Category: Religious Liberty

Is Trump Still the TACO Man? Or is he now THE HAMMER?

VDH, Ten Iranian Questions:

Trump had warned the Iranians on numerous occasions. They never got the message. They were apparently listening to the American Left’s smears of Trump as a “TACO” (“Trump Always Chickens Out”)—a silly slur phrase that just died Saturday night.

And die it did. To hell with the American Left with its Tampon Timmies, its Joyless Behars, its cortically-challenged Cortezes, and its Kamalian clowns.   (It should be clear that I am no longer quoting my man Hanson.)

Some fear that Midnight  Hammer will lead to a wider war. It might. The world, led by  the USA, will then have the opportunity to rid itself once and for all of the current Iranian Islamist theocracy. That would be a good thing, and easy to accomplish: destroy the oil refineries first, and see if that gets them to back off, and "build back better," to coin a phrase.  If they remain recalcitrant, destroy their power grid.  No more pussy-footing around with these evil-doers. It's not 1979 any more, or the Carter administration.

Their  particular brand of Islamist insanity would then be finished forever. Do you doubt that? It would be finished in its concrete exemplification just as Nazi ideology was finished in its concrete exemplification in 1945. By 'concrete exemplification of an ideology' I mean its existence in an actual State.  Once the current Iranian Islamist theocracy is concretely at an end,  it is not likely to come back.  I will fire off two more points and you guys can have at me in the combox.

First. A great power such as the USA cannot be wholly non-interventionist, although it ought to be as non-interventionist as it can be consistent with self-preservation and the defense of its allies.  No nation-building! Non-interventionism is good, but it has limits. One limit is reached when anti-civilizational savages pose an existential threat to we us  the (more or less) civilized.  I call our enemies 'anti-civilizational,' but you ought not call them  'medieval' as some pundits do unless you want to advertise your historical ignorance and slam an entire epoch.

An existential threat is a threat not merely to one's physical existence or biological life, but to one's way of life.  The radical Islamist trilemma: conversion, dhimmitude, or death is radically unacceptable — which is why I call it a trilemma: three prongs, each of which is unacceptable.  If one has been nuked out of physical existence, then one has been 'nuked' out of cultural existence as well.   

This is why Khamenei and the boys cannot be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. We do not yet know the extent or efficacy of Trump's bunker-busting despite Trump's typical boasts and exaggerations. (Trump is a builder, a promoter, and a bit of a carnival barker, but still vastly superior to any of the electable Democrats.) The Iranian nuclear program has, however, surely suffered a major set-back.  If they get it going again the IDF and the USAF will kick the mullahs' collective ass one more time.

Second. The Iranian people have a right to any system of government they choose so long as it poses no existential threat to any other State.  Who the hell are we to tell them how to live when our Western societies, dripping with decadence, are hanging by a thread?  (Leastways, until Trump came along.) If the Iranians want a theocracy, that is their business.  Is it objectively certain that our classically liberal system is better than a theocratic system?  No, or so say I, even though I firmly believe that our system is better than any theocracy. What if they want an Islamic theocracy? No problem with that either, so long as the Islam in question is moderate and wields no such trident as the one lately described.  I wish Zuhdi Jasser the best of luck in his quixotic quest to reform Islam.

Ann Coulter a while back said that we should invade the Muslim lands and convert them to Christianity.

We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.

Convert Muslims? Sheer madness. Coulter is a very intelligent woman, but sometimes intelligent people say stupid things.  Of the Abrahamic religions, Islam is the worst. Schopenhauer describes it as "the saddest and poorest form of theism."  It is the religion of terror at the present time. An inferior religion, it gives rise to an inferior culture, downstream of which is a benighted politics.  But Islam is their religion and it is better than no religion. Try barging into people's lives to convince them to renounce their parents, their hometown, their region, their religion, their folkways.  Try that down in Hillbilly Holler or anywhere.

Convert the benighted Muslims for the sake of their immortal souls because Jesus claimed to be via, veritas, vita? "Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me." (John 14:6, KJV. I was brought up on Douay-Rheims, but I love that old English.)   Why not make it more specific: extra ecclesiam salus non est, where the ecclesia in question is the Roman Catholic Church? That won't sit well with our Protestant or Eastern Orthodox pals, and it shouldn't. I go a step further: paths to salvation are many. I won't argue it out, leastways not now; I'll just refer you to the work of Frithjof Schuon. See, for example, The Transcendent Unity of Religions.

