Why Evangelicals Couldn’t Care Less About Trump’s Epstein Scandal
One of the maddening—and seemingly unanswerable—questions for many concerned Americans is how deeply religious Christian voters have remained so loyal to President Donald Trump despite his many divorces, relentless vulgarity, flagrant dishonesty, and conviction for sexual assault. And now with the recent controversies around the Epstein files, Trump’s friendship with the convicted child trafficker, and the vast conspiracy theories surrounding it all, this question seems even more urgent and baffling. How is it possible for godly men and women, whose Bibles are frequently read, who consider the teachings of Jesus Christ as their guide for living, how can these men and women devote themselves to a man who appears to be a living contradiction of all that they believe?
To understand this phenomenon, one must appreciate that for white American evangelicals, Trump’s MAGA movement is, at its core, religious, which is how deeply religious voters experience it. For them, the Epstein affair is a ruse ginned up by God-haters who want to bring down the man who embodies their hopes and dreams for themselves, their families, and their country.
No matter how the Epstein files controversy unfolds—and even what the files might reveal, if and when they are ever released—or the related backlash from right-wing podcasters, or the resulting tensions within the GOP, nothing will break their support. The reason goes to the heart of how Trump and his enablers have marketed MAGA to religious voters, how those voters now experience the movement, and the role that conspiracy theories circulating among evangelicals play in the drama.
Trump knows how to use Christians collective gullibility for his benefit. He can read a room, and when he summoned some 1000 top ministry leaders to a Times Square hotel ballroom in June 2016, he immediately understood what it would take to woo them away from the other GOP presidential hopefuls, co-religionists Ben Carson and Ted Cruz.
Trump asked the assembled clerics what they cared about, and they told him Hillary Clinton’s anti-Christian elitism, ending Roe v. Wade, and stopping LGBTQ progress, especially reversing the Supreme Court’s Obergefell opinion legalizing same-sex marriage. As attendees made their comments into microphones set up for that purpose, Trump listened and nodded his head with interest. Trump played to his audience’s fears and grievances. He assured them they were right about everything and that he’d do what was necessary to fix what was wrong, in particular, appoint anti-Roe justices. He said he would fight for Christians and defend Christianity. He received a standing ovation, and from then on, Trump had virtually every prominent evangelical influencer in his pocket.
As more and more evangelicals joined the Trump train, his rallies took on features that looked and felt a lot like what evangelicals experience in church on Sunday morning or in a revival tent: fervent opening prayers, gospel and country music groups, and emotional testimonials of how patrons were once on the other side, but they came to see the light and get behind the only true patriot leader, Donald J. Trump.
Employing Christian language, music, and “ordinances,” like baptisms and exorcisms, has not only been a clever marketing device for MAGA promoters, but it has also successfully laid out the explicit terms of the relationship for deeply spiritual but heretofore apolitical constituents.
Trump’s devotees have sacralized every step of the MAGA initiation process. Ministry Watch, a donor watchdog group, reports that while Trump addressed the February 2024 convention of the National Religious Broadcasters in Nashville, “One vendor in the NRB exhibition hall turned a MAGA chant of ‘Let’s Go Brandon’—meant to send an obscene message to President Biden—into ‘Let’s Go Jesus’ flags, hats and shirts.”
Over time, these techniques have helped MAGA followers engage in a momentous transfer of power: Moving their devotion from Jesus to Trump as the embodiment of God’s favor for America, shifting their respect for their pastors to MAGA celebrities as mouthpieces of truth, and channeling the heavenly exhilaration they feel during worship inside a sanctuary to the group high of belonging to a much larger movement on the ascendency of unrivaled earthly power.
The fusion is inseparable once the transition from God and church to Trump and MAGA is complete—and the 2024 election sanctioned that completeness. For these Christians, MAGA is their new denominational home. And because it’s transcendent, the bond cannot be loosened by outside forces—not by reports of a souring economy, not by videos of shrieking moms being separated from their children by masked ICE agents, not even by the call to release the full Epstein files. About the possibility that Trump may be implicated in Epstein’s crimes, the Reverend Kenneth Johnson, a widely-admired conservative evangelical leader in deep-red Adams County, Ohio, said of the Trump voters he ministers to, “If Trump is accused, most of his followers still would not believe it.” Of course, for the few outside Adams County who might believe it, there is always the Bible’s King David, who committed both adultery and murder, but was forgiven and was called “a man after God’s own heart.”
For right-wing Catholics, politicized evangelicals, and socially frightened Pentecostal-Charismatics, MAGA is the new American religion. The experience believers have in their relationship to it is anything but rational.
