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The influence of America’s evangelical churches has been in steep decline ever since the two administrations of professed evangelical Christian President George W. Bush at the beginning of this century. Again and again on my radio talk show and in this column, I tried to warn Christians about the way the Bush presidency was distorting Christ’s teaching and how millions of our countrymen were being turned off to Christianity as a result. For the most part, of course, my appeals fell on deaf ears. But I Pollyannaishly thought we had seen the worst of it with Bush. Boy was I wrong! Donald Trump has taken up where Bush left off—in spades.
A Christian Post interview with former Trump White House aid Cliff Sims explores how the adoration heaped upon President Donald Trump by evangelical pastors is pushing millions of Americans into a repudiation of Christianity and causing mass acceptance of atheism and paganism (which are now at all-time highs in this country—and growing).
RawStory has the review:
Former Trump White House aide Cliff Sims has told the Christian Post that he fears Trump-loving evangelical leaders are turning an entire generation away from Christianity thanks to their embrace of an amoral president.
Sims, who wrote a scathing insider’s account of life in President Donald Trump’s White House called “Team of Vipers,” explains in an interview with the Christian publication that many people on Trump’s faith advisory board are vicious social climbers who will happily knife one another to maintain their access to the president.
“I found some of the board to be mainly interested in maintaining their proximity to power, even to the point of trashing ‘rival’ faith leaders to keep them from threatening their own position close to the President,” he says.
Sims also reveals that he’s worried about how the president’s top evangelical advisers are affecting Americans’ views of Christianity.
“I’m haunted by the late author Brennan Manning’s quote, ‘The greatest single cause of atheism in the world today is Christians who acknowledge Jesus with their lips and walk out the door and deny Him by their lifestyle. That is what an unbelieving world simply finds unbelievable,'” he says.
What Sims says absolutely resonates with me, because I saw some of this in my days with the Moral Majority during the Reagan/Bush I years. I watched evangelical leaders that I had respected and admired compromise virtually every great Christian principle that they professed to believe in order to sit at the king’s table. What I witnessed then was but a precursor to what is happening today.
That evangelical leaders could enthusiastically embrace and endorse a man (Donald Trump) who is every bit as immoral and corrupt as Bill Clinton stretches the imagination. Jerry Falwell Sr. went to war against Democrat Jimmy Carter—a professed born-again Christian who had taught Sunday School (and still does, by the way, at age 94) in a Southern Baptist church for decades, a man who had never cheated on his wife—because Carter granted an interview to Playboy magazine. The spiritual/moral war between Falwell Sr. (along with the entire Religious Right) and Jimmy Carter remained red hot during the Bill Clinton years. Falwell and Company rightly railed against pornography, sexual perversion and the serial adulteries of men such as Bill Clinton as grounds for political opposition. Ronald Reagan and G.W. Bush were both elected on the strength of evangelical opposition to Carter and Clinton.
Fast forward to 2016:
Forty years after that [Falwell Sr.’s] press conference [denouncing Carter’s Playboy interview], a very different scene unfolded. This one took place in New York and starred Jerry Falwell Jr., inheritor of the family business. Hours earlier, the younger Falwell had introduced the GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump to a massive gathering of Christian leaders, calling him “God’s man,” anointed to lead the nation in turbulent times. The summit was successful beyond anyone’s expectation. As they celebrated back at Trump Tower, Falwell sought to document the occasion with a photo. The future president stood in the middle, flanked by Falwell Jr. and his wife, Becki. Thumbs went up. The camera snapped. Falwell tweeted the photo to his 60,000 followers. There was just one hiccup: Lurking over Becki Falwell’s left shoulder, framed in gold, was a cover of Playboy, graced by a bow-tied Trump and a smiling brunette covered only by his tuxedo jacket.
Nothing, it seemed, could so neatly encapsulate the religious right’s backsliding as Falwell Jr. giving a thumbs-up in front of the very magazine his father had singled out as symbolic of America’s moral decay—while standing shoulder to shoulder with a man who had appeared in a softcore porno flick and who reportedly [committed serial adultery with a bunch of women] including a Playboy model and hardcore adult-film actress. (Source: Politico)
Suffice it to say, Jerry Falwell Jr. and his fellow evangelical leaders who fawn over Donald Trump have deliberately decided to bury Biblical morality in favor of sitting comfortably at the king’s table.
However, I do not believe this is the biggest reason why Trump’s evangelical lackeys are pushing the country toward atheism and paganism. To be sure, many in the unchurched world love to loathe the hypocrisy of Christians, but that is not the major cause of these folks abandoning interest in Christianity. Since the Church began, men have fallen victim to sins of the flesh. Those who are opposed to the Gospel to begin with will use these frailties as an excuse to find fault, but, by nature, the Gospel bespeaks personal forgiveness and grace. The Church has grown in great numbers for over 200 years in this country—the various moral sins of some of its leaders notwithstanding.
No! The mass acceptance by evangelical pastors and churches of Donald Trump’s piggish lifestyle is NOT the main reason why so many people are turning their backs on Christianity. I’ll tell you why the mass acceptance of Donald Trump by evangelical pastors and churches has alienated the unchurched world and is driving them in large numbers toward atheism and paganism: It’s because the “Christian” Donald Trump (just like the “Christian” GW Bush before him) is a warmonger.
