Source: The Washington Post
Donald Trump seems to be the unlikeliest Republican candidate for evangelical voters, with his three marriages, his ownership of casinos and beauty pageants, and his belated opposition to their core issues of abortion and marriage.
Yet he captured the votes of 33 percent of evangelicals in South Carolina on Saturday — a big factor in his win, because evangelicals made up a whopping 72 percent of Republican primary voters there.
Sen. Ted Cruz of (R-Tex.) seems to be the quintessential evangelical candidate: a pastor’s son who can strut a campaign rally stage as though it’s a revival and who pledged to inspire millions of supposedly apathetic evangelicals to vote for a resurgent Christian America.
Cruz amassed the endorsements of more than 300 pastors and other religious leaders in South Carolina. TheBlaze founder Glenn Beck, one of Cruz’s most high-profile supporters, told voters at a South Carolina rally that the senator was “raised for this hour” by the “hand of divine providence.” Cruz was supposed to be a messianic figure to save Christian America from its downward secularist spiral.
But Trump, whose Bible has seemed like more of prop than a campaign-animating principle, understands other impulses of evangelical voters. This intuition also enabled him to best Cruz, 30 to 13 percent, among non-evangelical voters in South Carolina.
That impulse, which is Trumpism in a nutshell, is the magical thinking of how Americans get rich, whether it’s by surviving a reality television show, getting lucky with an investment, winning the lottery or being blessed by God.
Trump is arguably the candidate most resembling a televangelist.
For many evangelicals, Pentecostals and charismatic Christians, magical thinking has found its expression through the prosperity gospel, much to the consternation of Christians who consider it a heresy and a fraud. A uniquely American contribution to the evolution of Christianity in the modern age, the prosperity gospel teaches that God wants believers to be rich.
Categories: America, The Muslim Times, US Politics, USA