Republican hypocritical war on families

by Gwendoline M. Alphonso is an Associate Professor of Politics at Fairfield University, in Connecticut. She is the author of Polarized Families, Polarized Parties: Contesting Values and Economics in American Politics (University of Pennsylvania Press, July 2018).

Heart-rending images of migrant families being separated at the border generated a political maelstrom for Republicans that resulted in the capitulation of President Trump on June 20th. Trump signed an executive order that, he said, would keep migrant families together at the border. 

At the time of writing, 2000 migrant children continue to be in detention centers, separated from their families, as the Republican-dominated Congress struggles to consider an immigration reform bill. (The House voted the latest measure down; the Senate is considering an alternative.) In his statements the President characterized his predicament as a dilemma between values such as “compassion” vs. “toughness,” avowing to continue to uphold his zero tolerance policy even while signaling his acquiescence to family reunification.

Multiple protest organizers, commentators, politicians, and church leaders have approached the issue of migrant family separation as a reflection of American values. 

For example, New York Times columnist, David Brooks cited it as a policy example of an administration that “takes out” values such as affection, mercy, charity, compassion and empathy.” 

As Brooks says, this is “not who we are.” (PBS Newshour, 06/15). Trump supporters, however, such as former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, insisted that family separation is “the law” and the President is merely “enforcing it,” laying the blame repeatedly on Democrats for a failed immigration system.

Despite the continued insistence of Trump and his base that family separation is first and foremost a “law and order” issue, the majority of the American people are far more likely to see the issue in familial terms. Donald Trump's wrong minded executive order is an acknowledgement of that reality. The irony is that Trump and Republicans in Congress have only themselves to thank for the political straight jacket they now find themselves in – one that exemplifies long standing inconsistencies between morality and hard materiality in the inherited Republican family values agenda.

It just so happens that I have been studying the Republican deployment since the late 1970s of the family as the human touchstone for American greatness and moral values. It’s the subject of my new book, Polarized Families, Polarized Parties: Contesting Values and Economics in American Politics. What the record shows is that this phenomenon is quite in contrast with earlier attempts to mobilize around family economics in previous periods.

In its 1976 Platform the Republican Party asserted, “families—not government programs —are the best way to make sure . . . our cultural and spiritual heritages are perpetuated, our laws are observed and our values are preserved.”

Since then Republicans have roundly heralded families, not laws or programs, as the foremost, living and breathing, illustration of enduring American values and success. Despite Trump’s own unconventional family life, the 2016 Republican Platform once again committed to a traditional (married) family values agenda, asserting that family “is the foundation of civil society… its daily lessons — cooperation, patience, mutual respect, responsibility, self-reliance — are fundamental to the order and progress of our Republic…. That is why Republicans formulate public policy, from taxation to education, from healthcare to welfare, with attention to the needs and strengths of the family.”

From 1968 to 2016 both parties tripled the percentage of their platforms dedicated to family-specific pledges and legislators in Congress increased their sponsorship of family values bills tenfold, from a mere 4 percent of all family-related bills in the immediate decade following World War II to almost 40 percent in the last decade of the twentieth century.

Led by Republicans, “family values” became the central frame through which the parties’ increased their attention to family and in many cases organized their policy agendas. From invoking family values merely 15 or so times in their 1968 platform, Republican platforms from 1992 to 2016 on average mentioned family values roughly 90 times (Democratic platforms for the same period invoked family values about half as many times). Similarly, whereas 84 percent of family bills from 1989 to 2004 sponsored by Democratic members of Congress stressed the more typical economic aspects of family life, such as costs of housing, schooling, and food, 65 percent of Republican-sponsored family bills emphasized traditional family private values, such as self-sufficiency, family integrity and stability, in a variety of policies including taxation, welfare, education, immigration, marriage and abortion.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, Republicans were able to achieve vast policy and electoral success among antithetical groups by pursuing their family values agenda and closely tying family to conservative economic and moral values. Republicans in Congress successfully pursued key elements of a neoliberal economic agenda – dismantling welfare and poverty programs for poor families and scaling back redistributionist programs such as estate and other taxes on wealthy families – all while accommodating social traditionalism by opposing programmatic assistance and protections for unconventional families, such as those of LGBT parents and never married-mothers. In their campaign to protect “family values” some families – their integrity, stability, and self-determination— have thus clearly mattered more than others, some deserving the utmost protections and respect even as others were more actively regulated and coerced.

The Trump administration’s attempt to have us temper images of families forcibly separated at the border and, instead, to coldly consider them law breakers and criminals, is yet another illustration of the malleability and inevitable double-standard in the family values ideology that has infused the Republican Party ideology since the late twentieth-century. Yet this strategy may now be turning against the party.

Especially since the 2000s Democrats have steadily embraced family values as a political frame, this time bringing economic-focused family values – such as economic equity, inclusiveness and diversity – to oppose conservative policies and advocate for more liberal ones, such as equal wages for women, raising the minimum wage, and even same-sex marriage equality. 

If Trump’s executive order and Republican factional battles are any indication, it appears that Democrats may now have the upper hand in the battle over defining family and its values and their place in American public policy.

