From 2017 (my gut says the percentage of people who will admit to believing this has increased under 45)

Study: Third of U.S. Says Being Christian Important to Being ‘Truly American’
Avalon Zoppo

Nearly a third of Americans say that being “truly American” means subscribing to the Christian faith, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center.

But the study, which surveyed 14 countries, found that language was the core of national identity, with a median of 70 percent, with being Christian trailing behind language and sharing customs and traditions.

The study released Wednesday found that 32 percent of Americans say being Christian is very important to national identity. And of those who say religion is important to them, 51 percent believe Christianity is a crucial part of being American, Pew said.

In a country that is majority Christian, the researchers said, “The public is divided over whether one has to be Christian in order to be considered American, with roughly a third saying it is very important and another third saying it is not at all important.”

It added, “perhaps not surprisingly, the link between religion and nationality is of greatest consequence to those for whom religion plays a very important role in daily life.”

Responses were split along generational, political and gender lines. More Republicans (43%) said being Christian is essential to being truly American whereas 29 percent of Democrats agreed, according to Pew. Those 50 or older considered being Christian more important than those 35 or under.

The study’s findings are consistent with research on anti-Islamic views in the U.S., said Council on American-Islamic Relations Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, who added that given the current political climate, American Muslims face an increasingly negative perception.

“The study is not at all surprising,” Hooper said. “But we are a religiously diverse nation of many different faiths. You don’t have to follow a particular faith to be truly American. To be truly American, you should be accepting of all faiths.”

Other countries see national identity differently — only seven percent of Swedish people, 10 percent of French respondents and 15 percent of Canadians said they believe being Christian is an important part of their nationality, Pew said. Of the countries included Greece had the highest number at 54 percent.

The researchers also dove into whether people believe birthplace affects national identity, and found relatively little importance.

Asked whether being born in the U.S. is very important for being truly American, 32 percent said yes. The study found that being native born is valued more highly among older Americans and those with a high school degree or less.



SOURCE

Or it's simply trendy to say so.

More likely that it's become acceptable - after all, the Christian Right is now running the asylum.

Nearly a third of Americans say that being “truly American” means subscribing to the Christian faith, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center.

I guess that means Grabem supporters aren't truly American. There's no way you can support Grabem the man or his policies and consider yourself a Christian. That's the point Christianity Today was trying to make the other week.

Thing is, the Evangelical Right is willing to overlook his "flaws" because they believe he'll give them the Supreme Court. He's already given them two conservative Justices and, if he's reelected, he's probably going to give them at least on more. And with a solidly conservative Supreme Court they expect Roe v Wade and Obergefell v Hodges to be overturned.

Trump tells evangelical rally he will put prayer in schools
Jeff Mason and Heather Timmons

U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday said his Democratic opponents would tear down crosses and pledged to bring prayer to public schools at a re-election rally to shore up evangelical support.

Trump spoke on the outskirts of Miami at the King Jesus International Ministry, a "prosperity gospel" church that teaches that the faithful will be rewarded with health and wealth on earth.

“We are defending religion itself, it’s under siege,” Trump said. “A society without religion cannot prosper.”

More than 80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump in the 2016 election. But a crack in evangelical support opened up last month when the magazine Christianity Today wrote a blistering editorial on Trump's "grossly immoral character."

Attendees, some of them wearing Trump's signature red campaign hats, nearly filled the room, which the church says holds 7,000. Some raised their hands in a sign of praise and swayed while music played loudly over the speakers before the president entered the room.

Pastors gathered around Trump on the stage for an opening prayer, while much of the audience remained standing with their hands aloft.

In his speech, Trump mocked Democratic challenger Pete Buttigieg, the Indiana mayor, for having what he said was an unpronounceable last name, and told attendees Democrats were waging war against religion.

“These angry radicals want to impose absolute conformity by censuring speech, tearing down crosses and symbols of faith and banning religious believers from public life."

He got a big reaction from the crowd when he promised to bring religion into U.S. schools. A clause in the U.S. Constitution prohibits the government from promoting one religion over the other, which means public schools don't promote prayer or religious symbols.

SOURCE

I can't let this go by without posting it

Religious decline was the key to economic development in the 20th century
By Damian Ruck

We have known for decades that secular countries tend to be richer than religious ones. Finding out why involves unpicking a complex knot of cognitive and social factors – an imposing task. So my small research team thought we’d ask a more straightforward question: was it the secular chicken that came first, or the economic egg?