How about converting the Jews? Another form of folly. Here is an instructive short piece by Rabbi Yehiel Poupko.

Why Catholics Voted for Trump

A very good First Things article by Mary Eberstadt. I have only one comment. She reports, "The nation’s Catholic voters split 56 to 41 in favor of Donald Trump."

41 %  against?

Why such a large percentage? Are they 'devout Catholics' in the style of Joe Dementia and Nancy the Shredder?

The Democrat Party, besides being anti-democratic, is anti-liberty, and in particular anti-religious liberty. If you haven't noticed that yet, then you are in need of a proctologist who specializes in self-induced head injuries.

Would you like to join my old friend Joe in his catacomb? Or perhaps you are eager for martyrdom. 

Next Stop: The Catacombs

Catacomb Joe sends us to this Rod Dreher piece in the European Conservative. 

Believe it or not, the Trial of the Century just happened in a courtroom in Helsinki. The Finnish parliamentarian and physician Päivi Räsänen this week returned to the dock to face hate crimes charges for having quoted the Bible in defense of Scripture’s teaching on homosexuality.

The Left’s Destruction of the Universities

Said destruction is a special case of the Left's destruction of everything it touches. Here we read about a professor failing a student for refusing to condemn her Christian faith. This case is a few years old, but characteristic. Things are worse now.

Since the Left has captured the Democrat Party in the USA, if you vote Democrat you are voting against freedom of religion, and thus against the First Amendment, which in its very first clause states, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . . ." The educational institution in question, Polk State, is not private; hence the First Amendment applies. But even if it didn't, it is anti-American to oppose the spirit of 1A's opening clause, which is the spirit of religious liberty.

Religious liberty includes the liberty to practice no religion, to criticize religion, and of course to practice some religion other than Christianity as long as that other religion is not antithetical to the values enshrined in the founding documents. Toleration is the touchstone of classical liberalism, but of course toleration has limits: the Constitution is not a suicide pact.

To vote Democrat is to vote for the continuing politicization of the universities and their ongoing transformation into leftist seminaries. This is part of the reason decent Dems have jumped ship. Prominent examples of those who have left the party include Tulsi Gabbard and Tammy Bruce.

Does Classical Liberalism Destroy Itself?

Joe Odegaard sends us to The Orthosphere where we find Classical Liberalism Destroys Itself. The opening paragraph is stylistically brilliant, especially the concluding sentence, and I agree with the paragraph content-wise, though not with the quotation from Dreher:

“Classical liberalism detached from the Christian faith is what got us here.” 

Rod Dreher, “David French: Not Woke Enough For The Times?”  The American Conservative (Feb. 16, 2023)

The above is from a long thumb-sucker in which Dreher sadly ponders the performative conservatism of David French.  Performative conservatism means striking conservative poses rather than striking blows that actually conserve.  Performative conservatives have plenty of principles but precious few wins.  Dreher is himself what Sam Francis called a “beautiful loser,” which is to say a conservative pundit who is admired for his prose, his erudition, his broadmindedness, and his many, many friends on the left, but who is not and cannot be admired for success.  French and Dreher are the spiritual sons of George Will, a belletristic bimbo and court clown who went down fighting by the Queensbury Rules.

As I said, brilliant writing and a delightful skewering of that yap-and-scribble lap dog of the Left, George Will, of the Beltway bow-tie brigade. There is only one mistake: the rules are Queensberry, not Queensbury. My pedantry having now been satisfied, I proceed to the substantive issues.  My disagreement begins with the second paragraph:

Classical liberalism is detached from Christian faith because classical liberalism detached Christian faith from public life. It did this intentionally and by design. Does Dreher really not understand that the first task of classical liberalism was to liberate men and women from classical Christianity. Some emancipated Christians went straight to atheism while others chose a couple of generations of decompression in the halfway house of liberal Christianity. Many worked as thoughtful Christian conservative columnists who believe that the United States was not really a Christian country until passage of the Fourteenth, perhaps Nineteenth, amendment.