In any case much to the undoubted chagrin of our current President, the firestorm over family separation within the immigration debate demonstrates the continued powerful place of family in American politics and more crucially, in our collective consciousness of right and wrong – who we are and who we aspire to be as a people.

Mennonite message - lyrics and echo: "How Can We Be Silent?"

Carlos Romero is Executive Director of Mennonite Education Agency. This piece originally ran in the January issue of The Mennonite magazine, focused on education.

Opinion ~ I can’t remember living in a more polarized time than today. No matter how you view the results of the presidential election, its aftermath has underscored those disagreements. Fear and hatred of “the other” and acts of oppression, cruelty and violence that grow from this seem to have become normal.

I wish I could say the people and institutions of the church are immune from these forces. We like to think we are separate, but in fact we are greatly influenced by negativity in our culture.

I have experienced this negativity. It’s happened to me in the past and recently as well.

Last October, I received a call from an alum of Mennonite educational institutions. A hate call. The caller told me I needed to go back to Mexico where I belong (I am from Puerto Rico). I was told that my kind of people are rapists, thieves and criminals. The caller said the Mennonite church is corrupt because it made the mistake of welcoming me and that our educational institutions are corrupt because a person like me serves as executive director of Mennonite Education Agency.

Mennonites

I wish I could say such an engagement is rare. While the outright hostility and forthrightness of the caller is rare to experience, which I am grateful for, at times the spirit behind it is all too alive and active within our church. While it may be couched in more sophisticated and nuanced language, the same spirit of racism and bullying still finds ways to express itself in our church.

I struggled mightily to view the caller as someone created in God’s image. Sometimes it seems we lose the ability to look into the eyes of another and see Jesus, and this was real to me as I thought about that call. I continue to face this, with God’s help. I know that at times we become so consumed by our own sense of self-righteousness that we can’t see the gap between our words and our actions.

What can we do at a time such as this? The Mennonite church and our institutions can no longer be silent. Being “the quiet in the land” is an inadequate response to God’s call today.

Each time we sing these words in worship, from the hymn “How Can We Be Silent?” (Sing the Journey, No. 61), we ask ourselves: How can we be silent when we know our God is near, bringing light to those in darkness, to the worthless, endless worth? We need to share openly the gospel message of love, peace and reconciliation.

And we cannot be effective in spreading this message to the world without it beginning with us. One of the simplest commandments we have been given also is one of the most profound: to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. As church people and church institutions, we need to say clearly and unapologetically that we cannot engage in racism, sexism, abuse and bullying.

I’ve been asked many times, as a person of color, why I remain in the church. My answer always is this: I have hope and faith in God’s call and God’s kingdom.

In times of disagreement, church institutions can be an easy target for criticism. No institution or each person connected with it is perfect; my caller’s action is evidence of that.

But I would argue with great conviction that if there was ever a time the church and our world needed Mennonite education, it is today. Mennonite education is about transformation and inviting all to be full participants in the educational endeavor. Mennonite education is about developing critical thinking skills and learning in a rigorous environment. It’s about understanding that peace is a real way to live our lives and that we are called to be part of community. It’s about knowing the blessing of giving and serving, and remembering that we are all children of God.

How can we be silent when we are the voice of Christ, speaking justice to the nations, breathing love to all the earth?

My brothers and sisters, let’s move forward with the commitment that we will not be silent, with the realization that the work of healing a broken country and world must begin with us.

Let’s open our hearts and minds, willing, as the prophet Isaiah said, to go up to the mountain of the Lord, so that the God of Jacob may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his path.

Let’s work hard to maintain our ability to see God in the eyes of others and the assurance that others will see God in ours, to keep faith and hope. Education is about transformation, and transformation starts with us.

None can stop the Spirit burning now inside us. 

We will shape the future. We will not be silent.

This “Opinions” section of our website provides a forum for the voices within Mennonite Church USA and related Anabaptist-Mennonite voices. 

Trio of echo opinion letters ~ protect the immigrant children

Appreciate this echo opinion published in the news DelMarVa Now

I ask this question, as posed in a Mennonite hymn by Michael Mahler: “How can we be silent as we turn our eyes away, and ignore the poor and broken who lie bleeding in the street?*

In a time when the US government used the Bible to justify separation of immigrant families at our border — a time when at least 2,000 children in May and June were taken from their innocent immigrant parents and when families will be held together in detention indefinitely, while innocent children, who are already separated, are not promised a way back to their parents:
“How can we be silent as we turn our eyes away, and ignore the poor and broken who lie bleeding in the street?

How can we be silent when we’re called to heal and serve in the image of Lord Jesus, who has stooped to wash our feet?”

As we hear the firsthand accounts of children taken from their parents, how can we be silent?

As we learn about warehouses the tent city children have been housed in, how can we be silent?

As we hear the Bible used to justify this new zero tolerance policy, how can we be silent?

As we hear rhetoric that dehumanizes, how can we be silent?

As our current administration uses children as political pawns, how can we be silent?

As we seek to justify the detention of immigrant families who are fleeing violence, how can we be silent?

Those who claim the name of Jesus, speak. Hold your representatives accountable. Write to your local newspaper. Be bold.