Our recent paper in Scientific Advances shows that, in the 20th century, secularisation occurred before economic development and not the other way around. Although this doesn’t prove secularisation makes a country wealthier, it does rule out the reverse. The arrow of time points in one direction, so economic performance cannot be expected to influence people’s opinions in the past.

Global Gallup surveys give us a clear view of the relationship between secularisation and economic development – that the world’s poorest countries are also its most religious. But before the days of modern surveys, the steam-powered scholars of the early 20th century had already noticed that industrialised societies tended to be less religious than agrarian ones; though they disagreed on the interpretation.

The early 20th century French sociologist Emile Durkheim believed that economic development came first. He saw religion as meeting society’s practical functions, such as education and welfare. But when prosperous societies started to meet these functions all by themselves, religion was pushed to the margins. On the other hand, a few decades later, the German sociologist Max Weber argued that religious change came first. He wrote that the Protestant Reformation unleashed a stampede of productivity and economic improvement because of the “Protestant work ethic”.

Only one of them can be correct. For decades, economists and political scientists, armed with modern computers and advanced statistics, have tried to find out whether it was Durkheim or Weber. Some studies found that secularisation came first, some found that development comes first, and still others found they occur at the same time.

Diving deeper into history

My colleagues and I think one major shortcoming preventing us from getting to a solution has been a lack of historical depth. To measure a complex concept like “secularisation”, comprehensive surveying is required. But this has only been possible in the majority of the world for just a couple of decades, since 1990. However, for the first time, we have found a way to dive deeper and cover the entire 100 years of the 20th century.

This temporal periscope presents itself when we bring together evidence from anthropology, political science and neuroscience: people’s beliefs and opinions form and harden during the first few decades of their lives.

Therefore, despite a lifetime of ups and downs, a person’s religious belief will always reflect their formative years. They unwittingly carry a fossilised version of how secular the society of their childhood was, right into the modern day. So if you want to know how religious the world was in the 1950s, then just see how religious the people are who came of age during the 1950s.

We did this by collating answers from the European Values Survey and the World Values Survey, which have asked people around the world about their religiosity since 1990. By pooling data for people who came of age at different decades of the 20th century, we were able to create a new secularisation time line.

We compared this with 100 years of economic data. The image below shows that, in Great Britain, Nigeria, Chile and Philippines at least, the red secularisation line leads the blue economic development line. And our statistical analysis shows that this is the case in all of the 109 countries we measured.



Individual rights set countries apart

The message is crystal clear: secularisation occurs before economic development and not after it. This means we can rule out Durkheim’s functionalist model, but we cannot declare victory for Weber. Any human society is a cacophony of tangled causes, effects and dynamic emergent phenomena. To seek a single cause for anything in this arena is a mug’s game. So we checked if something else offers a more convincing explanation.

For example, a respect for the rights of individuals is the moral triumph of the humanitarian revolution and might provide the “leg up” that societies need to reach economic prosperity. A respect for individual rights requires tolerance of homosexuality, abortion and divorce and we showed that secular societies only become prosperous once they have evolved a greater respect for these individual rights.

If we zoom in on different regions of the world, we see some rich countries that are religious and some poor ones that are secular. Countries like the US and the Catholic countries of Europe have become economically prosperous, yet religion remains important. Conversely, the former Communist countries of Eastern Europe are some of the most secular on Earth, but have middling economic performance. It turns out that it’s a respect for individual rights that separates the rich from the poor – despite the law sometimes being slow to catch up with people’s opinions in some countries.

Though we shouldn’t ignore the role of religion. It’s easy to see why individual rights flower once religious influence has withered. That said, there’s no reason why individual rights can’t exist in a religious world. If religious institutions can become less of a conservative force and embrace modern cultural values, then they could provide moral guidance for the economically prosperous societies of the future.

SOURCE

Just in case you had any doubts about where they're coming from ...

'Evangelicals for Trump' was an awful display by supposed citizens of the Kingdom of God
Trump mocked his enemies, trafficked in half-truths, instilled fear and expressed zero humility. My fellow evangelicals loved every minute of it.
John Fea

I have spent my entire adult life in the evangelical community. I had a born-again experience when I was 16 and never looked back. I teach history at a Christian college with evangelical roots. As a historian, I study American evangelicalism.

