Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Evangelical Fear Elected Trump (The Atlantic conjures up a fake "evangelical")
The Atlantic ^ | 06/24/2018 6:00 AM ET | John Fea

Posted on 06/24/2018 9:00:00 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum

click here to read article


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-43 next last
To: E. Pluribus Unum

It wasn’t an act of fear to oppose Hillary.

It was an act of correct thinking, both as a moral being and an American citizen.

The DNC as it now exist is the people the commie hunters of the 40s, 50s and 60s were trying to protect us from. Everything about the DNC is vile, loathsome, and unAmerican.

They are scum.


21 posted on 06/24/2018 9:43:11 AM PDT by Rurudyne (Standup Philosopher)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: E. Pluribus Unum

Fear is neither ungodly nor cowardly.

It is a tool, if accurately applied, for identifying sources of danger.

Those sources of danger can then be defended against.


22 posted on 06/24/2018 9:55:51 AM PDT by Architect of Avalon
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: E. Pluribus Unum

This headline makes it seem there should be something wrong with voting for someone, if you had fear over an issue and they agreed with you.

Every Democrat who voted for Hillary had a dreadful fear of Donald Trump becoming president. Hillary agreed with them.

I guess Democrats are admitting there was something wrong with voting for her. In this instance, I sure agree.


23 posted on 06/24/2018 9:59:13 AM PDT by DoughtyOne (01/26/18 DJIA 30 stocks $26,616.71 48.794% > open 11/07/16 215.71 from 50% increase 1.2183 yrs..)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: E. Pluribus Unum

I think he gets it about right. Includes the usual, over-the-top stuff about Trump, but the MAIN REASON Christians supported Trump was because the alternative was a known and hideous quanitity. The absolute worst Trump could do was be as bad Rag Doll...it was literally IMPOSSIBLE for Trump to be any worse.

And, of course, Trump has been MUCH BETTER than most of us expected and if he holds firm on immigration, he will be OUTSTANDING.


24 posted on 06/24/2018 9:59:28 AM PDT by BobL (I drive a pick up truck because it makes me feel like a man)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: E. Pluribus Unum
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of Wisdom, and to depart from evil, that is understanding (Job 28:28).
25 posted on 06/24/2018 10:10:30 AM PDT by El Cid (Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved, and thy house...)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: E. Pluribus Unum

Some people say the Baptists are the spiritual heirs of the Puritans, not the evangelicals.


26 posted on 06/24/2018 10:31:01 AM PDT by firebrand
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: El Cid

Absolutely. And don’t forget

For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.


27 posted on 06/24/2018 10:36:11 AM PDT by firebrand
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 25 | View Replies]

To: E. Pluribus Unum
"Evangelical" was a term made up by pollsters in the 1950s to denote and to demote the term "Christian." So, the left can define the term any way they like.

I don't know anyone who is a Christian who calls them self an Evangelical.

It seems about time that we take back our Christian terms.

28 posted on 06/24/2018 10:36:50 AM PDT by Slyfox (Not my circus, not my monkeys)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: E. Pluribus Unum

There has never been a better defender than Trump.


29 posted on 06/24/2018 10:47:58 AM PDT by rrrod (just an old guy with a gun in his pocket)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: grey_whiskers

Fear is not what elected Trump. And fear is not what will keep him in office and reelect him in 2018.

Every week, the left news media comes up with a new perjorative name to call anyone who does not toe the liberal line of the East and West Coast elites, the intellectuals who think they are the holders of all truths. They have not hearts and no wisdom and above all they have no humility.

This week’s new name is “lightweight Yahoos”, like all those folks wearing the red hats at the Duluth rally. While ma n y were MAGA hats, I will bet that the other half were “Make Minnesota Red” hats.

BY continually insulting those who may disagree with them as Nazis, racists, homophobes, haters, deplorables, white supremacists, etc., they are labelling themselves more than us. Keep it up, and Trump will be reelected in a landslide in 2020.


30 posted on 06/24/2018 11:30:11 AM PDT by Gumdrop
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: Olog-hai

“Not to mention, Fea does not know his Bible; those words were spoken by Eliphaz the Temanite. God does not address Job until chapter 38 of the book.”

Exactly. Rightly divide the Word.

And the things Eliphaz said were NOT from God.

Job 42:7
And so it was, after the Lord had spoken these words to Job, that the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, “My wrath is aroused against you and your two friends, for you have not spoken of Me what is right, as My servant Job has.”

But leave it to leftists to misquote a Bible they don’t even believe in, to condemn others for things they hypocritically do themselves.

If Evangelicals elected Trump out of fear, what are the motives of those trying to stop Trump?