As the hymn finishes: “We will shape the future. We will not be silent!”

Sara Waltermyer lives in Snow Hill Maryland.

Stop! We are breaking God's heart

I found my faith as a Christian while living as an immigrant in a foreign country.

I was not the perfect stranger. I spoke the language some, but not perfectly. I did not always understand all the cultural implications of my actions, but I was welcomed and I was loved.

I was told my presence was a “gift from God” -- and I was treated as such.

The crisis unfolding at our borders is urgent. Children are ripped from their parents, while their parents can only cry in agony.

Who are we as a nation? Who are we as Christians, who acknowledge families as a centerpiece to the fabric of our lives, if we allow this to continue?

How can we ignore Jesus’ command to love and welcome the strangers among us?

How can we allow our attorney general to insist a mother, while seeking asylum to save and protect her children, should be punished or “taught a lesson” by having her children ripped from her?

How can we allow him to misuse Scripture for this immoral crusade?

To me, as a Christian -- as a human -- these actions are incomprehensible.

In the name of God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ: Stop! We are breaking God’s heart.

Whitney Palmer lives in Berlin Maryland.

Biblical verse doesn't justify unholy actions

The present (Donald Trump) administration is now quoting partial biblical verses to justify separating children from their parents. This, of course, after our Republican leaders have falsely accused the Democrats of making this procedure law.

That's not true. But that hasn't stopped anyone.

Democrats only housed unaccompanied children crossing the border and only for no longer than 45 days.

As the government shows off a few of the shelters, it reminds me of the Nazi propaganda machine that showed the Jews lovely make-believe villages to assure them all would be OK.

Of course, that was a lie. But we are getting darn close to the same thing. Remember, those quotes from the Bible were also used to justify slavery -- and even the Germans claimed biblical verses to justify their unholy actions.

Just during the past few months, our nation has separated more than 2,000 children from their parents. Our president likes the North Korean despot and wishes people here would sit up straight when he speaks, like they do in North Korea.

He really respects Vladimir Putin, who seems to kill reporters and polticial enemies at will -- and no one interferes. Russia also likes to take over countries.

And Trump blames that on Obama.

All you people who claim news is boring and there's no point in paying attention really should start getting that information -- and not just from (right wing propaganda spewing!) Fox news -- so you can see the erosion of all the norms this nation has tried to follow for more than 200 years.

Joan Seiler lives in Eden Maryland

*Also check this link published in The Mennonite

Clarion call from George Will ~ Create a minority Republican party

George Will echo opinion published in The Virginian-Pilot

AMID THE CARNAGE of Republican misrule in Washington, there is this glimmer of good news: The family-shredding policy along the southern border, the most telegenic recent example of misrule, clarified something. 

Occurring less than 140 days before elections that can reshape Congress, the policy gave independents and temperate Republicans — these are probably expanding and contracting cohorts, respectively — fresh if redundant evidence for the principle by which they should vote.

The principle: The congressional Republican caucuses must be substantially reduced. So substantially that their remnants, reduced to minorities, will be stripped of the Constitution’s Article I powers that they have been too invertebrate to use against the current wielder of Article II powers. 

Thereby, Republicans will then have leisure time to wonder why they worked so hard to achieve membership in a legislature whose unexercised muscles have atrophied because of people like them.

Consider the melancholy example of House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wisc., who wagered his dignity on the patently false proposition that it is possible to have sustained transactions with today’s president, this Vesuvius of mendacities, without being degraded. In Robert Bolt’s play “A Man for All Seasons,” Thomas More, having angered Henry VIII, is on trial for his life. 

When Richard Rich, whom More had once mentored, commits perjury against More in exchange for the office of attorney general for Wales, More says: “Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world. … But for Wales!” Ryan traded his political soul for … a tax cut. He who formerly spoke truths about the accelerating crisis of the entitlement system lost everything in the service of a president pledged to preserve the unsustainable status quo.

Ryan and many other Republicans have become the president’s poodles, not because James Madison’s system has failed but because today’s abject careerists have failed to be worthy of it. As explained in Federalist 51: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” Congressional Republicans (congressional Democrats are equally supine toward Democratic presidents) have no higher ambition than to placate this president. By leaving dormant the powers inherent in their institution, they vitiate the Constitution’s vital principle: the separation of powers.

Recently Sen. Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who is retiring, became an exception that illuminates the depressing rule. He proposed a measure by which Congress could retrieve a small portion of the policymaking power that it has, over many decades and under both parties, improvidently delegated to presidents. Congress has done this out of sloth and timidity — to duck hard work and risky choices. Corker’s measure would have required Congress to vote to approve any trade restrictions imposed in the name of “national security.” All Senate Republicans worthy of the conservative label that all Senate Republicans flaunt would privately admit that this is conducive to sound governance and true to the Constitution’s structure. But the Senate would not vote on it — would not allow it to become just the second amendment voted on this year.

This is because the amendment would have peeved the easily peeved president. The Republican-controlled Congress, which waited for President Donald Trump to undo by unilateral decree the border folly they could have prevented by actually legislating, is an advertisement for the unimportance of Republican control.