But I have never seen anything like what I witnessed as I watched President Donald Trump speak to a few thousand of his evangelical supporters at King Jesus International Ministry, a largely Hispanic megachurch in Miami, during the kickoff to his “Evangelicals for Trump” campaign.

It is no coincidence that this rally took place two weeks after Christianity Today, the historic voice of moderate evangelicalism, called for Trump’s removal from office. The magazine’s editor, Mark Galli, described the president's character as “grossly immoral” and warned his fellow evangelicals that their ardent support was damaging to their Christian witness.

While the Evangelicals for Trump campaign had been in the works for several weeks before Galli’s editorial, it is hard to see the decision to schedule the kickoff event for Jan. 3 as anything but damage control. Even the smallest crack in his evangelical support — especially in swing states like Florida — could result in a Trump loss in 2020.

One note that's music to evangelicals

Before Trump’s speech, several evangelical leaders laid their hands on the president and prayed for him. “Apostle” Guillermo Maldonado, the pastor, prayed that Trump would fulfill his role as a new King Cyrus, the Old Testament Persian ruler who released the Jews from captivity and allowed them to rebuild Jerusalem. Paula White, a preacher of the Prosperity Gospel (God blesses the faithful with financial and physical health), prayed against the demonic forces, presumably Democrats, trying to undermine Trump’s presidency.



As Trump took the podium, the evangelicals in attendance, many wearing pro-Trump clothing and “Make America Great Again” hats, began screaming “USA, USA, USA.” It was clear from the outset that this event would be no different from any other Trump rally. It didn’t matter that the room was filled with born-again Christians. Trump only knows how to sing one note, and it is music to the ears of his evangelical supporters.

Trump and the 'Prosperity Gospel': He's selling false promises to credulous evangelical Christians

Trump bragged about the crowd size, adding that there were “thousands of people” outside “trying to get in.” He called the Evangelicals for Trump movement the “most important grassroots movement in American history.” He reminded everyone that he took the life of Qasem Soleimani.

“You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” the Rolling Stones anthem that has become Trump’s theme song, blared over the church loudspeaker in Spanish when he finished his speech. Maybe “Onward, Christian Soldiers” would have been more appropriate.

Trump painted himself as a president who is protecting American evangelicals from those on the political left who want to “punish” people of faith and destroy religion in America. One of the evangelical Christians in the audience screamed “Pocohontas,” a racist reference to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. Trump was visibly pleased.

Trump the strongman was on display. Like autocratic leaders before him, he stirred fear among his people and offered them safety under his regime.

Cheering Trump's depraved words

At one point in his speech, Trump rattled off the names of the Fox News personalities who carry his water on cable television. The crowd roared as the president read this laundry list of conservative media pundits.

This rhetorical flourish was all very appropriate on such an occasion because Fox News, more than anything else, including the Bible and the spiritual disciplines, has formed and shaped the values of so many people in the sanctuary. Trump’s staff knows this. Why else would they put such a roll call in the speech?

At times, it seemed like Trump was putting a new spin on the heroes of the faith described in the New Testament book of Hebrews. Instead of Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Sarah, Joseph, Moses, David and Samuel, we got Sean (Hannity), Laura (Ingraham), Tucker (Carlson) and the hosts of "Fox and Friends."

Message to evangelicals:Impeachment is about Trump. It's not an attack on you.

I am used to this kind of thing from Trump, but I was stunned when I witnessed evangelical Christians — those who identify with the “good news” of Jesus Christ —raising their hands in a posture of worship as Trump talked about socialism and gun rights.

I watched my fellow evangelicals rising to their feet and pumping their fists when Trump said he would win reelection in 2020.

Trump spent the evening mocking his enemies, trafficking in half-truths in order to instill fear in people whom God commands to “fear not,” and proving that he is incapable of expressing anything close to Christian humility.

His evangelical supporters loved every minute of it. That night, Christians who claim to be citizens of the Kingdom of God went to church, cheered the depraved words of a president and warmly embraced his offer of political power. Such a display by evangelicals is unprecedented in American history.

I usually get angry when members of my tribe worship at the feet of Trump. This time, I just felt sad.

SOURCE

IMO, Trump's goal is to be a Putin-like strongman. I don't see anything likely to stop him.

Instead of sad this man and all Americans should be afraid. Very afraid.

