"The Trump Presidency Was A Catastrophe For American Christianity": An Interview With David French https://www.vox.com/22188646/trump-evangelical-christianity-david-french
Christianity: A Compendium Of "What Went Wrong" And Current Worship Of The Wrongness https://newsfrombarbaria.
Alan: In the first link above, the interviewee, David French, is a fellow at the National Review Institute and a staff writer for National Review from 2015 to 2019, French currently serves as senior editor of The Dispatch. In the 2016 election went on record saying he would vote for Donald Trump if he became the Republican nominee.
This interview is brief and highly-informative, supplying the distilled political wisdom of an intelligent, studious, life-long Evangelical Christian.
Excerpt: I tell people all the time that live in other parts of the country, in non-MAGA parts of the country, that they have to remember where white evangelicals tend to get their information about the world. When it comes to politics, most evangelicals are not getting their information from the pulpit. I think it’s a misconception that a lot of people who are outside of the evangelical world have, that at church they’re getting a ton of politics. No, but what’s happening is a lot of Republican Christians are getting catechized in politics through conservative media, through Fox News, through talk radio.
As I’ve told a lot of people, if you had the information inflow that a lot of my neighbors have [French lives in Tennessee], you’d be MAGA also. A lot of it is just a product of information that makes it not that hard to support Trump, if that’s your information flow. The other thing is that a lot of these people genuinely believe, because of where they get their information, that the country is in some kind of emergency that justifies the extremism of Trump. They believe they need someone who’s willing to be very aggressive in taking on the left, their so-called enemies....
The right may have acquired political power, but the left was much more effective at achieving cultural power, and if you believe, as I do, that politics is downstream from culture, the quest for pure political power was always going to be limited. The religious right lost the culture and with it their ability to impact the world the way they envisioned. The Trump years encapsulate this perfectly. The right went all-in on Trump. White evangelicals went all-in on Trump. They won the presidency. They won the House. They won the Senate. They had the judiciary.
Is anyone going to say that the United States of America is now more fundamentally Christian in 2021 than it was in 2017? I don’t think so.
Most people would say the cultural left has been empowered during these years. So the religious right got what they wanted in a lot of ways politically speaking, but I don’t think they achieved their long-term goals by any stretch of the imagination."
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