31 posted on 06/24/2018 11:33:22 AM PDT by unlearner (A war is coming.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 14 | View Replies]

To: E. Pluribus Unum
The foundations of the article cited in this thread seem questionable.

On the other hand, the kind of fear-mongering and street talk that Democrat/Progressives cultist leaders have engaged in from before the November 8 election has brought us here--all for the reason of protecting and continuing their "progressive"/regressive "transforming" America from its roots in Constitutional limitations on power to one in which "the People" are dumbed down and propagandized so that they will, like sheep, follow false "shepherds."

After the 2016 Election, many of the "sheeple" Progressive followers said they were/are "afraid." That is what they are hearing from their captors, the Progressives, who do fear they may lose grip on their control of everything from education to local government.

What is "fear"?

An ancient text enlightens us, "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." - Holy Bible

On the other hand, man-induced fears induce nothing but ignorance and more fear.

We might seek out thoughts from the author of The Conservative mind, Dr. Russell Kirk, in the following excerpted portions of his, The Rarity of the God-Fearing Man:

"A Michigan farmer, some years ago, climbed to the roof of his silo, and there he painted, in great red letters that the Deity could see, 'The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.' These words are on that roof yet.

"Without knowledge of fear, we cannot know order in personality or society. Fear forms an ineluctable part of the human condition. Fear lacking, hope and aspiration fail. To demand for mankind “freedom from fear,” as politically attainable, was a silly piece of demagogic sophistry. If, per impossible, fear were wiped altogether out of our lives, we would be desperately bored, yearning for old or new terrors; vegetating, we would cease to be human beings. A child’s fearful joy in stories of goblins, witches, and ghosts is a natural yearning after the challenge of the dreadful: raw head and bloody bones, in one form or another, the imagination demands. . . . And there are things which rightfully we ought to fear, if we are to enjoy and dignity as men. When, in an age of smugness and softness, fear has been pushed temporarily into the dark corners of personality and society, then soon the gods of the copybook headings with fire and slaughter return. To fear to commit evil, and to hate what is abominable, is the mark of manliness. “They will never love where they ought to love,” Burke says, “who do not hate where they ought to hate.” It may be added that they will never dare when they ought to dare, who do not fear when they ought to fear. Time was when there lay too heavy upon man that fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom. Soul-searching can sink into morbidity, and truly conscience can make cowards of us all. Scotland in the seventeenth century, for instance, tormented itself into a kind of spiritual hypochondria by an incessant melancholy fawning up upon the Lord’s favor. But no such age is ours. Forgetting that there exists such a state as salutary dread, modern man has become spiritually foolhardy. His bravado, I suspect, will stand the test no better than ancient Pistol’s. He who admits no fear of God is really a post-Christian man; for at the heart of Judaism and Christianity lies a holy dread. And a good many people, outwardly and perhaps inwardly religious . . . today deny the reality of reverential fear, and thus are post-Christian without confessing it. Christianity always was a scandal; and I rather think I began to fear God because I discovered that terror to be so unconventional, impractical, and off-color in our era. . . . Before I began to think much on the spiritual diseases of our century, I revolted against the disgusting smugness of modern America—particularly the complacency of professors and clergymen, the flabby clerisy of a sensate time. Once I found myself in a circle of scholars who were discussing solemnly the conditions necessary for arriving at scientific truth. Chiefly from a perverse impulse to shock the Academy of Lagado, perhaps, I muttered, “We have to begin with the dogma that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.” I succeeded in scandalizing. Some gentlemen and scholars took this for indecent levity; others, unable to convince themselves that anyone could mean this literally, groped for the presumptive allegorical or symbolical meaning behind my words. But two or three churchgoers in the gathering were not displeased. These were given to passing the collection plate and to looking upon the church as a means to social reform; incense, vestments, and the liturgy have their aesthetic charms, even among doctors of philosophy. Faintly pleased, yes, these latter professors, to hear the echo of fife and drum ecclesiastic; but also embarrassed at such radicalism. 