The biggest obstacle Trump would have to overcome is term limits. That requires amending the Constitution and I doubt that the Trumpettes are going to able to push that thru.

On the subject of Putin, I trust everyone is aware that almost the entire Russian government resigned because Putin is planning on restructuring everything?

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/russ ... p-n1116176

Like term limits?

Like term limits?

Like stripping the President (him right now) of most of his powers and conferring them on the Prime Minister (him after the next "election"). All this will take place when the next Prime Minister is sworn in. It's pretty much the same stunt he pulled when Medvedev was President back in the 2000's.

The election in November probably will.

We can only hope.

Those people are dangerous... far more dangerous than the "Commies".

No question.

From 2017 ...

Why and how authoritarian evangelicals threaten Democracy
By Alice Friedemann

http://churchandstate.org.uk/2018/11/wh ... -democracy?

Evangelicals Love Donald Trump for Many Reasons, But One of Them Is Especially Terrifying
End Times.
STEPHANIE MENCIMER

The enemies of Israel have unleashed a massive air attack on the Promised Land. Hundreds of fighter jets streak across the sky. But before Israel can be destroyed, fire rains from the heavens and the enemy jets explode in mid-air with no explanation. Hailstones the size of golf balls follow the fire. The ground shakes. Birds pick clean the bodies of the fallen attackers. The enemy is vanquished without a single Israeli casualty, and the country is saved.

These are some of the opening scenes of the bestselling 1995 book Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days, by Jerry B. Jenkins and the late evangelical minister Tim LaHaye. But don’t mistake this scenario for a mere action sequence: It’s based on the war of Gog and Magog, a biblical conflict prophesied in the Book of Ezekiel. In the Bible, Gog is the leader of Magog, a “place in the far north” that many evangelicals believe is Russia. According to Ezekiel’s prophecy, Gog will join with Persia—now Iran—and other Arab nations to attack a peaceful Israel “like a cloud that covers the land.” LaHaye, like many evangelicals, believed this battle would bring on the Rapture, the End Times event when God spirits away the good Christians to heaven before unleashing plagues, sickness, and other horrors on the unbelievers remaining on Earth. Meanwhile, the Antichrist reigns supreme.


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The story of Gog and Magog is central to the bloody eschatology long embraced by millions of American evangelicals. In recent years, End Times has gained special political currency as believers have seen any number of Middle East conflagrations as fulfilling Ezekiel’s prophecy, notably the US invasion of Iraq and the war in Syria. Gog and Magog took on fresh relevance earlier this month, when the Trump administration assassinated Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s elite Quds Force.

On many levels, President Donald Trump’s self-created crisis in Iran seems to have no relationship to any sort of coherent foreign policy or geopolitical plan for the future. The assassination has yielded few if any tangible rewards for the US. But there is an eager constituency for Trump’s improvised policy toward the Middle East and Iran in particular: the evangelical Christians who see it as a means of ushering in the return of Christ. Lured by the promise of conservative Supreme Court justices, anti-abortion measures, and a commitment to Christian supremacy under the guise of religious freedom, white evangelicals voted for Trump in higher numbers than any other group—more than 80 percent.

He desperately needs them if he’s going to be reelected. And while some have expressed concern about the administration’s inching toward war with Iran, many of those with what were once fringe beliefs have cheered the killing of Soleimani. “Iran has this big part to play in biblical history,” says religious historian Diana Butler Bass, who grew up in the evangelical church, attended an evangelical college and seminary, and wrote her Ph.D. thesis at Duke University on American fundamentalism. “There are these particular prophecies from Ezekiel, where there is talk of a war that will happen at a very important moment in Israel’s history. And that war is going to kick off the End Times. People in this prophetic community believe Iran is going to be one of these aggressors.”



Bass thinks this worldview may be central to understanding Trump’s foreign policy. “When Iran gets into the news, especially with anything to do with war, it’s sort of a prophetic dog whistle to evangelicals. They will support anything that seems to edge the world towards this conflagration,” she says. “They don’t necessarily want violence, but they’re eager for Christ to return and they think that this war with Iran and Israel has to happen for their larger hope to pass.”

