Just before headlining the CPAC convention in Virginia and the South Carolina primaries on Saturday, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump delivered a speech to right-wing television stations Thursday evening in which former president pledged to cede power to the Christian nationalist movement. on an unprecedented scale.
Trump said during his speech at the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB) annual conference in Nashville, Tenn., that he would defend “pro-God context and content” on the nation’s AM radio stations, saying public that religion is “the biggest thing missing” in the United States and warned, without evidence, that Christian television networks were “under siege” by the left and a “fascist” Biden administration.
“Trump’s real sin is not hypocrisy but theocracy.”
“We have to bring back our religion,” Trump said. “We need to bring back Christianity.”
Striking a Christ-like pose at one point, with his arms outstretched as if on a cross, Trump mentioned his legal struggles, including multiple criminal indictments and civil judgments, and said: “I take all these arrows for you and I’m so proud. to take them. I am accused for you.
As Common dreamsreported Earlier this week, right-wing Christian nationalists operating in Trump’s inner circle were quietly preparing for the prospect of his possible re-election.
In his Thursday speech, during which he also promised to shut down the Department of Education so that Christian fundamentalists could take over school policy at the state level, Trump said: “If I go in, you will use this power at a higher level. level you’ve never used before.
Reflecting on Trump’s speech at Washington Postcolumnist Philip Bump argued that the former president is primarily a salesman selling a product to a key voting bloc in this year’s elections, namely right-wing Christians.
The former president, Bump writes, “is telling a group that feels like it’s losing its cultural power that he’s right and he’ll make sure that’s not the case.”
“It worked in 2016 and 2020,” he wrote, after noting that Trump had already won the vast majority of those voters. “Why wouldn’t it work now?”
In writing In The nation On Friday, Jeet Heer warned that a key element of Trump’s current presidential campaign “is that he is now in open alliance with Christian nationalists – a faction significantly more radical and opposed to democracy than the mainstream evangelicals he courted in previous elections.”
While many have tried to fault Trump for his obvious hypocrisy when it comes to religion or moral piety, Heer says that’s a mistake.
“Trump’s real sin is not hypocrisy but theocracy,” Jeer wrote. “Christian nationalism is an extremist ideology at odds with the fundamental pluralism of American life. It poses a threat not only to secularists but also to the vast majority of religious people whose faith does not involve recourse to the state for impose theology.”
