Donald Trump, a 77-year-old Bible salesman from Palm Beach, Florida, has emerged as the nation’s most prominent Christian leader. Trump is running for president as a divinely chosen champion of White Christians, promising to sanctify their grievances, destroy their perceived enemies, bolster their social status, and grant them the power to impose an anti-feminist, anti-LGBTQ, White-centric Christian nationalism from coast to coast. That Trump doesn’t attend church and has obviously never read the book that he hawks for $59.99, seems of interest exclusively to his political opponents.
What might catch the attention of some evangelical conservatives, however, is that Trump’s ostentatious embrace of White Christian militantism coincides with a precipitous decline in religious affiliation in the US. According to the Public Religion Research Institute, one-quarter of Americans in 2023 said they were religiously unaffiliated. “Unaffiliated” is the only religious category experiencing growth. In a single decade, from 2013 to 2023, the percentage of Americans saying that religion is the most important thing, or among the most important things, in their life plummeted to 53% from 72%.
I’ve always understood ‘neighbour’ in this context to mean ‘fellow Christian’. Everyone else is fair game.
That’s theologically insane. It’s been doctrine at times and is how catholic slaving was justified, but it flies in the face of one of the recurring themes of the gospels: that you need to love your enemies and people you don’t like. That’s the point of the Good Samaritan, it’s the at the time equivalent of “a priest and a well respected christian ignored an injured Christian, but then some random Muslim guy showed up and just helped this stranger just because he was hurt, be like the Muslim guy”