The Trump whisperer regarding immigration is Stephen Miller, 32, whose ascent to eminence began when he became the Savonarola of Santa Monica High School. Corey Lewandowski, a Trump campaign official who fell from the king’s grace but is crawling back (he works for Vice President Mike Pence’s political action committee), recently responded on Fox News to the story of a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome taken from her parents at the border. Lewandowski replied: “Wah, wah.” Meaningless noise is this administration’s appropriate libretto because, just as a magnet attracts iron filings, Trump attracts, and is attracted to, louts.

In today’s GOP, which is the president’s plaything, he is the mainstream. So, to vote against his party’s cowering congressional caucuses is to affirm the nation’s honor while quarantining him. 

A Democratic-controlled Congress would be a basket of deplorables, but there would be enough Republicans to gum up the Senate’s machinery, keeping the institution as peripheral as it has been under their control and asphyxiating mischief from a Democratic House. And to those who say, “But the judges, the judges!” the answer is: Article III institutions are not more important than those of Articles I and II combined.

George Will is a Washington Post columnist. Thank you Mr. Will.

Truth to power!

Preventable gun fatalities ~ shooting at The Capital Gazette Annapolis MD

Filed in the thick folder titled "All Gun Violence in Preventable"

All gun violence is preventable files becoming thicker with each horrific tragedy ~ today in Annapolis MD

Shooting with fatalities in Annapolis Maryland at the The Capital Gazette newspaper is one of the oldest in the country

From CNN's Saeed Ahmed ~ another deadly gun violence and murderous attack on innocent people, this time in Annapolis Maryland.

In fact, The Capital is one of America’s oldest newspapers, beginning life in 1884, as the Evening Capital.

It has an interesting history. The company that publishes it started in 1727 with the Maryland Gazette. In 1767, Anne Catharine Green became the first female newspaper publisher in the country and the Maryland Gazette fought the stamp tax that started the American Revolution.

For many decades, there were two papers that served the region – The Maryland Gazette, a weekly, and the Evening Capital, a daily.

In 1981, The Evening Capital became the Capital. And in 1994, the company that owned it launched one of the first newspaper websites in the US with CapitalOnline.com.

Today, The Capital serves Annapolis, Anne Arundel County and Kent Island. It has a daily readership of about 67,000 and a Sunday readership of 83,000, according to the Baltimore Sun Group, which owns it.

Echo from The Baltimore Sun ~ stop immigrant cruelty and child abuse

A letter to the editor of the Baltimore Sun from Patricia Ranney in Millersville, Maryland ~ echo opinion.

Beata Mariana de Jesus Mejia-Mejia, reunited with her 7-year-old son Darwin at BWI Marshall Airport Fri, June 22.

MILLERSVILLE, MD - I am deeply troubled by the treatment of children who have been separated from their families (at the US border with Mexico).

Since the “correct” port of entry for asylum seekers has been closed, this leaves all asylum seekers forced to enter a “door” that creates a “crime,” a stunning (and fearfully imaged) feature of the Donald Trump zero tolerance policy. Americans must pressure our government to establish humane due process at our southern border.

Children who were separated and placed elsewhere without their parents are kept away from access by the press, their families, lawyers and even elected officials. There is no way to know if they are being cared for. 

Melania Trump’s visit to a detention center was intended to quiet the voices of public wanting to see for themselves how the children are doing. I'm sure Ms. Trump’s intention was good and there may be some adequate (detention) centers, although not enough to cover the need.  Just as we celebrate the 7-year-old who was reunited at BWI airport — which took legal action and persistence — we do not absolve our government of this separation policy.

The bond between parent and child is a basic human right, and no humane country would separate them when families are seeking asylum at their border.

If this practice was done by any adult in society — a coach, teacher or religious leader — it would result in criminal charges. 

Kidnapping, child abuse and endangerment come to mind.

Let’s keep demanding human rights for those who come to our door. We would want no less if we were in their shoes. Due process matters.

Patricia Ranney, Millersville

Scott Pruitt is challenged by Pope Francis about environmental science

Pope Francis and the environment ~ the antithesis of wrong minded Scott Pruitt: by Walter G. Moss*

Scott Pruitt is in conflict with God's creation ~ these deliberate degradation are sins

Maine Writer comment: Let's remember, before Pope Francis was a chemistry teacher before he became a priest.  In other words, Pope Francis is a scientist.  On the other hand, Scott Pruitt is a political operative and, as such, he has no idea about how the environment is harmed by his propriety driven policies.

Published in the History News Network HNN.com

Scientific evidence overwhelmingly attests to the existence of human-caused global warming. The problem, however, is many people ignore or dispute such evidence. Such it has been with evolution, and so it now is with global warming. A recent example has been the man President Trump appointed to the job of protecting our environment—the Environmental Protection Agency’s head, Scott Pruitt—and other Protestant evangelicals who share his hostility to a science-based climate policy. (Evangelicals are primarily Protestants of various denominations who share an emphasis on the importance of experiencing a “born-again” transformation, on the Bible and Jesus as ultimate authorities, and on encouraging others to accept Jesus as their Savior. Evangelicals make up about 25 percent of U.S. voters.)

