Thursday, March 23, 2017

Trump Manipulated Religious Right & Returned It To Racist Roots - The New Republic

By openly embracing the racism of the alt-right, Trump effectively played to the religious right’s own roots in white supremacy, despite that history being something that many current Christian Conservatives are probably not aware of. 

Conservative Christians voted for Donald Trump in record numbers. He won 81% of the white evangelical vote.

As a result, the religious right has effectively become a subsidiary of the alt-right, yoked to Trump’s white nationalist agenda.

The overwhelming support for Trump heralds the religious right - a movement founded to maintain the South’s segregationist “way of life" - coming full circle to embrace its roots in racism, a history that many current Christian Conservatives are probably not aware of.

The religious right was actually galvanized in the 1970s and early ’80s, when the IRS revoked the tax-exempt status of Bob Jones University and other conservative Christian colleges that refused to admit bob-whites.

By openly embracing the racism of the alt-right, Trump effectively played to the religious right’s own roots in white supremacy.

The religious right, in its support for a thrice-married, self-confessed sexual predator, finally dispensed with the fiction that it was concerned about family values.

The full article is available here