The bias of the author surfaces with "the first task of classical liberalism was to liberate men and women from classical Christianity." Not so. The task was to separate church and state, not to "liberate" men and women from "classical" Christianity. What does "liberate" mean here? And what is "classical" Christianity? Roman Catholicism? Some form of Protestantism? The author is attributing nefarious motives to the Founders who were classical liberals and men of the Enlightenment.  A government that is neutral on such theological questions as the divinity of Jesus Christ and the tri-unity of God and that allows for freedom of religion and the freedom to practice no religion is not inimical to Christianity but tolerant of different forms of Christianity as well as tolerant of other religions and of those who practice no religion. 

There may be some truth in Dreher’s proposition that classical liberalism only works so long as the United States contains a great many Christians. But that is just additional evidence that classical liberalism destroys itself. It is a simple and obvious historical fact that Christians fare no better under classical liberalism than they fared under the Roman Emperor Nero. The disappearance of Christians under the former is not so swift and sanguinary as under the latter, but it is equally certain.

The "obvious fact" is neither obvious nor a fact. Would the author prefer to be a practicing Christian under Nero or under Biden? Christians obviously fare better now under Biden and those who pull the puppet's strings than they did under Nero.  And the talk of "equal certainty" is a wild exaggeration. Undoubtedly, Christianity is presently under assault. That is an obvious fact.  But there is no necessity that Christianity succumb. There is no inevitability at work here.

More importantly, there is nothing in the nature of classical liberalism that necessitates that Christians be forced into latter-day catacombs.  After all, the touchstone of classical liberalism is toleration. Toleration is part of the very essence of classical liberalism. That toleration extends to Jews, Christians, and even Muslims if the latter renounce Sharia (Islamic law), which is incompatible with the principles and values of classical liberalism. Toleration has limits.  Perhaps the thought of people like the author is that if you tolerate many different views, then you must tolerate all, including the view that Christianity must be destroyed. But the inference from Many to All is a non sequitur. Logically viewed, all slippery slope arguments are invalid.   If we tolerate the consumption of alcoholic beverages, must we also tolerate drunk driving? Obviously not.  To tolerate drinking is not to tolerate drunkenness, let alone drunk driving. To tolerate drinking by adults is not to tolerate drinking by children. To tolerate private inebriation is not to tolerate public inebriation. And so on.  A government that tolerates sodomy in private between consenting adults can also tolerate the existence of private schools in which it is taught that sodomy is a mortal sin.  Why not?

Besides the Many to All fallacy, there is also the fallacy called post hoc ergo propter hoc (after this, therefore because of this.) From the fact that classically liberal government has been followed temporally by the decadence and insanity all around us (wide open national borders, celebration of worthless individuals, destruction of monuments to great men, the institutionally-mandated DEI agenda, et cetera ad nauseam) it does not follow logically that the first is the cause of the second.

Dreher admits as much when he writes

“I cannot imagine a form of government and a social compact that most of us can consent to, that upholds classical liberal standards without a broadly shared religion..”

Nor can I.  I cannot imagine that form of government and social compact because classical liberal standards necessarily destroy a broadly shared religion.  Classical liberalism destroys a broadly shared religion because it removes all civil disabilities from apostates and infidels.  The natural result is that there are more of both and the broadly shared religion disappears.

I disagree with Dreher. We don't need a broadly shared religion; what we need is a minimal conception of the common good to which most of us can consent, whether we are Christians, Jews, Buddhists, atheists, agnostics, etc.  Of course, the commonality of a broadly shared religion freely subscribed to by its adherents would greatly enhance comity.  Imagine the social harmony and social cohesion we would all enjoy if each of us, sincerely, and without coercion, subscribed to and lived by the Baltimore Catechism!  But that is hopelessly utopian. Our Protestant brethren would surely raise a stink to high heaven.

I even more strongly disagree with the author. We are being told that classical liberalism "necessarily destroys a broadly shared religion because it removes all civil disabilities [liabilities?] from apostates and infidels." First of all, where does this necessity come from? There is no necessity or inevitability at work here.  That's the slippery-slope trope once more. And again, to tolerate broadly shared religions is not to destroy them.  And what exactly is the author proposing? A politically totalitarian theocracy? What  then  would he do with the "apostates" and "infidels"?   What penalties would he exact? Would he support a throne-and-altar form of 'woke cancellation'? 