An article in the century-old pro-business magazine Forbes recently stated that Pruitt “has systematically removed science from environmental decisions and regulations in the United States.” Two other recent articles zero in on Pruitt’s evangelical connections. The first, in Slate, is entitled “God’s EPA Administrator,” and it asks, “Did the politics and history of evangelical Christianity create Scott Pruitt?” The second, a New Yorker essay, asks, “Are Evangelical Leaders Saving Scott Pruitt's Job?”

Late last year I wrote that President Trump’s worst sin was the damage he was doing to our environment and that Pruitt was one of his chief henchmen. 

“Sin” is a strong word and a religious one. But in using it I was following the example of Pope Francis, in his 2015 climate encyclical. There he quoted favorably the Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew, who stated:“For human beings … to destroy the biological diversity of God’s creation; for human beings to degrade the integrity of the earth by causing changes in its climate, by stripping the earth of its natural forests or destroying its wetlands; for human beings to contaminate the earth’s waters, its land, its air, and its life – these are sins.”

All of these religious references, lead us to several important questions: 1) Do different religions (e.g., Francis' s Catholicism and Pruitt's evangelical Protestantism) say different things about our obligations regarding climate change? 2) What role do religious beliefs regarding climate change play in the minds of politicians? 3) How do these beliefs affect the behavior of voters?

In answer to the first question about the differences in religions, the answer is, “Yes.” But the answer involves more complexity than one might imagine. Some idea of this complexity can be gained by looking over such books such as the Routledge Handbook of Religion and Ecology (2018), which contains essays on different religions’ and regions’ approach to ecology, plus other ones dealing with subjects such as religions and climate change (see here for an online version of the latter essay). Even within one religion, for example Judaism with its Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform branches, there are often different approaches to climate change.

Our chief concern here, however, is between the different perspectives of the Catholic Pope Francis and Trumpian Protestant evangelicals like Scott Pruitt. In addition to quoting the Orthodox Patriarch Bartholomew about how harming our climate is sinful, Francis begins his climate encyclical by citing the environmental concerns of his papal predecessors since 1971, and then he jumps back to the thirteenth-century’s St. Francis of Assisi, whose name our current pope took as a “guide and inspiration” when he was selected to head the Catholic Church. The pope recommends the saint’s loving attitude toward nature as a safeguard against regarding ourselves as “masters, consumers, ruthless exploiters, unable to set limits on . . . immediate needs.”

Early on, however, Pope Francis transitions from a concern with his Catholic forerunners’ thinking to stating that he will review “several aspects of the present ecological crisis, with the aim of drawing on the results of the best scientific research available today, letting them touch us deeply and provide a concrete foundation for the ethical and spiritual itinerary that follows.” 

Pope Francis then goes on to write that “a very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system. In recent decades this warming has been accompanied by a constant rise in the sea level and, it would appear, by an increase of extreme weather events, even if a scientifically determinable cause cannot be assigned to each particular phenomenon. . . . A number of scientific studies indicate that most global warming in recent decades is due to the great concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrogen oxides and others) released mainly as a result of human activity. As these gases build up in the atmosphere, they hamper the escape of heat produced by sunlight at the earth’s surface. The problem is aggravated by a model of development based on the intensive use of fossil fuels, which is at the heart of the worldwide energy system. Another determining factor has been an increase in changed uses of the soil, principally deforestation for agricultural purposes.”

Thus, from the beginning of his encyclical, Francis displays the utmost respect for scientific findings. Popes, however, have not always been so open-minded. Mention of the Catholic papacy’s negative reaction to the contentions of Copernicus and Galileo that the earth revolved around the sun (and not vice versa) is enough to dispel any overly-rosy generalizations about past papal respect for science.

Yet, the Catholic Church has never taken an official position on Darwinian evolution, and unofficially it has never been as hostile to it as Protestant evangelicalism. Most notable among evangelical opponents to Darwin, as the famous Scopes Trial of 1925, reminds us, were the fundamentalists. (A Pew Research survey indicates that only 27 percent of white evangelical Protestants, as compared to 68 percent of white Catholics, are willing to accept that “humans have evolved over time.”)

Although fundamentalists are only a subset of evangelicalism, by 1930 a decades-long transformation was occurring among evangelicals in general. As conservative columnist Michael Gerson points out, before the Civil War many evangelicals were abolitionists who believed in social justice and progress, but by 1930 “all progressive social concern . . . became suspect” among most evangelicals. Decades later white evangelicals “shamefully” sat out or opposed the civil rights movement.

In general, as a 2014 survey revealed, white evangelical Protestants are less likely than other major U. S. religious groups to concern themselves with scientific developments or to believe that climate change is an important environmental matter. Although U. S. Catholics were more than twice as likely as white evangelical Protestants to say that climate change is the “most pressing environmental issue,” they still did not prioritize it as much as they have done since Pope Francis’s climate encyclical, which has swayed, some, but by no means all, Catholic believers.

Although climate change may or may not be of much interest to religious believers, it can no longer be ignored by national politicians. This brings us to our second and third questions: What role do religious beliefs regarding climate change play in the minds of politicians and voters? In light of the overwhelming percentage (81 percent) of white evangelicals who voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and the prominence of evangelicals like Vice-President Pence and EPA head Pruitt in the Trump Administration this question has special importance.