'Oh no,' they murmured, 'not the fear of God. You mean the love of God, don’t you?' For them the word of Scriptures was no warrant, their Anglo-Catholicism notwithstanding. With Henry Ward Beecher, they were eager to declare that God is Love—though hardly a love which passes all understanding. Theirs was a thoroughly permissive God the Father, properly instructed by Freud. Looking upon their mild and diffident faces, I wondered how much trust I might put in such love as they knew. Their meekness was not that of Moses. Meek before Jehovah, Moses had no fear of Pharaoh; but these doctors of the schools, much at ease in Zion, were timid in the presence of a traffic policeman. Although convinced that God is too indulgent to punish much of anything, they were given to trembling before Caesar. Christian love is the willingness to sacrifice oneself; yet I would not have counted upon these gentlemen to adventure anything of consequence for my sake, nor even for those with greater claims upon them. I doubted whether the Lord would adventure much on their behalf. . . . The great grim Love which makes Hell a part of the nature of things, my colleagues could not apprehend. And, lacking knowledge of that Love, at once compassionate and retributive, their sort may bring us presently to a terrestrial hell, which is the absence of God from the affairs of men. . . . Every age portrays God in the image of its poetry and politics. In one century, God is an absolute monarch, exacting his due; in another century still an absolute sovereign, but a benevolent despot; again, perhaps a grand gentleman among aristocrats; at a different time, a democratic president, with an eye to the ballot box. It has been said that to many of our generation, God is a Republican and works in a bank; but this image is giving way, I think, to God as Chum—at worst, God as a playground supervisor. So much for the images. But in reality God does not alter. . . . What raises up heroes and martyrs is the fear of God. Beside the terror of God’s judgment, the atrocities of the totalist tyrant are pinpricks. A God-intoxicated man, knowing that divine love and divine wrath are but different aspects of a unity, is sustained against the worst this world can do to him; while the goodnatured unambitious man, lacking religion, fearing no ultimate judgment, denying that he is made for eternity, has in him no iron to maintain order and justice and freedom. Mere enlightened self-interest will submit to any strong evil. In one aspect or another, fear insists upon forcing itself into our lives. If the fear of God is obscured, then obsessive fear of suffering, poverty, and sickness will come to the front; or if a well-cushioned state keeps most of these worries at bay, then the tormenting neuroses of modern man, under the labels of 'insecurity' and 'anxiety' and 'constitutional inferiority,' will be the dominant mode of fear. And these latter forms of fear are the more dismaying, for there are disciplines by which one may diminish one’s fear of God. But to remedy the causes of fear from the troubles of our time is beyond the power of the ordinary individual; and to put the neuroses to sleep, supposing any belief in a transcendent order to be absent, there is only the chilly comfort of the analyst’s couch or the tranquilizing drug. By fashionable philodoxies (opinions) of our modern era, by our dominant system of education, by the tone of the serious and the popular press, by the assumptions of the politicians, by most of the sermons to the churchgoers, post-Christian man has been persuaded to do what man always has longed to do—that is, to forget the fear of the Lord. And with that fear have also departed his wisdom and his courage. Only a ferocious drunken farmer is unenlightened enough to affirm a primary tenet of religion in great red letters, and he does not know its meaning. Freedom from fear, if I read St. John aright, is one of the planks in the platform of the Antichrist. But that freedom is delusory and evanescent, and is purchased only at the cost of spiritual and political enslavement. In ends at Armageddon. So in our time, as Yeats saw, Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Lacking conviction that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, the captains and the kings yield to the fierce ideologues, the merciless adventurers, the charlatans and the metaphysically mad. And then, truly, when the stern and righteous God of fear and love has been denied, the Savage God lays down his new commandments. Sincere God-fearing men, I believe, are now a scattered remnant. Yet as it was with Isaiah, so it may yet be with us, that disaster brings consciousness of that stubborn remnant and brings, too, a renewed knowledge of the source of wisdom. Truth and hardihood may find a lodging in some modern hearts when the new schoolmen and the parsons, or some of them, are brought to confess that it is a terrible thing to be delivered into the hands of the living God. . . ." - "The Rarity of the God-Fearing Man" - Russell Kirk.


32 posted on 06/24/2018 11:46:31 AM PDT by loveliberty2
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Rurudyne

The DNC of back then was such an entity also. Wilson brought segregation back into the US military, nationalized key industries and infrastructure (particularly the railroads), and legitimized the KKK by means of promoting “The Birth Of A Nation” right in the White House among other means. Never mind what his successors of that party did.


33 posted on 06/24/2018 11:47:05 AM PDT by Olog-hai ("No Republican, no matter how liberal, is going to woo a Democratic vote." -- Ronald Reagan, 1960)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 21 | View Replies]

To: E. Pluribus Unum

Nowadays, anyone can call himself, or be called, an evangelical. No longer has anything to do with evangelism or Biblical Christianity.


34 posted on 06/24/2018 12:33:29 PM PDT by Socon-Econ
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: E. Pluribus Unum

Based on Trump’s performance, Evangelicals are thrilled with Trump’s Presidency. He is the most pro-Christian and religious freedom President in at least the last 100 years.


