{"id":90008,"date":"2020-10-15T19:56:54","date_gmt":"2020-10-15T16:56:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/american-evangelicals-still-see-trump-as-their-anointed-one-why\/"},"modified":"2020-10-15T19:56:54","modified_gmt":"2020-10-15T16:56:54","slug":"american-evangelicals-still-see-trump-as-their-anointed-one-why","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/american-evangelicals-still-see-trump-as-their-anointed-one-why\/","title":{"rendered":"#American evangelicals still see Trump as their anointed one. Why?"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#American evangelicals still see Trump as their anointed one. Why?<\/strong>”<\/p>\n

\n

When you walk into the Sunday service at the Logos School in Moscow, Idaho, something feels off right from the beginning. It\u2019s not so much the small army of children running and giggling in the K-12 school\u2019s playground, but rather their mothers: they are conspicuously young, a few barely out of their teens, and some looking like they should still be students at the school. Their app<\/a>earance and simple math suggest they could not have given birth to the three or four children each is corralling into the gymnasium as the services begin. Not unless they began at a shockingly young age.<\/p>\n

Inside, Logos\u2019s gym looks like that of a typical high school, with stow-away bleachers and retractable basketball hoops and banners commemorating past sporting successes\u2014a regional basketball championship, a state title in volleyball. The only difference is the half-dozen or so large banners bearing the images of crusader knights, in full armour, swords drawn, ready for battle.<\/p>\n

Logos prides itself on being a \u201cclassical Christian\u201d school that offers a \u201cChrist-centred education.\u201d It attracts many conservative evangelical families who live in and around Moscow, pop. 25,800, but is particularly popular among those who follow Christ Church, headed by Pastor Doug Wilson.<\/p>\n

READ MORE:\u00a0The stark, unbridgeable divide between rural and urban America<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Wilson leads this Sunday\u2019s services at the school gymnasium, one of three that Christ Church holds every Sunday in Moscow serving a community that has ballooned to an estimated thousand members\u2014in no small part due to all those young women having all those children (\u201cSecular families have one or two children,\u201d Wilson will tell me later, proudly. \u201cOurs have six or seven.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Wilson\u2019s views have, for obvious reasons, ignited some intense and acrimonious debates in Moscow, a historically liberal college town that is home to the University of Idaho, while Washington State University lies just eight miles away, across the state line. It is, as its long-time progressive residents like to say, a \u201ctiny blue dot in a sea of red.\u201d<\/p>\n

But things are changing. In the 1960s, a fiery religious fundamentalist named James Wilson decided to set up his evangelical mission in the town. The choice was strategic: because of Moscow\u2019s location between two universities, Wilson believed it offered unique opportunities for evangelism, challenging what his followers to this day claim is the secular \u201cindoctrination\u201d young people receive at universities. Secularism, they say, has undermined the ordained patriarchal order, weakening men and assigning roles to women which they are not equipped to handle.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Pastor Doug Wilson at the Logos School; Wilson argues God regularly passes judgment on humanity. (Photograph by Adnan R. Khan)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Wilson\u2019s teaching, outlined in his book, <\/span>Principles of War: A Handbook on Strategic Evangelism, <\/i>was, as the title suggests, an attempt to re-establish a more \u201cmuscular Christianity\u201d, according to Nick Gier, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Idaho, who knew both James Wilson and his son Doug. In his critiques of the Christ Church movement, Gier describes an ideology obsessed with reclaiming manliness in Christian doctrine, where \u201conly propertied males should vote,\u201d because \u201cmisguided women might decide to cancel out their husband\u2019s wise choices in church and political matters,\u201d Gier wrote<\/span> in 2010.<\/p>\n

Pining for a manlier America resonates with the persistent frontier-ism in small town U.S.A. Doug Wilson has successfully harnessed his father\u2019s message to rapidly expand his congregation while launching related enterprises. Christ Church now owns a number of successful businesses in Moscow, runs a private college, and is planning to build a massive cathedral to meet the needs of its growing flock.<\/p>\n

To the dismay of the town\u2019s liberals, the church also actively encourages followers in other parts of America to move to Moscow, with the goal of transforming the town into an evangelical Christian home base from which to prepare for the inevitable collapse of secularism and the rise in its place of the Kingdom of God.<\/p>\n

The Sunday service I attended is dedicated to this theme. Wilson spends the good part of an hour riffing on the power of prophecy and the importance of preparing for God\u2019s judgment. He repeatedly extols the virtue of \u201cdonning breastplates;\u201d good Christians, he says, are always prepared to battle in the way of God.<\/p>\n

RELATED:\u00a0We are all witnessing the Great American Implosion<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

After the service, Wilson tells me the imagery is meant as metaphor. Christians should be \u201cspiritually\u201d prepared for God\u2019s judgments, he emphasizes: <\/span>\u201cWe\u2019re at the end of a peculiar civic-political order now. The liberal public square that was dominant during the 20th<\/sup> century is coming to pieces, because of good old-fashioned sin.\u201d<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve heard that sentiment often, in a variety of iterations, during my journey across America. Some people believe this moment in history represents the end of times\u2014the second coming of Christ, Judgment Day and all those apocalyptic fever dreams. Others, like Wilson, believe we are in the midst of one of God\u2019s smaller judgments, a punishment of sinners in the same vein as the sacking of Jerusalem in 70 CE.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s consistent throughout is the belief that Donald Trump and the coronavirus pandemic are somehow necessary agents to the proper functioning of God\u2019s plan. Anyone who gets in the way is the enemy, an agent of darkness.<\/p>\n

So it is that Moscow\u2019s mask mandate, which requires masks in any public space, indoor or outdoor, where proper social<\/a> distancing cannot be maintained, is met with fury. Protesters of the order, all supporters of Wilson and Trump, have warned of dire consequences if they are forced to relinquish their God-given right to refuse to wear a mask.<\/p>\n

At the Christ Church Sunday service, where no one but my wife and I has their face covered, one congregant tells me masking is really not necessary. \u201cWe\u2019ve had much bigger gatherings than this and we haven\u2019t had an outbreak,\u201d he says. \u201cOur prayers protect us here.\u201d <\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

\"A<\/p>\n

A worshipper prays for forgiveness during Sunday service at the Logos School. (Photograph by Adnan R. Khan)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

In recent days, Trump has used his own positive coronavirus diagnosis to leverage that belief in Divine intervention in a naked attempt to ramp up his own sputtering campaign. In a video posted on his Twitter account on Oct. 7, shortly after his release from the Walter Reed Medical Center, Trump called his diagnosis a \u201cblessing from God.\u201d Only two days earlier, right wing media had lit up with headlines announcing Trump\u2019s miraculous recovery. \u201c<\/b>Prayers For Trump From Christians & Others Lead To Miracle At Walter Reed,\u201d <\/b>one headline read.<\/span><\/p>\n

Wilson defends his calls for his congregation to flout the mask mandate. His goal is not to tell others what they should or should not do during this pandemic, he tells me. \u201cBut I want to remind people that in the Constitution, we have the right to peaceably assemble and we have the right to religious worship. Exercising those ought not to be controversial.\u201d<\/p>\n

He skirts the question of how temporary orders to wear face masks or social distance during a pandemic in which a highly infectious disease spreads through the air constitute a breach of those rights. Local health officials argue that the group\u2019s rights have in no way been violated; they may gather in public places and demonstrate, as long as they are social distancing or, if not, then wearing masks.<\/p>\n

But Wilson is famous for taking his arguments through a maze of seemingly logical propositions before popping out on the other side with rather dubious QEDs. He has argued, for instance, that allegations of misogyny against him are unfounded. If people would only see things from his perspective\u2014one based on a literal reading of the Bible\u2014they would understand, he opines, that restricting women to being homebound baby-makers is honouring womanhood, not demeaning it.<\/p>\n

RELATED:\u00a0Amy Coney Barrett and the challenge of separating church and state<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

But it\u2019s not long before the pretzeled logic of religious fundamentalists who fancy themselves intellectuals crumbles, revealing the ideological impetus behind their arguments. During his sermon, Wilson offers up prayers for Amy Coney Barrett<\/span>, Trump\u2019s Supreme Court nominee. Like all evangelicals, there are two basic goals in his mission to get Trump elected again, and they have nothing to do with the American Constitution: repeal abortion and LGBTQ rights.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard, when this agenda reveals itself, to fend off unsettling images of The Handmaid\u2019s Tale<\/i> and other misogynistic dystopias. Wilson\u2019s doublespeak glosses over the unsettling fervour with which people like he are now grasping for victory in next month\u2019s elections. Others are much less subtle. In Broadus, Mont., Jane Thompson, an antique shop owner, told me she firmly believes Trump, despite all his faults, has been anointed by God to carry out the mission of making America godly again. \u201cGod often chooses imperfect people for His purposes,\u201d she told me.<\/p>\n