To mask the disappearance of the broadly shared religion, our court clowns and progressive propagandists have invented preposterous pseudo-religions like Judeo-Christianity, or now “People of Faith.”  What this shows is that our broadly shared religion is that there shall be no broadly shared religion—classical liberalism, in short.

I agree that there is no such specific religion as Judeo-Christianity, but by that reasoning there is no such specific religion as Christianity either given the manifold sects and doctrinal divergences. My friend Dale Tuggy, noted philosopher of religion, is a unitarian, a denier of the divinity of Christ, and someone who thinks (gasp!) that Platonism has nothing to contribute to Christianity. And he has said bad things about Trump in my presence. But he is probably a better Christian than me in some ways.

And surely it is a slovenly misuse of 'religion' to refer to classical liberalism as a religion. Call it an ersatz religion if you like, but note that an ersatz X is precisely not an X. A salt substitute such as potassium chloride is not table salt (sodium chloride).

The irony is that Dreher knows this and says as much when he writes about Christianity and not politics.  Christianity cannot survive as a broadly shared religion if it does not possess a political community in which apostasy comes at a price, and from which infidels are rigorously excluded.  Classical liberalism forbids both of these necessary measures, and this is why Christianity and classical liberalism both are doomed.

This is doubly mistaken. Christianity can easily survive as a broadly shared religion under a limited, constitutionally-based government whose provisions secure, inter alia, religious liberty. No politically totalitarian theocracy is need to assure Christianity's survival.  Toleration and limited government suffice. Of course, we have neither now. So what we have to do is get back to American conservatism which includes a sizable admixture of classical liberalism. I understand what animates those on the Reactionary Right, just as I understand what inspires those on the Alternative Right who, unlike the Orthospherians, think that Christianity is the problem, it having weakened us and made us unfit for living in this world, the only one (they think) there is. But both of these right turns lead to dead ends. There will be no return to throne-and-altar conservatism.  

Finally, neither Christianity nor classical liberalism are doomed. Again the inevitability 'argument' which is akin to the slippery-slope trope, and the fallacies of Many to All, and post hoc ergo propter hoc.   That being said, things in the near-term look bad indeed, and I am none too sanguine about turning things around and returning to America as she was founded to be.

The Militant Defends Religious Liberty!

Will wonders never cease? This article receives the coveted MavPhil nihil obstat.  I found nothing in it to disagree with. Excerpt:

Today anti-Catholic prejudice is being whipped up by Democrats and the middle-class left, who argue the “main threat to democracy” comes from “semi-fascists” and the far right, including Catholics who they smear as reactionary.

“The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade at a time when it has an unprecedented Catholic supermajority,” The Associated Press complained June 30 in an article entitled “Anti-Roe justices a part of Catholicism’s conservative wing.”

While acknowledging that the 71 million Catholics in the U.S. have a wide range of opinions on abortion, the article pounds away at the six justices who “were raised Catholic.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett is a special target of leftists, who insist she seeks to impose her religious and moral agenda through her votes in court cases.

Nowhere in the AP article does it explain that the Dobbs ruling is based on a reading of the Constitution, not on religious belief. Or that the decision neither bars nor restricts abortions, but turns this decision over to the people in each state and their elected officials.

Exactly right. This is not to say, of course, that I share The Militant's stated goal of "overcoming capitalism." Capitalism, rightly deployed, is not the problem but the solution. I am for free markets and for private property. Private property is the foundation of individual liberty. Socialism, however, requires public ownership and control of the means of production, central planning, top-down interference with states, localities, and the private lives of citizens. What public control comes to, however,  is State control which is to say: control by the few who run the omni-invasive and omni-(in)competent State.  

Socialism has failed everywhere it has been tried, and it must fail because it collides with certain  essential truths about human nature. One of them is that people need incentives to behave in economically and socially productive ways. People will work their asses to the bone if they see some benefit that will accrue to them and theirs (family, friends, local community, tribe), but will slack off like Maynard G. Krebs if forced to labor for some such nebulosity as 'the common good.'  

Why Did Trump Get the Religious Vote?

A re-post from two years ago. Cognate question: Why do leftists keep asking the title question?

……………………………

Why did Donald J. Trump receive the support of evangelicals and other religious conservatives?

