Why do the Evangelicals support Donald Trump?
Some history. I was born into the Quaker church.
Both my grandfather and grandmother were Reverends in the Quaker church.
My mother called herself, " A preacher's brat."
My mother's mother and her father came to live with us once my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
After my grandmother's passing, my grandfather continued to live with us.
Even though the Rev. Larkin Hadley had retired, he still wrote a sermon every Sunday throughout the week.
I never heard my grandfather use racist dialog or tone.
Ever.
As much as my burned down memory can scrape a fragment together, every story I've ever heard was of a man of compassion.
He saved me more than once as a child from a bloody beating from my father.
However, religion does not conform to the will of the individual, or to an agreed-upon social morality, but to the power and influence, its leadership can wield over its followers.
They feed innate prejudice like a trail of breadcrumbs for those to follow.
In the mid-80s, when membership was declining, and it looked like the church was going to die, the Quaker Church at its Yearly Meeting decided to throw down their old values and accept a new reality.
What is the Yearly Meeting?
The Yearly Meeting is a gathering of all of the Quaker churches across the U.S. to discuss and plan the agenda of the church.
A gathering of both professional and lay members.
So, with the decline in church membership due to the social upheavals of the 60s, how was the Friends Church, as they renamed themselves, how could they bring in more members?
They believed they had to become involved in politics.
To speak up and make their position known.
To be socially active.
To pull back into their ranks the young people.
To put people back into the pews.
Heretofore they had a prohibition against involvement with politics.
What is Caesars is Caesars.
What is God's God, was dismissed in the face of their funding, tithes, and offerings drying up, due to empty pews.
The Quaker Church had become old fashioned, irrelevant to the movement of the society they found themselves in.
A name change occurs once again.
The Friends Church, who historically are the Quakers, becomes known nationwide as the Evangelicals.
Consider…
Just why did our founding fathers want a separation between religion and government?
The separation between church and state.
Dosen’t Christianity and the Bill of Rights and the Constitution agree with each other?
A government founded upon the principle that all people are created equal.
A government of the people, by the people, for the people has a distinct ideology, present, and upfront in that statement.
We are all equal.
Religion, on the other hand, makes marked separations between the saved and the sinner.
You are either for us or against us.
With God or against God.
Religion makes no room for the undecided, the marginal.
It sidelines the minority in favor of a majority who supports a version of God.
It is a rule, an idea, a dogma passed down generation to generation which cannot buy it’s own rules be questioned.
A type of window dressing, marketing, has been crafted to make the reality, "this dogma," more palatable to those not born again into religion.
"Love the sinner hate the sin."
The religious can marginalize the group, the individual who does not adhere to, who does not believe like me.
The religion encourages this separation.
This categorizing of who is worthy of God’s love and blessings and who is not.
You either belong to my club, or you don't.
If you don't belong to my club, you are an infidel and are worthy of death.
If not at my hands, then by my God, who will make you suffer in hell for all eternity for not wanting to be a member of my club.
Let's get real.
Religion segregates.
Religion discriminates.
Religion divides the deserving from the undeserving.
Religion blinds the faithful to see only one way to God.
Its purpose is to use the goodwill of the faithful to support the power structure of the religion.
To keep the King the King.
That segregation is taught from the pulpit and repeated in the pews every Sunday in our Evangelical houses of worship.
Segregation goes hand in hand with racism.
Ever wonder how good Christian people have the idea that the white race is superior and all the rest are akin to animals?
Well, you have to look at the story of the Great Flood to get the answer.
The story of Noah and his sons is used to illustrate who is deserving and who is not in the eyes of God by racist America.
After the flood was over and the animals were let loose to propagate once again, God wanted Noah to flourish also.
To that end, Noah was missing having wine with his dinner.
So Noah planted a vineyard.
Noah grew his grapes and made himself some new wine.
He drank of his new wine and passed out.
His sons seeing his nakedness had homosexual sex with him while he was unconscious.
For that sin, God gave each son a curse.
For the son Ham, he made his skin black as night.
Ham and his descendants were to serve the white man for the rest of time as the white man's slave.
This curse was to be a reminder of their sin forever.
What God has cursed let no man say it ain't.
This story was told repeatedly from the pulpit there in Cleveland, Ohio in that little Quaker church I attended.
It was repeatedly told to me by the Reverend as well as his wife, as to why it was wrong for the negro in 1968 to want more out of life than what God had granted in his mercy.
Rules are rules, you know.
Can't question God and say everyone is equal when God clearly made the slave a slave and the free man free.
That Constitution thing is just plain wrong-headed.
Those men with the white wigs must have gotten God's word all backward.
So this adopted myth, this cornerstone of racism in religious white America, is why Evangelicals support Donald Trump.
He uses their coded language of race and class segregation and he must be sent by their God to lead the stupid people like you and I back to God.
On April 4th, 1968. Martin Luther King Jr. is killed.
I'm eight years old.
Innocent of the world not understanding the turmoil.
When I heard that someone had killed Martin Luther, my eight-year-old heart was grieved.
Someone had killed the person who founded our church.
I was too naive to understand that Martin Luther King Jr. was not Martin Luther, the founder of the Protestant movement, the 16th century, and subsequent Christian derivatives.
At church that Sunday following the assassination, the adults around me were all happy.
They were laughing and patting each other on the back.
Gleeful.
They were happy somebody killed that agitator.
That nigger. They were happy that someone had killed a friend of Jesus…?
I didn't understand why good men praised evil.
My parents didn't understand why I cried.
Where was love?
I wept…
Peace
DFrey