When one considers that Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Energy Secretary Rick Perry, and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson are also evangelical Christians, the serious impact of Trumpian evangelicals is considerable. In addition, other Republican evangelical Trump supporters like Senator James Inhofe (Okla.), patron of fellow Oklahoman Pruitt and author of The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, also increase evangelicals’ influence, as do the fossil-fuel-tycoon Koch brothers, who have supported various conservative evangelicals like Pence and Pruitt, as well other individuals and groups opposing efforts to reduce global warming.

Trump’s own religious views are less clear. But the evangelical leader James Dobson claimed that during the 2016 campaign Paula White, a Florida televangelist and spiritual advisor to Trump, converted him to evangelicalism. What is certain, however, is that Trump considers himself a Christian and has supported many goals of conservative evangelicals.

Evangelicals are influenced by their faith’s distrust of science and belief in God’s omnipotence. One example is furnished by Pastor Ralph Drollinger, author of “Rebuilding America: The Biblical Blueprint” and conductor of a weekly Bible-study meeting attended by many of the Trumpian evangelical cabinet supporters—about Drollinger and his Bible-study group Pruitt has stated, “to be encouraged, to pray . . . to spend time with a friend, a colleague, a person who has a faith focus on how we do our job, whether it’s through prayer or through God’s Word, and to encourage one another in that regard is so, so important, and we have that in our Cabinet and it’s such a wonderful thing.”

Drollinger has written: “To think that Man can alter the earth’s ecosystem—when God remains omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent in the current affairs of mankind—is to more than subtly espouse an ultra-hubristic, secular worldview relative to the supremacy and importance of man. . . . In our lifetime there has been a radical shift in aggregate, national religious belief. In essence and unfortunately, America has been in the process of changing horses: from the religion of Christianity to one of Radical Environmentalism. We are in the process of exchanging the worship of the Creator for the worship of His creation. This is a huge and dire error, with extreme consequences, and it presages disaster.”

But not all evangelicals share this view. In deciphering the role of religious faith in the politics of evangelicals, the insights of Gerson (see above) seem most pertinent. He believes his own evangelical faith has shaped his life, but that “Christian theology is emphatically not the primary motivating factor” in the minds of evangelical politicians and voters(my bolding). He writes that “Fox News and talk radio are vastly greater influences on evangelicals’ political identity.”

Also influencing their political choices are other factors like geographic location and race. The states with the largest evangelical populations (all with more than 40 percent of the total population) were Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Tennessee—more liberal California and New York had much smaller percentages of evangelicals, only 20 percent and 10 percent respectively. In last year’s Alabama Senate race, 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for the Republican candidate, while 95 percent of black evangelicals supported his Democratic opponent.

Gerson faults white evangelical voters for being too defensive, reactive, and narrow, for voting for Trump with his “distinctly non-Christian” values. Unlike the Catholic Church, which developed a well-thought-out social philosophy, evangelicals failed to do this, and Gerson thinks this has left them too susceptible to politicians like Trump who promised to look out for their interests. 

Michael Gerson supports Pope Francis opinion about the environment~ Evangelicals are influenced by extremist FoxNews

In contrast to the narrowness that Gerson eschews, Pope Francis has urged Catholics to be open-minded, pragmatic, and work for the common good. Anyone reading his long climate encyclical from beginning to end, while perhaps not agreeing with all aspects of it, should conclude that it reflects this spirit and is motivated primarily by his deep Christian faith. 

*Walter G. Moss is a professor emeritus of history at Eastern Michigan University 

North Korea meeting with Donald Trump is an evident failure

"Daily Beast" ~Watchdog: North Korea kept upgrading nuclear reactor since Trump-Kim Jong Un  Summit ~ report by Spencer Ackerman

Non-verbals ~ Experts noted that Trump (inappropriately) touched Kim on numerous occasions, while Kim was much more restrained. Obviously, the photo op meeting between Kim Jung Un and Donald Trump held in Singapore was clearly a failed effort to stop the North Korean nuclear armament.

North Korean leader Kim Jung Un is already ignoring the agreement he is said to have signed in Singapore

North Korea continued to upgrade its only known nuclear reactor, satellite imagery has shown, calling into question the value of the summit agreement between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un. 

In fact, the infrastructure improvements at the Yongbyon nuclear plant, which is used to fuel the country’s weapons program, are “continuing at a rapid pace,” according to analysis by monitoring group 38 North. Moreover, the upgrades include the modification of a cooling system for the plutonium production reactor, at least two new non-industrial buildings, and a new engineering office building. Kim Jong Un committed to “complete denuclearization” in a meeting with Trump in Singapore this month, but the details of how and when that will happen were not explicitly set out. “Infrastructure improvements continue at Yongbyon,” Jenny Town, managing editor of 38 North, wrote on Twitter. “Underscores reason why an actual deal is necessary, not just a statement of lofty goals.”