After all, no one would confuse Trump with a religious man.  Robert Tracinski's explanation strikes me as correct:

The strength of the religious vote for Trump initially mystified me, until I remembered the ferocity of the Left’s assault on religious believers in the past few years—the way they were hounded and vilified for continuing to hold traditional beliefs about marriage that were suddenly deemed backward and unacceptable (at least since 2012, when President Obama stopped pretending to share them). What else do you think drove all those religious voters to support a dissolute heathen?

Ironically, a pragmatic, Jacksonian populist worldling such as Donald J. Trump will probably do more for religion and religious liberty in the long run than a pious leftist such as Jimmy Carter.*  

Mr. Carter famously confessed the lust in his heart in an interview in — wait for it – Playboy magazine.  We should all do likewise, though in private, not in Playboy. While it is presumptuous to attempt to peer into another's soul, I would bet that Mr. Trump is not much bothered by the lust in his heart, and I don't expect to hear any public confessions from his direction.

But what doth it profit a man to confess his lust when he supports the destructive Democrats, the abortion party, a party the prominent members of which are so morally obtuse that they cannot even see the issue of the morality of abortion, dismissing it as a health issue or an issue of women's reproductive rights?  

______________________

*My prediction, made on 19 January 2017, proved correct. In response to Trump's speech at the March for Life the other day, Bernie Sanders tweeted the vicious Orwellianism, "Abortion is health care." Way to go, Bernie, you have further galvanized our opposition to you and what you stand for.

Note that at the present time no House Democrat is pro-life. The Dems have take a hard Left into the mephitic precincts of lunacy and evil. 

Integralism in Three Sentences

Here:

Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that rejects the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holding that political rule must order man to his final goal. Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man’s temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power.

The crucial proposition is the first. By 'end of human life' is meant the ultimate or final goal or purpose of human life, not its cessation or stoppage.  It is presupposed that all human lives share the same final purpose. And what might that be? For a traditional Catholic, the Baltimore Catechism gives the answer:

LESSON FIRST
ON THE END OF MAN
1. Q. Who made the world?
A. God made the world.
2. Q. Who is God?
A. God is the Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things.
3. Q. What is man?
A. Man is a creature composed of body and soul, and made to the image
and likeness of God.
6. Q. Why did God make you?
A. God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world,
and to be happy with Him forever in the next.

The Catholic integralist is making the following claims. First, every human life has an ultimate purpose. Second, the  purpose is not different for different people: all, regardless of race, sex, or any other difference, share the same purpose. Third, the final common purpose is known and not open to doubt or debate: it is not a matter of conjecture or speculation or private opinion.  Fourth, the final common purpose is to know, love, and serve God in this world, and to be happy with him in the next. And of course the Catholic integralist is committed to the presuppositions of these claims, e.g., that there is a God, that he created everything distinct from himself, that man has a destiny that transcends this life, and so on.

Suppose all of the above is true. Then the political order here below must subserve the divinely ordained eternal order.   The temporal power, the State, must be subordinated to, and therefore cannot be separated from, the true church, the Roman Catholic Church.  If so, classical liberalism is an erroneous and pernicious political philosophy.

One consequence of this view seems to be that state power can be justifiably used to coerce dissidents.  Some of them hold that human life has no purpose at all. Others hold that it has a purpose but one that is determined by the individual. Still others think that there is a common ultimate purpose but that it is secular and humanistic and therefore atheistic.

And then there are the classically liberal theists who hold that when it comes to the final purpose of human life and how to attain it, there is reasonable belief, but no knowledge. If there is no knowledge in this area then coercion of atheists, agnostics, and non-Catholics could not be justified.  Finally, there are those who, while holding that there is knowledge in this area, knowledge that justifies the coercion of dissidents, reject the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. Some Protestants for example, or Islamists.

My view is that we ought not stray too far from the classically liberal view of the Founders. We do not KNOW that the Catechism worldview is true. ONLY IF it were known to be true could it be justifiably imposed via the awesome power of the State. In a well-ordered Republic, the dissent of secular humanists, atheists, and non-Catholic theists ought to be tolerated. At the same time, State power must never be used to violate the consciences of Catholics by, say, forcing them to support the grave moral evil of abortion on demand with their tax dollars.

Government by ts very nature is coercive. I stand for limited government and limited coercion.

So that's my initial take on Catholic integralism. It is a non-starter.