Not all or even most evangelicals believe in the literal truth of these sorts of prophecies, though nearly 60 percent of white evangelicals, according to one 2010 poll, believe Jesus is definitely or probably going to return by the year 2050. But those who do subscribe to this apocalyptic world view seem to be overrepresented among Trump’s religious supporters and advisers. In October, a host of influential evangelical pastors came to the White House to pray with Trump to protect him from impeachment. Among those who laid hands on the president as he stood, head bowed, in the Oval Office, was repeat visitor Greg Laurie, pastor of a California megachurch. A few days after the killing of Soleimani, Laurie made a YouTube video with Don Stewart, author of 25 Signs We Are Near the End, to discuss Iran and the End Times. “The scenario that the Bible predicted, seemingly so impossible,” Stewart promised, “is now falling into place.”

From the outset, Trump has surrounded himself with people who hail from the fringes of the evangelical community that is steeped in the language of biblical prophecy, and his administration regularly reflects that language back to them in its messaging. In March 2017, for instance, Trump issued an official White House statement recognizing the Persian New Year in which he misattributed a quote to Cyrus the Great, the libertine pagan leader of the ancient Persian empire who was anointed by God to free Jews in Babylon. Ordinary Americans probably wouldn’t have even noticed the announcement, but evangelicals knew that Trump was speaking their language. Many of them believe Trump is like Cyrus, a flawed nonbeliever who nonetheless is chosen by God to work his miracles on Earth.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who was reportedly instrumental in pushing for the killing of Soleimani, is also a master of such messaging. In March, during an interview in Jerusalem with the Christian Broadcasting Network (founded by another apocalyptic preacher, Pat Robertson), Pompeo showed his familiarity with another Iran-centric Bible story popular with End Times evangelicals. In the story, a Persian king is urged to slaughter the Jews in his kingdom at the urging of the evil adviser Haman. But his Jewish Queen Esther convinces him not to and saves her people. Asked whether he thought Trump could be a modern-day Esther, saving the Jews from Iran, Pompeo replied, “As a Christian, I certainly believe that’s possible.” The secretary of state’s End Times beliefs made headlines again after the Soleimani killing, as meme-makers circulated a quote from a speech he made in a Kansas church in 2015. A few days after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage, Pompeo said: “We will continue to fight these battles. It is a never-ending struggle. … until the Rapture.”


Joyce Boghosian / White House
The State Department did not respond to questions about how Pompeo’s religious views may affect his foreign policy decisions. But it’s not hard to see how apocalyptic evangelicalism might be influencing the Trump administration as it seeks to mobilize the millions of evangelicals reached by televangelists and megachurch pastors preaching the End Times. The most blatant appeal to this constituency came when Trump made the controversial decision to move the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a long-desired goal of evangelicals who see it as fulfilling a biblical prophecy necessary in securing the Second Coming. What may be less obvious is how Trump’s disdain for international governing bodies like NATO also dovetails almost perfectly with End Times theology, whether he realizes it or not.

Matthew Avery Sutton, a Washington State University history professor and author of American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, says evangelicals who believe the end is near have always been hostile to any sort of international organizations. That’s because they believe biblical prophecies that say that in the last days, a world leader who preaches peace will emerge and move toward a one-world government. In fact, the prophecy goes, that leader will be the Antichrist who will force the world to accept a false religion and persecute people who don’t accept him as a Messiah. (In Left Behind, the Antichrist is a Romanian UN secretary-general.) Evangelicals love Trump’s talk of pulling out of NATO, his attacks on the UN, and his trashing of the Paris climate change accord. “They hate the UN,” Sutton says. “Trump’s unilateralism is also music to their ears.”

Trump is not the first president to surround himself with evangelical Christians with an apocalyptic bent. Ronald Reagan was advised by Billy Graham and Jerry Falwell, and personally believed in the End Times and the coming apocalypse, writing about it in his journals. He appointed people like Interior Secretary James Watt, a Pentecostal fundamentalist whose disdain for environmental conservation seemed to be informed by his belief that the end of the world was nigh. In an appearance before Congress, he told stunned lawmakers, “I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord returns.”

Apparently George W. Bush was also part of this apocalypse-now group. When Bush was trying to convince French president Jacques Chirac to support an invasion of Iran in 2003, he reportedly told Chirac: “Gog and Magog are at work in the Middle East. Biblical prophecies are being fulfilled.” Chirac had no idea what Bush was talking about and had to consult a biblical scholar.