35 posted on 06/24/2018 1:14:11 PM PDT by WASCWatch
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Olog-hai

Progressivism was always opposed to the ideals that this country was founded upon, they were an infestation of the very desire for Arbitrary governance and Administrative Law that the DoI sets forth a desire to avoid.

There is no questioning that progressivism was always bad. But it was not a Cultural Marxist or communistic entity till well after men like FDR had managed to kick governance by constitutional means to the curb.

The Democrats didn’t ideologically become wholly owned by the people who dominate it today until after their Republican fellow travelers on the far Left swept into the party to support McGovern.

Yet even then there was but a thin veneer over the Swamp that was very much exactly what it is today: the Democrats were about naked power, the ultimate essence of Arbitrary government. To have power was all that mattered and it’s how someone like LBJ could not only be accepted by his fellow Democrats but also prosper in their company (what floats at the top of a cesspool isn’t going to be cream). When Teddy Kennedy wanted Soviet help he wasn’t out of the mold, he was in fact being perfectly moldy.

Long before Tip O’Neil was bold enough to openly indicate that the seriousness of the charges was a purely partisan consideration it had been a purely partisan consideration.

But the ideology that we vs not-we attitude served has in fact shifted in that there is no longer anything extreme to the Left of it.


36 posted on 06/24/2018 1:48:21 PM PDT by Rurudyne (Standup Philosopher)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 33 | View Replies]

To: Rurudyne
Yes it was Marxist, even before the last century. Ever read Woodrow Wilson’s Socialism and Democracy from 1887?
The thesis of the state socialist is that no line can be drawn between private and public affairs which the State may not cross at will; that omnipotence of legislation is the first postulate of all just political theory. […]

[I]t is very clear that in fundamental theory, socialism and democracy are almost, if not quite, one and the same. They both rest at bottom upon the absolute right of the community to determine its own destiny and that of its members. Men as communities are supreme over men as individuals. […]

… Corporations grow on every hand, and on every hand not only swallow and overawe individuals but also compete with governments. The contest is no longer between government and individuals; it is now between government and dangerous combinations and individuals. Here is a monstrously changed aspect of the social world. In face of such circumstances, must not government lay aside all timid scruple and boldly make itself an agency for social reform as well as for political control? “Yes,” says the democrat, “perhaps it must.” …
There is no autocratic movement in any country that has no ties to Marxism in some form or another. Remember that the Communist Manifesto said that the means justified by their illusory ends “will be different in different countries” although exactly the same at their core.
37 posted on 06/24/2018 2:01:37 PM PDT by Olog-hai ("No Republican, no matter how liberal, is going to woo a Democratic vote." -- Ronald Reagan, 1960)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 36 | View Replies]

To: Socon-Econ
Nowadays, anyone can call himself, or be called, an evangelical. No longer has anything to do with evangelism or Biblical Christianity.

For instance, Richard Dawson is an evangelical fundamentalist atheist.

38 posted on 06/24/2018 2:43:15 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum (<img src="http://i.imgur.com/WukZwJP.gif" width=600><p>https://i.imgur.com/zXSEP5Z.gif)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 34 | View Replies]

To: E. Pluribus Unum

Evangelical is a loaded and abused term.

I have extensive history with all major denominations through my non-denominatonal education and lay ministry.

Functionally, churchianity and enemedia apply the term, Evangelical, almost exclusively to those of Anabaptist persuasion.

I, then a member of the Lutheran Church - Missouri Synod, was once accused by a Baptist seminarian of being a member of a denomination that had no legitimate Evangelical mission, and that I could not honestly call myself an Evangelical. The LCMS at that time, according to my inquiry, had one of the largest missions outreach programs in the world.

Many naively equate an “invitation” in a worship service with being an “Evangelical” bona fide.


39 posted on 06/24/2018 5:44:39 PM PDT by YogicCowboy ("I am not entirely on anyone's side, because no one is entirely on mine." - J. R. R. Tolkien)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Rurudyne

Just read the article reviewing his book in Christianity Today (which is also very left wing). I just can’t get my mind around why John Fea (and other evangelical never trumpers) think Trump is unusually sinful. He says we 81% of evangelicals do harm to the message by voting for Trump.

So that brings up 2 questions for me:

1) If we are to judge Trump for his un-repentant past (to which I still ask myself who am I to judge another sinner) what has he done that is so terrible? Said some disgusting remarks about wanting to get laid? Maybe cheated on his wife? Is that it? Did her murder anyone? (tongue in cheek question)

2) Is John just judging Trump on his past?

3) If not, what is Trump doing now that is sinful?

I am really curious because the never Trumper evangelicals have never really answered this clearly for me.


40 posted on 07/12/2018 11:57:55 AM PDT by Sam Gamgee
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 21 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-43 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson