Posted this in another thread but thought if would be more appropriate here.
Are there that many who are brainwashed?
Trump's Christian supporters and the march on the Capitol
Before the march on the US Capitol began last Wednesday, some knelt to pray.
Thousands had come to the seat of power for a "Save America" rally organised to challenge the election result. Mr Trump addressed the crowd near the White House, calling on them to march on Congress where politicians were gathered to certify President-elect Joe Biden's win. For some Christians, seeing religious symbols alongside Confederate flags was shocking. But for others, Mr Trump is their saviour - someone who was "defending Christians from secularists" as Franklin Graham, son of the late evangelist Billy Graham, told the BBC.
The day before the rally, a throng of fervent religious supporters of President Trump held a "Jericho March" in Washington. Brandishing crosses and singing Christian hymns, they marched around the Capitol re-enacting the biblical story of when the Israelites besieged the enemy city of Jericho.
The imagery on display was revealing of not just the racial and political divides in America, but the religious divides as well.
Exit polls suggest that in 2020, like in 2016, around four-fifths of white evangelicals - who make up a quarter of the American electorate - backed the Republican president.
Ever since white evangelicals became a political force in the late 1970s, they have campaigned against access to abortions, sought to bolster religious liberty laws, and encouraged support for the state of Israel. In all these areas the Trump administration has delivered: limiting government funds for groups supporting abortions, appointing more than 200 conservative judges to federal courts and three to the US Supreme Court, and moving the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem - a long held desire among some white evangelicals. They admit Mr Trump has flaws. In the words of one of his most loyal supporters, Texas megachurch leader Robert Jeffress, the president is "no altar boy". "He doesn't pretend to be overly pious," Mr Jeffress told me before the election. "But that's not why evangelicals turned out for him. It wasn't for his personal piety. It was for his public policies."
'Christian nationalism' in the US
But aside from specific campaign issues, some academics say "Christian nationalism" was behind much of the religious support for Mr Trump's campaign. They say Christian nationalism merges Christian identity with national identity: to be American is to be Christian. Proponents believe that America's success depends on its adherence to conservative Christian positions and warn, in Mr Trump's words, of "an assault on Christianity" from political opponents. "Voting for Trump was, at least for many Americans, a symbolic defence of the United States' perceived Christian heritage," the sociologist Andrew Whitehead wrote in a paper analysing the support for the president. Academics such as Mr Whitehead and Philip Gorski, professor of sociology at Yale University, argue that throughout his presidency, Mr Trump explicitly played to Christian nationalist ideas by repeating the claim that the United States is abdicating its Christian heritage.
He promised "to protect Christianity" and for many supporters his campaign slogan "Make America Great Again" could have been synonymous with "Make America Christian Again". At a rally in Ohio last year he warned a Biden presidency would mean "no religion, no anything".
"Hurt the Bible, hurt God. He's against God, he's against guns," he claimed.
But American Christianity is divided. The Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church of the US, the Most Reverend Michael Curry, described the riots as a "coup attempt" and "deeply disturbing". The Episcopal Bishop of Washington, the Right Reverend Mariann Budde, said the religious symbols on display were "the most heretical, blasphemous forms of Christianity". "This has been part of our nativist, racist Christian past from the beginning," she told the Sunday programme on BBC Radio 4. "What has been different in the Trump presidency has been the legitimisation of it."
But many Christians, including some of Mr Biden's fellow Catholics, refuse to see him as a "real" Christian because of his support for abortion access and for LGBT rights.
There is little evidence in the reactions of many evangelical leaders to last week's riots that they are abandoning Mr Trump. Some, like the prominent evangelical writer and radio host Eric Metaxas, have promoted false conspiracy theories that it was the loose-knit left-wing antifa activists masquerading as Trump supporters who led the riot.
"Nothing that President Trump has done in the last four years has deterred white evangelical support at all."
Trump's Christian supporters and the march on the Capitol
Christian supporters of President Trump were among the thousands who descended on Washington.
www.bbc.com