Trump, who seems unable to distinguish between the New and Old Testaments, doesn’t seem particularly fluent in the prophecies of Ezekiel. But he has brought into the White House a host of people who are. Quite a few also hail from what Bass delicately describes as the “not respectable charlatan wing” of evangelical Christianity. They’re the prosperity preachers and prophets of the sort depicted by Sinclair Lewis in Elmer Gantry. “I have no doubt at all that those people are sitting right next to [Trump], giving him these Bible verses, telling him about these prophecies,” Bass says, “which means that they are kind of egging him on, [telling him] that he’s part of God’s prophetic fulfillment for these last days.”

Many of those who have become White House regulars are associated with something known as the New Apostolic Reformation, what Christianity Today describes as “a loosely connected group of Pentecostals and Charismatics.” They’re the ones who speak in tongues, scour the news for clues to biblical prophecies, engage in faith healing, and preach prosperity gospel—the notion that faith in God (or, usually, the preacher) will make people wealthy (or at least enrich the preacher). These apostles tend to embrace “dominionist” theology that implores Christians to take over of all levels of government, media, and education as a way of preparing for the End Times and return of Christ. Influential politicians like former Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), who has made several visits to the Trump White House, former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin, and former Trump Energy Secretary Rick Perry fall into this camp.

Peter Montgomery, a senior fellow at the liberal nonprofit People for the American Way who has tracked the religious right for many years, says that the network of preachers who come from NAR and Pentecostal media operations “are telling people over and over again that Trump was ‘chosen,’ that God intervened in the election. Some of them say very explicitly that Trump is playing a role in God’s End Time plans to bring about the return of Christ.”

One of the most prominent representatives of the Left Behind wing of the evangelical movement is San Antonio televangelist John Hagee, who has been calling for a war with Iran for more than a 15 years. In 2005, Hagee wrote a best-selling book, Jerusalem Countdown, that claimed the Bible predicted a war with Iran. (In 2011, it was turned into a movie of the same title, starring Bionic Man Lee Majors and Randy Travis.) Shortly after the book was published, Hagee created Christians United for Israel, a Christian Zionist organization that now claims to have 8 million members. It lobbies for support for Israeli settlements, military aid to Israel, and for the US to join with Israel to launch a preemptive strike on Iran.



Hagee, now 79, had once been popular with powerful Republicans during the George W. Bush administration, despite some of his more controversial statements. Among other things, he has said that gays caused Hurricane Katrina, referred to the Catholic Church as the “great whore,” called Hitler a “half-breed” Jew, and said that Hitler was part of God’s plan to get the Jews back to Israel. His star began to fall in 2008 after he endorsed Sen. John McCain for the GOP presidential nomination. McCain rejected his support, calling Hagee’s views “crazy and unacceptable.”

The election of Barack Obama consigned Hagee to his megachurch in San Antonio. But Trump has restored him to the corridors of power in Washington. Hagee endorsed Trump early in 2016. Once Trump was elected, Hagee met with the new president for two hours in 2017 to discuss moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Foreign policy experts feared the embassy relocation would destabilize the region and hamper peace talks, but Trump moved it anyway in May 2018. Israeli troops killed more than 50 people in the protests that followed.

Hagee attended the opening ceremony alongside notables such as Ivanka Trump and husband Jared Kushner, and he gave the closing benediction. “Let every Islamic terrorist hear this message: Israel lives,” he announced. “Let it echo down the marble halls of the presidential palace in Iran: Israel lives.” He later told the Texas Observer that he was looking forward to Trump confronting Iran, explaining, “The sum of Iran’s evil is greater than the whole of its parts.”

When Christians United for Israel held its annual DC confab and lobbying day last summer, Trump sent no fewer than five top administration officials to address attendees, including Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence (both evangelicals themselves), then–national security adviser John Bolton, a special envoy to the Middle East, and the US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman. Pompeo opened the speech by telling the crowd of more than 5,000 people, “This is what it must have looked like to be part of the crowd for the fishes and the loaves. What a miracle that was.” Once more the story of Queen Esther came in handy, this time as Pompeo compared it to modern-day Iran.