When you see the United States as a “Christian country,” as the MAGA religious do and are convinced that white people of European descent are best suited to rule it, you might think we’d be better off without the Constitution or even democracy in any form. True believers are convinced Christ will return to earth not to establish a constitutional democracy but an absolute theocratic monarchy in which the ruler can never be questioned. In the end, this both explains what we are witnessing in the evangelical dismissal of the Epstein scandal and encapsulates the gravest danger we face as Americans.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/202...n-scandal/
One of the maddening—and seemingly unanswerable—questions for many concerned Americans is how deeply religious Christian voters have remained so loyal to President Donald Trump despite his many divorces, relentless vulgarity, flagrant dishonesty, and conviction for sexual assault. And now with the recent controversies around the Epstein files, Trump’s friendship with the convicted child trafficker, and the vast conspiracy theories surrounding it all, this question seems even more urgent and baffling. How is it possible for godly men and women, whose Bibles are frequently read, who consider the teachings of Jesus Christ as their guide for living, how can these men and women devote themselves to a man who appears to be a living contradiction of all that they believe?
To understand this phenomenon, one must appreciate that for white American evangelicals, Trump’s MAGA movement is, at its core, religious, which is how deeply religious voters experience it. For them, the Epstein affair is a ruse ginned up by God-haters who want to bring down the man who embodies their hopes and dreams for themselves, their families, and their country.
No matter how the Epstein files controversy unfolds—and even what the files might reveal, if and when they are ever released—or the related backlash from right-wing podcasters, or the resulting tensions within the GOP, nothing will break their support. The reason goes to the heart of how Trump and his enablers have marketed MAGA to religious voters, how those voters now experience the movement, and the role that conspiracy theories circulating among evangelicals play in the drama.
Trump knows how to use Christians collective gullibility for his benefit. He can read a room, and when he summoned some 1000 top ministry leaders to a Times Square hotel ballroom in June 2016, he immediately understood what it would take to woo them away from the other GOP presidential hopefuls, co-religionists Ben Carson and Ted Cruz.
Trump asked the assembled clerics what they cared about, and they told him Hillary Clinton’s anti-Christian elitism, ending Roe v. Wade, and stopping LGBTQ progress, especially reversing the Supreme Court’s Obergefell opinion legalizing same-sex marriage. As attendees made their comments into microphones set up for that purpose, Trump listened and nodded his head with interest. Trump played to his audience’s fears and grievances. He assured them they were right about everything and that he’d do what was necessary to fix what was wrong, in particular, appoint anti-Roe justices. He said he would fight for Christians and defend Christianity. He received a standing ovation, and from then on, Trump had virtually every prominent evangelical influencer in his pocket.
As more and more evangelicals joined the Trump train, his rallies took on features that looked and felt a lot like what evangelicals experience in church on Sunday morning or in a revival tent: fervent opening prayers, gospel and country music groups, and emotional testimonials of how patrons were once on the other side, but they came to see the light and get behind the only true patriot leader, Donald J. Trump.
Employing Christian language, music, and “ordinances,” like baptisms and exorcisms, has not only been a clever marketing device for MAGA promoters, but it has also successfully laid out the explicit terms of the relationship for deeply spiritual but heretofore apolitical constituents.
Trump’s devotees have sacralized every step of the MAGA initiation process. Ministry Watch, a donor watchdog group, reports that while Trump addressed the February 2024 convention of the National Religious Broadcasters in Nashville, “One vendor in the NRB exhibition hall turned a MAGA chant of ‘Let’s Go Brandon’—meant to send an obscene message to President Biden—into ‘Let’s Go Jesus’ flags, hats and shirts.”
Over time, these techniques have helped MAGA followers engage in a momentous transfer of power: Moving their devotion from Jesus to Trump as the embodiment of God’s favor for America, shifting their respect for their pastors to MAGA celebrities as mouthpieces of truth, and channeling the heavenly exhilaration they feel during worship inside a sanctuary to the group high of belonging to a much larger movement on the ascendency of unrivaled earthly power.
The fusion is inseparable once the transition from God and church to Trump and MAGA is complete—and the 2024 election sanctioned that completeness. For these Christians, MAGA is their new denominational home. And because it’s transcendent, the bond cannot be loosened by outside forces—not by reports of a souring economy, not by videos of shrieking moms being separated from their children by masked ICE agents, not even by the call to release the full Epstein files. About the possibility that Trump may be implicated in Epstein’s crimes, the Reverend Kenneth Johnson, a widely-admired conservative evangelical leader in deep-red Adams County, Ohio, said of the Trump voters he ministers to, “If Trump is accused, most of his followers still would not believe it.” Of course, for the few outside Adams County who might believe it, there is always the Bible’s King David, who committed both adultery and murder, but was forgiven and was called “a man after God’s own heart.”
For right-wing Catholics, politicized evangelicals, and socially frightened Pentecostal-Charismatics, MAGA is the new American religion. The experience believers have in their relationship to it is anything but rational.
When you see the United States as a “Christian country,” as the MAGA religious do and are convinced that white people of European descent are best suited to rule it, you might think we’d be better off without the Constitution or even democracy in any form. True believers are convinced Christ will return to earth not to establish a constitutional democracy but an absolute theocratic monarchy in which the ruler can never be questioned. In the end, this both explains what we are witnessing in the evangelical dismissal of the Epstein scandal and encapsulates the gravest danger we face as Americans.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/202...n-scandal/
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
