"Downright strange": How Trump's warped litmus test for MAGA Christians spread beyond abortion

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"Downright strange": How Trump's warped litmus test for MAGA Christians spread beyond abortion
Bradley Onishi, expert on Christian nationalism, explains Trumpism has supplanted traditional Christian orthodoxy

By Chauncey DeVega
Senior Writer
Published August 29, 2024 5:45AM (EDT)


(Salon) The 2024 Election is existential. It will decide if the United States will remain a democracy or succumb to some form of authoritarianism and neofascism under Dictator Trump and his MAGAfied Republican Party and movement.

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Bradley Onishi is President of the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement and the Founder of Axis Mundi Media. In 2023 he published, “Preparing for War: The Extremist History of White Christian Nationalism." Onishi is also a faculty member in Religion and Philosophy at the University of San Francisco.

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The Age of Trump and the democracy crisis and ascendant neofascism are not purely “political” crises. This is a moral crisis and test for the nation. Why are so many in the news media and political class still afraid to speak in those terms?

Trumpism presents a unique challenge to American media, because Trumpism flouts every norm, every process, every expectation. The moral failings of Trump are different than those of other politicians, because on one hand, usually, those failings come in the form of scandals that erupt into public view, causing media outcry for months and months and months. We could think of Bill Clinton's Monica Lewinsky scandal. On the other hand, Trump's moral failings, whether they be with Stormy Daniels or in other ways, keep coming every day, all the time, so it's hard to pick out the exception. And for the news media, moral failings are the exception. They're the things that happen. They're an event, they're a fall, they're a misstep, and if Trump's every day is one ongoing flouting of the moral norms of political life, then it's hard to cover that for them, and it's flummoxing.

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What does it mean to be a “Christian” in the Age of Trump?

Over the last five years, conservative churches have elevated culture war issues to the level of doctrine. This means that if you want to be a Christian in many conservative churches across the country, whether they're evangelical or charismatic, not only do you need to be willing to confess that there's one God who is a trinity, that his son, Jesus rose from the dead, and so on and so forth, but you also need to be willing to agree that you are absolutely against abortion and/or that you would like to build a wall. You also need to not support the rights of transgender people and the LGBTQ community more broadly. What we have now in the Age of Trump is a situation where what it means to be a Christian is adherence to political conservative orthodoxy, rather than Christian doctrinal orthodoxy. ............(more)

https://www.salon.com/2024/08/29/downright-strange-how-warped-litmus-test-for-maga-christians-spread-beyond-abortion/