Another customer browsing in the shop added: \u201cI totally agree. You know, even King David was a bit of a ladies\u2019 man.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Jane<\/p>\n

Jane Thompson at her antique shop in Broadus, Mont.; Thompson believes Trump has been anointed by God to save America from sin and villainy. (Photograph by Adnan R. Khan)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

More astonishing still is how widespread in rural America is the belief that the hand of God is working miracles through an excessively-tanned and obese former reality TV personality. Yet according to exit polls in the 2016 elections, fully one-third of Trump\u2019s votes came from evangelicals. So, for the purposes of trying to understand Trumpworld, I have to treat this line of thinking seriously.<\/p>\n

It is sometimes exceedingly hard. When I began this journey through Trump\u2019s America, I convinced myself that I would be fair and open to the perspectives of people who support him. A month and a half later, I like to think I have been. I still feel sympathy for rural Americans and their fears of losing idyllic lives to the relentless march of urbanization. I feel like I have a more nuanced understanding of how the breakdown of America\u2019s political and economic institutions have created a space where grievances from the left and the right overlap. There are core issues in America upon which everyone agrees. If those exist, then there is hope that the polarization in American society can be overcome.<\/p>\n

Still, as I\u2019ve gone deeper down the Trumpian rabbit hole, things have gotten decidedly darker. I\u2019ve been called a terrorist (more on that in another dispatch) and treated with disdain for wearing a mask. I\u2019ve been told, repeatedly by Trump supporters that the only way the Democrats can win is if they cheat.<\/p>\n

The fervour for Trump\u2014especially in rural Montana, Wyoming and Idaho\u2014is of the cultish variety seen at Trump rallies.\u00a0 <\/span>Many progressives like me, understandably, dismiss it. But as W.I. Thomas, the late 19th<\/sup>\u2013 and early 20th<\/sup>-century American sociologist, once said, \u201csomething is real if it is real in its consequences.\u201d And the consequences of Donald Trump currying favour with the religious right\u2014from his attacks on secular institutions to his nomination of a judge they expect to curtail abortion rights\u2014are very real.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

At the end of Sunday service at Christ Church, Doug Wilson takes a seat at the exit to the Logos School\u2019s gymnasium with a bucket of Hershey\u2019s Kisses in his lap. A flurry of children dart in and out of our conversation, grabbing handfuls of candies and running off into the sea of grownups milling around and talking.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The armed guard assigned to stay close to me during the Sunday service at the Logos School. Pastor Doug Wilson of Christ Church claims his congregation is under threat and persecuted.\u00a0 (Photograph by Adnan R. Khan)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Wilson apologizes for the armed guard he had posted next to me throughout the course of the service. \u201cWe\u2019ve had a few death threats,\u201d he tells me. \u201cThe political climate is very tense right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

I tell him that most of the congregants I\u2019ve spoken to say they will be voting for Trump.<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah,\u201d he laughs. \u201cYou won\u2019t find many Biden supporters here.\u201d<\/p>\n

The prospects, I point out, don\u2019t look very promising for Trump: \u201cWhat do you think your followers will do if Biden wins the election?\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019d get ready for persecution,\u201d he says. \u201cI would expect Joe Biden to have no respect whatsoever for my religious liberty. I believe we would have to go underground.\u201d<\/p>\n

What exactly his followers would do then remains unclear, but Wilson says the possibilities worry him. \u201cEight million people in this country are new gun owners,\u201d he says. \u201cThat\u2019s eight million people who never owned a gun before. So yeah, I\u2019m worried.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

\n

For forums sites go to Forum.BuradaBiliyorum.Com<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\n

If you want to read more News<\/a> articles, you can visit our General category.<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#American evangelicals still see Trump as their anointed one. Why?” When you walk into the Sunday service at the Logos School in Moscow, Idaho, something feels off right from the beginning. It\u2019s not so much the small army of children running and giggling in the K-12 school\u2019s playground, but rather their mothers: they are conspicuously…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":90009,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/www.macleans.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/10\/RELIGIOUS-RIGHT-MOSCOW-IDAHO-KHAN-OCT14-766x575.jpg","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[67904,4941,67806,71012],"class_list":["post-90008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-general","tag-2020-u-s-election","tag-donald-trump","tag-editors-picks","tag-religion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=90008"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/90008\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/90009"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=90008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=90008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=90008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}