Supreme Court minority opinion on Muslim ban ~ will stand the test of time

Sotomayor and Ginsburg Issue Scathing Dissent of Supreme Court f the United States Travel Ban Decision~ published in Fortune by Renal Reints 

In my opinion, although the Supreme Court wrote a lukewarm position in the majority opinion about upholding a Muslim ban supported by the the Donald Trump administration, the fact is, it is the minority opinion that will prevail.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor

Unfortunately by a slim margin in a split decision, the Supreme Court upheld President Donald Trump’s travel ban Tuesday, siding with the president in Trump v. Hawaii. 

In the 5-4 decision, the Court legally allows vast immigration restriction from several majority-Muslim nations: Iran, Libya, North Korea, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen.

While the court’s opinion stated the president had “sufficient national security justification” to order the travel ban, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg issued a scorching dissent calling attention to Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric on the campaign road.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg

“The United States of America is a Nation built upon the promise of religious liberty,” they wrote.”

America's Founders honored that core promise by embedding the principle of religious neutrality in the First Amendment. The Court’s decision today fails to safeguard that fundamental principle. It leaves undisturbed a policy first advertised openly and unequivocally as a ‘total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States’ because the policy now masquerades behind a façade of national-security concerns.”

Their quotation refers to a statement Trump made in December 2015. “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” he said then, at a South Carolina rally.

In the dissent, Sotomayor and Ginsburg accused the court majority of “ignoring the facts, misconstruing our legal precedent, and turning a blind eye to the pain and suffering the Proclamation inflicts upon countless families and individuals, many of whom are United States citizens.”

“The full record paints a far more harrowing picture from which a reasonable observer would readily conclude that the Proclamation was motivated by hostility and animus toward the Muslim faith,” they wrote.

The dissent continued to give Trump’s full statement on banning Muslims, which remained on his website until May 2017, several months into his presidency. From there, Sotomayor and Ginsburg account every moment during Trump’s campaign, month by month, where he defended his position on banning Muslims. After some time, Trump’s language surrounding a ban took a turn, focusing instead on “radical Islamic terrorism.”

“Asked in July 2016 whether he was ‘pull[ing] back from’ his pledged Muslim ban, Trump responded, ‘I actually
don’t think it’s a rollback. In fact, you could say it’s an expansion,'” Sotomayor and Ginsburg account in their dissent. “He then explained that he used different terminology because ‘[p]eople were so upset when [he] used the word Muslim.'”

Continuing their account to when Trump signed the travel ban and thereafter, Sotomayor and Ginsburg provide detailed evidence of Trump’s personal view on Muslim immigrants and how he incorporated this rhetoric into his political policies, determining that with all the evidence, the travel ban is clearly motivated by anti-Muslim fervor.

“Our Constitution demands, and our country deserves, a Judiciary willing to hold the coordinate branches to account
when they defy our most sacred legal commitments,” Sotomayor concludes. 

“Because the Court’s decision today has failed in that respect, with profound regret, I dissent.”

Republicans who oppose Donald Trump

George Will: This November, cast your vote against the GOP
Although a reported poll cites a large percentage of Republicans still support Donald Trump, the facts are that some prominent long time party faithful are abandoning the party because they cannot support cruelty.

Published in The Washington Post and reprinted in the By George F. Will and republished in New Jersey Opinion nj.com

WASHINGTON -- Amid the carnage of Republican misrule in Washington, there is this glimmer of good news: The family-shredding policy along the southern border, which was merely the most telegenic recent example of misrule, clarified something. Occurring less than 140 days before elections that can reshape Congress, the policy has given independents and temperate Republicans -- these are probably expanding and contracting cohorts, respectively -- fresh if redundant evidence for the principle by which they should vote.

The principle is: The congressional Republican caucuses must be substantially reduced. So substantially that their remnants, reduced to minorities, will be stripped of the Constitution's Article I powers that they have been too invertebrate to use against the current wielder of Article II powers. They will then have leisure time to wonder why they worked so hard to achieve membership in a legislature whose unexercised muscles have atrophied because of people like them.

Columnist George Will leaves the Republican political party

Consider the melancholy example of House Speaker Paul Ryan, who wagered his dignity on the patently false proposition that it is possible to have sustained transactions with today's president, this Vesuvius of mendacities, without being degraded. In Robert Bolt's play "A Man for All Seasons," Thomas More, having angered Henry VIII, is on trial for his life.

When Richard Rich, who More had once mentored, commits perjury against More in exchange for the office of attorney general for Wales. More says: "Why, Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world ... But for Wales!" Ryan traded his political soul for ... a tax cut. He who formerly spoke truths about the accelerating crisis of the entitlement system lost everything in the service of a president pledged to preserve the unsustainable status quo.

Speaker Ryan and many other Republicans have become the president's poodles, not because James Madison's system has failed but because today's abject careerists have failed to be worthy of it. As Madison explained it in Federalist 51: "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place." Congressional Republicans (congressional Democrats are equally supine toward Democratic presidents) have no higher ambition than to placate this president. By leaving dormant the powers inherent in their institution, they vitiate the Constitution's vital principle, the separation of powers.