Hagee is one of the most prominent of Trump’s evangelical supporters who see a war with Iran as a necessary step towards the End Times, but he’s far from the only one. The White House has hosted a steady stream of dominionists and NAR apostles since Trump took office, including Lance Wallnau, author of God’s Chaos President. An evangelical leader with a consulting business in Dallas, Wallnau has become famous as one of the few evangelicals who accurately prophesied Trump’s election after receiving divine inspiration to read chapter 45 of the Book of Isaiah. That’s the story of King Cyrus, whom Wallnau and many other evangelicals think Trump resembles. (For $45, Wallnau and ex-con televangelist Jim Bakker now sell a Trump/Cyrus coin that people can use to pray for Trump’s reelection.) Dr. Lance, as he’s known, has made several visits to the White House, including for a private briefing on Jared Kushner’s Middle East peace plan.

Facilitating many of these visits is Paula White-Cain, the controversial televangelist associated with the Trinity Broadcasting Network who became Trump’s spiritual adviser after he saw her preach on TV in the early aughts. White led a 20,000-strong megachurch in Tampa that was investigated by Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) in 2007 for lavish spending on private jets and big houses and possible violations of its tax-exempt status. His report did not find any wrongdoing—church leaders refused to cooperate with the investigation—but in 2012, White’s church declared bankruptcy. She went on to lead a mostly African American church in Florida where she remained until last spring, when her son took over the ministry.

Now on her third marriage, White has long been at odds with more elite, mainstream evangelicals because of her particular self-help brand of prosperity gospel. Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore called White a “charlatan” and “heretic.” Nonetheless, in late October, Trump installed her in an official post at the White House office of public liaison to do outreach to evangelicals, formalizing access for some of the more extreme members of that group. She has referred to Trump as a modern-day Esther and called his enemies “demonic.”

Bass says that evangelical elites of the sort who associated with President George W. Bush have long looked down their noses at populist preachers like White and her crowd, but Trump has elevated them to positions of power. It’s a win-win situation. The evangelicals are at last in the influential positions those who disparaged them once held. And Trump’s narcissism is receiving special nourishment by their insistence that he was chosen by God. “I think that Trump likes it when people think he’s close to God—he called himself the ‘chosen one’—and to think that all of this has some sort of divine backing,” Bass says. “I don’t think there’s ever been a president who was quite influenced by this stream of evangelicalism as Trump has been.”

Naturally, there are political benefits to all of this. The administration has struggled to provide evidence of any imminent threats from Soleimani, but the timing for the assassination was certainly fortuitous for someone looking to mobilize evangelicals. Not only was Trump embroiled in impeachment hearings, he was still chaffing from a recent editorial in the evangelical publication Christianity Today, founded by Billy Graham, calling for him to be removed from office on moral grounds. Trump announced the killing of Soleimani just hours before appearing at the launch of his campaign’s Evangelicals for Trump coalition in Miami.

That event took place at a Pentacostal Latino church headed by Guillermo Maldonado, who speaks in tongues and hosts a TV show called “The Supernatural Now.” He’s the founder of the King Jesus International Ministry, a Miami megachurch with upwards of 20,000 members and a large TV and radio presence. Maldonado is also another regular White House visitor who has preached that Trump has a role in God’s plans for the End Times. At the 2019 Global Prophetic Summit, he claimed that God told him, “America, I have prepared this time, I have raised somebody in office to open the doors for my gospels.”

André Gagné, a theology professor at Concordia University in Montreal, says the apocalyptic worldview is concerning at such high levels of power, because believers may be rather sanguine about the possibility that assassinating an Iranian general might spur an even bigger war or nuclear confrontation in the Middle East. “If it brings the end of the world, it brings the end of the world,” Gagné says. “They’re ready. They can’t wait for the Rapture to happen. For them it’s the ultimate reunion with God.”

SOURCE

live links and vids at source

Humph. Magog is in Quebec. Don't they know anything?

And the theocracy moves one step closer ....

Trump first president to attend anti-abortion rally
By Ritu Prasad

He addressed thousands of protesters at the March for Life near the US Capitol where his impeachment trial is ongoing.

Mr Trump said: "We're here for a very simple reason: to defend the right of every child born and unborn to fullfil their God-given potential."

The annual demonstration first began in 1974 - a year after the US Supreme Court legalised abortion in Roe v Wade.

Until now no president had ever attended the march, which takes place just steps from the White House, though previous Republican presidents, including George W Bush and Ronald Reagan, have addressed the group remotely.

Mike Pence became the first sitting vice-president to attend the rally in 2017.

Mr Trump's appearance at the 47th March for Life delighted protesters.