The only groups of people in the United States that support and clamor for more war are Zionist neocons and evangelical Christians (most of whom are also Zionists). Everyone else is sick of war! They are sick and tired of U.S. forces being used as mercenaries for Big Oil. They are sick and tired of watching our country’s future being borrowed and sold on the backs of both them and their posterity via trillions of dollars of national debt for war profiteers. They are sick of America’s young fighting men being sent to countries all over the world that they have absolutely no right or reason to be in. They are sick and tired of fighting Israel’s wars. They are sick of it! They are sick of war! And all of his rhetoric notwithstanding, Donald Trump has proven himself to be nothing more than just another Zionist neocon warmonger.
Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley, among others in Trump’s administration, are touted as being “great Christians.” They say Pompeo keeps an open Bible on his desk. Over and over, these people are loudly lauded as “great Christians.”
Haley spent her entire tenure as U.S. Ambassador defending Israel’s indefensible wars and military atrocities. She was nothing but a total toady for Zionist Israel. And to show its appreciation for Haley’s groveling and pandering, the Jewish Sanhedrin in Israel made her an honorary president of its Organization of 70 Nations (an attempted Zionist equivalent of the United Nations).
But, gee, isn’t there something about the Jewish Sanhedrin that sticks out in my mind? Oh, yes. They were the ones who crucified the Lord Jesus Christ and persecuted and murdered the apostles and members of the early church, weren’t they? But nowadays, the likes of “Christians” Haley, Pompeo and Pence literally fall all over themselves to do the slavish bidding of the Christ-rejecting Zionist State of Israel—even to the point of using the U.S. military as little more than a surrogate army for Israel.
Unchurched people by the millions are saying, “If that’s Christianity, I want no part of it.” That’s why they are rejecting Christianity and turning to atheism and paganism.
And now that the warmongers in D.C. are running out of bad guys in the Middle East to go to war with (no, they haven’t forgotten about Iran; war with that country is still in our future), they are pressing regime change in Venezuela. Hundreds or maybe thousands of U.S. military troops have already been sent to points surrounding Venezuela.
Mike Pompeo declared that the duly elected President of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro’s “days are numbered.”
Quintessential warmonger John Bolton said the same thing about Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega.
In addition, Mike Pence recently met with the unelected and self-proclaimed Venezuelan opposition leader Juan Guaido.
Vice President Mike Pence announced additional sanctions on Venezuelan officials Monday, urged Latin American neighbors to freeze assets of the state oil company and held his first face-to-face meeting with Venezuela’s opposition leader.
Visiting Colombia, Mr. Pence also warned some countries in the region that have conspicuously sought to remain neutral in the crisis convulsing Venezuela that they cannot remain so, singling out Mexico and Uruguay.
“We believe there can be no bystanders,” he said. “No one on the sidelines of this, particularly in our hemisphere.”
The statements by Mr. Pence, who was making his fifth trip to Latin America, escalated the Trump administration’s campaign aimed at pressuring President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela to step down.
“We are with you [Guaido] 100 percent,” Mr. Pence said.
Make no mistake about it: U.S. sanctions against Venezuela (and dozens of other countries around the world) are nothing more than an act of war. The purpose of sanctions is to deliberately starve, kill, destabilize and wreak violence and havoc on the country victimized by those sanctions.
You and I both know that what happens in Venezuela is none of our business. We both know that Venezuela poses absolutely no threat to the people of the United States. We both know that the U.S. has absolutely no constitutional, legal, moral or Natural right to overthrow a duly elected leader in a foreign country—no matter how much we may dislike him. And we both know that after Maduro is toppled, the leader of Nicaragua will be next. And it won’t stop in Nicaragua.
Beyond that, you and I both know that Donald Trump and his bloodthirsty neocons in Washington, D.C., couldn’t care less whether the people in Venezuela are starving or not. In fact, their sanctions against that country are a contributing cause of that country’s starvation and suffering. And don’t bother bringing up Maduro’s refusal to allow U.S. “humanitarian” aid into his country. He has accepted tons of humanitarian assistance from other countries. Maduro knows that the U.S. is smuggling arms into Venezuela in support of the rebels.
You and I both know this is just another war-for-oil scheme on behalf of Donald Trump and his cabal of war profiteers. Venezuela has some of the largest oil, natural gas and gold reserves in the world. Plus, Trump is copying the playbook of G.W. Bush on how to win a second term by going to war.
Yep, Trump needs more illegal immigrants at America’s southern border in order to rally his base for his “Finish the Wall” 2020 reelection campaign. You are reading it right. I am saying that Trump is deliberately trying to destabilize already unstable Central and South American countries in order to create tens of thousands of additional immigrants as a way to “prove” to his supporters that he needs to be reelected so he can finish his wall.
Trump knows the fix is in. The Mueller probe is dead; the evidence is buried. The Jewish mafia has defeated the Bush/Clinton Crime Family and is now fully in charge of the executive branch of government. Our judicial branch of government is being won over by the imperial presidency doctrine. Brett Kavanaugh is making sure of that. And our legislative branch of government has ceded so much unconstitutional authority to the President (any President) that current attempts to rein in the imperial presidency are all but futile. There is precious little standing in Trump’s way now.
And the only people who refuse to open their eyes to all of the above are Jerry Falwell Jr. and his fellow evangelical pastors and their congregations. They are too busy fighting for position at the king’s table. The rest of the country sees war for what it is; it sees Zionism for what it is; and it sees Trump for what he is. And they can only assume (wrongly) that these warmongering, Zionist-fawning evangelicals are representative of Bible Christianity—and THAT’S why they are headed in the opposite direction by the droves.
By their preoccupation with self-interest, personal ambition and infatuation with power, evangelicals are unwittingly pushing America toward atheism and paganism.
© Chuck Baldwin
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