and so forth.

Franklin Graham, also buys into Trump’s version of faith, family and the heathen version of the Hillary myth — as imagined by the Fox News crowd and other white supremacists…

“We’re losing our country,” Graham told a rally on the steps of the state Capitol in Frankfort, Ky., in May.  Graham begged pastors to run for office. “We need Christian men and women at every level,” shouted Graham.

Graham,  wrote in a Facebook post: “Do you think that if people on your deacon board or pastoral board were serving on the school board that you would be discussing same-sex bathrooms?” Answer: or maybe the way to deal with this is with an assault rifle in a gay club in Orlando? Right Franklin?

Emails obtained by the Charlotte Business Journal display the nasty views of North Carolina State Rep. Dan Bishop (R), the primary sponsor of the “bathroom bill.” In response to a constituent message telling him not to “cave in to the Politically Correct Taliban” and to coordinate “bathroom bills” with other states, Bishop replied, “I LOVE that idea. Taliban. Love that too. Not giving up. Ever.”

Trump told another audience of evangelical Christians that, when he is president, “we will respect and defend Christian Americans.”

What happens to everyone else?

How about the Mexican Pentecostal and Roman Catholic parents of kids raised here, now in limbo after the Supreme Court’s Republicans decided Mexican kids raised here aren’t real Americans? What now, as they see their families devastated?

Maybe the best place to round up brown and black Christians is in their churches! They always seem to be there praying to Jesus, and doing other anti-American activities. I mean this worked for Dylann Roof, why not for Trump? Church is where all those Mexican rapists mostly hang out. According to a Pew Research Center  study “Latino evangelical Protestants are the most likely to say they attend worship services at least weekly, pray daily and consider religion to be very important in their lives.”

There it is Trump, now your goons know where to find “them.”

Jerry Falwell Jr., (a vocal Trump lover) can help out. He’s a keeper of fundraising lists and asked his students to carry loaded weapons on the campus of Liberty University just in case any Muslims showed up.

Falwell can no doubt lend Trump some church lists so Trump can track down brown and black Christians — once the Trump goons get to work on “defending American (white) Christians.”

Think my little satire here is extreme? No, reality trumps (no pun) any fiction I can come up with. Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, an anti-LGBT hate group according to Southern Poverty Law Center,  compared gay people to the Taliban, equating gay sex with domestic terrorism. “If open homosexuals are allowed into the United States military, the Taliban won’t need to plant dirty needles to infect our soldiers with HIV,” he wrote.

“Our own soldiers will take care of that for them,” said Fischer, who was scheduled to join Ted Cruz at a Mississippi campaign rally until the Texas senator reportedly got sick and canceled the event.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His latest book —WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace

Available now on Amazon

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Follow Frank on Twitter www.twitter.com/frank_schaefferSee Frank’s paintings http://www.frankschaefferart.com/Follow Frank on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/frank.schaeffer.16 Contact Frank at http://www.frankschaeffer.com


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