Former president Donald Trump and his Republican rivals for the 2024 election have for months been heavily courting social conservatives and white evangelical Christians, seen as the most influential group in Iowa’s Republican caucuses.

“We thank you for the upcoming election, Lord — or caucus, as we call it in Iowa,” said Hundley, speaking from the sanctuary of his evangelical Christian church in his slight Texas drawl as his parishioners bowed their heads.

“It doesn’t matter what our opinion is,” he went on. “It’s really what’s your opinion that matters. But you’ve given us the privilege of being able to exercise a beautiful gift. The gift of vote. We thank you for that.”

While Hundley stops short of suggesting to his parishioners which candidate divine guidance should lead them to support, he is among more than 300 pastors and other faith leaders who’ve been described as supporters by former President Donald Trump’s campaign. It’s a message that some members of Hundley’s First Church of God have taken to heart, saying their faith informs their intention to caucus for Trump.

Ron Betts, a 72-year-old Republican who said he plans to caucus for “Trump all the way,” said he felt the former president “exemplified what Jesus would do.”

  • @blunderworld@lemmy.caEnglish
    38•6 months ago

    Are American Christians not able to tell the difference between their internal monlogue and divine guidance, or what?

      • @blunderworld@lemmy.caEnglish
        11•6 months ago

        Finding a definitive answer on whether or not any god exists is way above most of our pay grades.

        But even if I were religious, I don’t see myself thinking “maybe chili tonight for dinner?” And responding “okay, thanks God”.

        • @Natanael@slrpnk.net
          6•6 months ago

          We literally have a scene from a children’s movie here in Sweden from our famous author Astrid Lindgren where exactly that’s the joke, the kid answers their own prayer asking if they can take more cake

    • @LaurentideEnglish
      5•6 months ago

      American Evangelicalism is a tulpamancy cult. I was raised Evangelical, sent to a private Evangelical school, and made to attend several Evangelical churches until adulthood. In all of these communities, it was universally believed that God directly speaks to each person through a special voice in their head. I was very strongly pressured to find, listen to, and obey this voice, and made to feel like I was not a “true believer” for being unable to channel it into glossolalia.

      • DominusOfMegadeus
        6•6 months ago

        Tulpa:

        “Modern practitioners, who call themselves “tulpamancers”, use the term to refer to a type of willed imaginary friend which practitioners consider to be sentient and relatively independent. Modern practitioners predominantly consider tulpas to be a psychological rather than a paranormal concept. The idea became an important belief in Theosophy.”

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulpa

      • @skulblaka@startrek.website
        5•6 months ago

        This is a huge point that should be talked about more. Tulpamancy isn’t pseudoscience, it’s very real and religion, especially Christianity, uses it to great effect. The process of finding and cultivating the “voice of God” is the exact process used to create an intentional tulpa of any number of various other types, there are entire internet communities about it. A little bit of research with this context in mind is extremely eye opening.

    • @ghostdoggtv@lemmy.world
      2•6 months ago

      They shift attribution depending on whatever is politically convenient. Religion is America’s original sin and those traitors know it.

      • BeautifulMind ♾️English
        5•6 months ago

        Religion is America’s original sin

        It’s worse than that. Religion was co-opted into the maintenance of slavery, and it caused schisms in multiple sects, including the Baptists, Presbyterians, and Methodists

        Generation after generation, Southern pastors adapted their theology to thrive under a terrorist state. Principled critics were exiled or murdered, leaving voices of dissent few and scattered. Southern Christianity evolved in strange directions under ever-increasing isolation. Preachers learned to tailor their message to protect themselves. If all you knew about Christianity came from a close reading of the New Testament, you’d expect that Christians would be hostile to wealth, emphatic in protection of justice, sympathetic to the point of personal pain toward the sick, persecuted and the migrant, and almost socialist in their economic practices. None of these consistent Christian themes served the interests of slave owners, so pastors could either abandon them, obscure them, or flee.

        What developed in the South was a theology carefully tailored to meet the needs of a slave state. Biblical emphasis on social justice was rendered miraculously invisible. A book constructed around the central metaphor of slaves finding their freedom was reinterpreted. Messages which might have questioned the inherent superiority of the white race, constrained the authority of property owners, or inspired some interest in the poor or less fortunate could not be taught from a pulpit. Any Christian suggestion of social justice was carefully and safely relegated to “the sweet by and by” where all would be made right at no cost to white worshippers. In the forge of slavery and Jim Crow, a Christian message of courage, love, compassion, and service to others was burned away.

        https://www.politicalorphans.com/the-article-removed-from-forbes-why-white-evangelicalism-is-so-cruel/