Voters who support limiting abortion make up a key constituency for Mr Trump, who is seeking their support at the polls again in the 2020 election.

On Friday, marchers in Washington shouted "four more years" and "we love you".

On the streets surrounding the National Mall vendors selling Trump flags and Make America Great Again hats were aplenty. Many of the attendees sported pro-Trump merchandise, though for some, there was a distinction between liking the president and liking his anti-abortion stance.

One young woman, Julia, told the BBC: "I'm not necessarily pro-Trump, but I appreciate that the President of the United States is making the move to be here."

She added that she was unhappy at all the focus on Mr Trump as opposed to the issue.

"Until the day we can see Roe v Wade switched, [the movement] will continue, whether he's president in the next election or not."

Chuck Raymond, a financial advisor in St Louis, said: "Without a doubt, he is the most pro-life, pro-family, pro-religious freedom president we've ever had."

Mr Trump's appearance on Friday has already made a difference for some voters.

Jose Sandoval, who drove nine hours from Knoxville, Tennessee, to participate in the march, said he did not vote for Mr Trump in 2016, but his attendance has changed Mr Sandoval's mind for 2020.

"I really appreciate what he's doing for us," he told the BBC. "It matters what he thinks about [abortion], and this changed my thinking about him."

Mother-daughter pair Marci and Jeanette Houle had a similar journey down to the capital - 10 hours in a bus from New Hampshire. Marci said they appreciated that the president was backing up his anti-abortion stance with his presence.

"We voted for Trump in the first place because he was the pro-life [anti-abortion] choice, that was our main concern. If his opponent [in 2020] is not pro-life, we're going to vote for Donald Trump."

In 2016, 81% of Evangelical voters - a group for whom abortion is the biggest political issue - backed Mr Trump for president. He has continued to court them as his re-election campaign ramps up.

March for Life president Jeanne Mancini said Mr Trump and his administration "have been consistent champions for life".

But pro-choice groups said his appearance was a distraction tactic.

Ilyse Hogue, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, said it was "a desperate attempt to divert attention from his criminal presidency and fire up his radical base".



America's two main political parties are more polarised than ever on the issue of abortion.

Democrats campaigning for November's White House election are unapologetically pro-choice - something many March for Life attendees said made the candidates inaccessible to anti-abortion supporters, even if they disliked Mr Trump.

In 2016, the Democratic party for the first time included in its platform a call to repeal the Hyde Amendment, a decades-old law that prohibits using taxpayer money for abortions.

Last year, leading White House contender Joe Biden was sharply criticised by his Democratic rivals for initially backing the Hyde Amendment. Amid uproar from the party's liberal base, he reversed course in June.

Mr Trump, meanwhile, has bolstered support for anti-abortion views within the Republican party.

In 2018, he was the first sitting president to address the Campaign for Life gala, sponsored by the Susan B Anthony List anti-abortion political action group. Earlier this week, the group announced it would spend $52m (£40m) in support of the president and Republicans in 2020.

Mr Trump has appointed conservative judges, banned clinics receiving tax money from promoting abortions and barred federal money going to foreign organisations that educate about or perform abortions.

Anti-abortion activists across the nation have been pushing abortion bans through state legislatures - measures that in some cases would bar an abortion as early as six weeks into a pregnancy.

Last year, 17 states enacted some form of abortion restriction, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which promotes research on abortion access.

Anti-abortion groups hope the lawsuits will reach the US Supreme Court, which is now stacked with conservative-leaning justices, and ultimately result in Roe v Wade being overturned.

Such a monumental decision would enable individual states, such as those in the South and Midwest, to enshrine the abortion bans they have already passed.

In a few weeks, the justices are expected to take up the first major abortion related case since the arrival of Trump appointees Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch.

Sarah Schultz, who flew in from South Dakota for the rally, said that "the presidency has helped [Mr Trump] figure out the issues for himself".

"He's making a clear line," she said of his appearance on Friday. "People are going to be drawn to one side or another now - they have to take a stand."

Ms Schultz adds: "I like that the issues are clearer, but in this country, we should be able to discuss our differences without getting angry."

SOURCE

numerous additional links at source

IMO, a bit of desperation is setting in.

Trump go in by cobbling together disaffected persons and asking them to vote for him. and he just barely made it.

if ANY of them decide he didn't help them, he is toast.