Religious Liberty and David Brooks

A re-run from 29 October 2016. I lay into the insipid David Brooks.

…………..

The Op-Ed pages of The New York Times are plenty poor to be sure, but Ross Douthat and David Brooks are sometimes worth reading.  But the following from Brooks (28 October 2016) is singularly boneheaded although the opening sentence is exactly right:

The very essence of conservatism is the belief that politics is a limited activity, and that the most important realms are pre­political: conscience, faith, culture, family and community. But recently conservatism has become more the talking arm of the Republican Party. Among social conservatives, for example, faith sometimes seems to come in second behind politics, Scripture behind voting guides. Today, most white evangelicals are willing to put aside the Christian virtues of humility, charity and grace for the sake of a Trump political victory.

Come on, man.  Don't be stupid.  The Left is out to suppress religious liberty.  This didn't start yesterday.  You yourself mention conscience, but you must be aware that bakers and florists have been forced by the state to violate their consciences by catering homosexual 'marriage' ceremonies.  Is that a legitimate use of state power?  And if the wielders of state power can get away with that outrage, where will they stop? Plenty of other examples can be adduced, e.g., the Obama administration's assault on the Little Sisters of the Poor.

The reason evangelicals and other Christians support Trump is that they know what that destructive and deeply mendacious stealth ideologue  Hillary will do when she gets power. They support Trump  not because they think the Gotham sybarite lives the Christian life, but despite his not living it.  They understand that ideas and policies trump character issues especially when Trump's opponent is even worse on the character plane.  What's worse: compromising national security, using high public office to enrich oneself, and then endlessly lying about it all, or forcing oneself on a handful of women?

The practice of the Christian virtues and the living of the Christian life require freedom of religion.  Our freedoms are under vicious assault by leftists  like Hillary. This is why Trump garners the support of Christians.  

The threat from the Left is very real indeed.  See here and read the chilling remarks of Martin Castro of the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights.  Given Castro's comments the name of the commission counts as Orwellian. 

ADDENDUM (6/7/19) We who rolled the dice for Trump have been vindicated in spades. He has kept his promises. The cause of religious liberty is much better off than it was under Obama, and much much better off that it would have been under Hillary. 

Religious Liberty and David Brooks

This is a slightly redacted re-post from before the Trump victory, from 29 October 2016, to be exact. The cause of religious liberty has been substantially advanced by President Trump. Yet another reason  for patriots and true conservatives to be grateful this Holiday season.

………………..

The Op-Ed pages of The New York Times are plenty poor to be sure, but Ross Douthat and David Brooks are sometimes worth reading.  But the following from Brooks (28 October 2016) is singularly boneheaded although the opening sentence is exactly right:

The very essence of conservatism is the belief that politics is a limited activity, and that the most important realms are pre­political: conscience, faith, culture, family and community. But recently conservatism has become more the talking arm of the Republican Party. Among social conservatives, for example, faith sometimes seems to come in second behind politics, Scripture behind voting guides. Today, most white evangelicals are willing to put aside the Christian virtues of humility, charity and grace for the sake of a Trump political victory.

Come on, man.  Don't be stupid.  The Left is out to suppress religious liberty.  This didn't start yesterday.  You yourself mention conscience, but you must be aware that bakers and florists have been forced by the state to violate their consciences by catering homosexual 'marriage' ceremonies.  Is that a legitimate use of state power?  And if the wielders of state power can get away with that outrage, where will they stop? Plenty of other examples can be adduced, e.g., the Obama administration's assault on the Little Sisters of the Poor.

The reason evangelicals and other Christians support Trump is that they know what that destructive and deeply mendacious stealth ideologue  Hillary will do when she gets power. It is not because they think the Gotham sybarite lives the Christian life, but despite his not living it.  They understand that ideas and policies trump character issues especially when Trump's opponent is even worse on the character plane.  What's worse: compromising national security, using high public office to enrich oneself, and then endlessly lying about it all, or forcing oneself on a handful of women?

The practice of the Christian virtues and the living of the Christian life require freedom of religion.  Our freedoms are under vicious assault by leftists  like Hillary. This is why Trump garners the support of Christians.  

The threat from the Left is very real indeed.  See here and read the chilling remarks of Martin Castro of the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights.  Given Castro's comments the name of the commission counts as Orwellian. 

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