What ever happened to the Moral Majority?

Women at the Empty Tomb by Fra Angelico

President Obama is clearly the moral superior of what passes for a president today.

Obama is faithful to his wife.  Trump is faithful to his sex workers.

Yet people calling themselves born-again Christians still prefer 45 to 44.

Thank you to Amy Sullivan for writing about this problem in the NYT Sunday Review on Easter Day. In the print edition, the title is "Trump's Christian Soldiers;" online it's called "Democrats Are Christians, Too."

"Eighty percent of white evangelicals would vote against Jesus Christ himself if he ran as a Democrat,"  she writes.

Her article concludes:

At the 2015 breakfast in the East Room, which featured music by Amy Grant, as close as evangelicals come to royalty, Mr. Obama spoke about the daily challenges of faith. “Today we celebrate the magnificent glory of our risen Savior,” he said. “I pray that I will live up to his example. I fall short so often. Every day I try to do better.”

Conservative evangelicals were unmoved. One year later, a Public Policy Polling survey found that only 13 percent of Trump supporters believed Mr. Obama was a Christian. They won’t have a chance to hear Mr. Trump himself speak about faith and the resurrection this Easter season. After he came into office, the Trump White House ended the short-lived tradition of Easter breakfasts.

I never thought I'd be pining for the good old days of 1970 and 1971 when I worked for Christianity Today Magazine, the beating heart of born-again Christianity.

The Moral Majority seems to have morphed into a confused minority that asks with Pilate "What is truth?"  

They aren't sure what truth is, or what fake is, but they still want the current president to be their leader.

"We knew we weren't electing a saint," they say, but as more and more truth emerges about the man they elected, I don't see many born-again Christians turning away from him.

Cognitive dissonance is hard to bear.  It's easier just not to listen to evil or see it.

Immoral as he may be, he's their man.

But Sullivan does label this group "conservative evangelicals," not just evangelicals.  She notes the presence of progressive evangelicals.

I am among these folks--the Sojourner Magazine, Anne Lamott types.  I'm a member of EEWC-Christian Feminism Today.  www.eewc.com  EEWC stands for Evangelical & Ecumenical Women's Caucus.  

We'll be there to pick up the pieces of the evangelical churches when Trump is impeached. 

Sullivan notes that these right-wingers tend to identify opposition to gay rights and to legal abortion as part of the Apostles Creed.

Someday those idols too will fall, and the followers of Jesus of Nazareth will fully accept sexuality of various kinds as well as the sovereignty of women's control of their own bodies.