Recently Sen. Bob Corker, the Tennessee Republican who is retiring, became an exception that illuminates the depressing rule. He proposed a measure by which Congress could retrieve a small portion of the policy making power that it has, over many decades and under both parties, improvidently delegated to presidents. Congress has done this out of sloth and timidity -- to duck hard work and risky choices. Corker's measure would have required Congress to vote to approve any trade restrictions imposed in the name of "national security."

All Senate Republicans worthy of the conservative label that all Senate Republicans flaunt would privately admit that this is conducive to sound governance and true to the Constitution's structure. But the Senate would not vote on it -- would not allow it to become just the Second Amendment voted on this year.

This is because the amendment would have peeved the easily peeved president. The Republican-controlled Congress, which waited for Trump to undo by unilateral decree the border folly they could have prevented by actually legislating, is an advertisement for the unimportance of Republican control.

The Trump whisperer regarding immigration is Stephen Miller, 32, whose ascent to eminence began when he became the Savonarola of Santa Monica High School. Corey Lewandowski, a Trump campaign official who fell from the king's grace but is crawling back (he works for Mike Pence's political action committee), recently responded on Fox News to the story of a 10-year-old girl with Down syndrome taken from her parents at the border. Lewandowski replied: "Wah, wah." Meaningless noise is this administration's appropriate libretto because, just as a magnet attracts iron filings, Trump attracts, and is attracted to, louts.

In today's GOP, which is the president's plaything, he is the mainstream. So, to vote against his party's cowering congressional caucuses is to affirm the nation's honor while quarantining him.

A Democratic-controlled Congress would be a basket of deplorables, but there would be enough Republicans to gum up the Senate's machinery, keeping the institution as peripheral as it has been under their control, and asphyxiating mischief from a Democratic House.

And to those who say, "But the judges, the judges!" the answer is: Article III institutions are not more important than those of Articles I and II combined.

Immigrant children rescued by Nora Sandigo Children Foundation

Nora Sandigo Children Foundation

Angels among us ~ Florida humanitarian helps immigrant children

A mom in Florida is caring for 1,250 children of illegal immigrants in case their parents are deported ~ God Bless Her!

Gisela Salomon, Associated Press pubished in Business Insider

• Nora Sandigo cares for 1,250 children of undocumented immigrants who are at risk of being detained or deported.
• Parents who are worried about what may happen to their children if they are detained sign a document known as a power of attorney that allows Sandigo to become the children's caretaker.
• Sandigo is an immigrant herself. As a teen, she fled the socialist Sandinista government in Nicaragua and came to the US.

MIAMI (AP) — The 29-year-old Mexican farm worker was stressed and afraid. Her husband had just been detained by immigration authorities as he left a South Florida construction site and was about to be deported. She feared the same would soon happen to her. What would become of her two kids?

So she called Nora Sandigo, an immigration activist who has accepted responsibility for 1,250 children, becoming an essential part of emergency planning for people who are in the U.S. illegally and now face an increasing prospect of being caught amid a crackdown under President Donald Trump.

"Don't worry," Sandigo told her on a recent morning. "Come see me tomorrow."

Nora Sandigo Children Foundation

Hundreds of immigrant parents have signed a document known as a power of attorney that enables Sandigo to care for their children if they are detained, at which point it might be too late to make such an arrangement.

"People are desperate to do this to protect their kids," she said after hanging up with the woman from Mexico. "Once they are detained there's very little that can be done for them."

The power of attorney allows Sandigo to sign documents on behalf of children at schools, hospitals and court. She can help the minors pursue legal residency if they are not citizens or travel abroad to be reunited with their families.

At least once a week, Sandigo, a 52-year-old mother of two daughters, drives south to the city of Homestead and drops off donated clothing and food for some of them, mostly people from Mexico and Central America who work on nearby farms.

Every two weeks, many of the families gather at her home on the rural southern fringe of Miami. Sometimes several hundred show up.

She hands out donated supplies to the adults while the kids play with a menagerie of animals on the five-acre property, including ponies, a goat, pigs and a peacock.

Most of the kids still live with at least one parent, and in the end she may never have to take care of most of them.

Sandigo, a deeply religious woman who makes frequent references to God and Jesus, gets more involved if the parents are detained or deported. In December, she accompanied an 8-year-old Mexican girl to the hospital because the child couldn't sleep, eat or stop crying after her father was detained and went with another child to an asylum hearing in downtown Miami.

Two kids from Nicaragua whose parents were forced to leave the U.S. lived with her for two years. One now attends Georgetown University and the other lives with an uncle and plans to join the Army.

A 16-year-old who was born in the U.S. to parents from India has been living with her since September 2016, getting an education at a local public school that his parents felt he couldn't get after they were deported to their homeland. Sandigo refers to the boy, Ritibh Kumar, as "my lovely son."

Kumar, who is tall and athletic and has lived in the U.S. most of his life, said Sandigo checks his homework and watches him play tight end on his school's football team. "She is my No. 1 fan," he said. "This is my second home, my second mother."
When Lucia Ambruno was forced to return to Colombia, she placed her two children in Sandigo's care after hearing media reports about the foundation. The two teens lived with her in Kendall for several months until they were able to move in with family friends in another part of the U.S.

"She inspires a lot confidence, a lot of love," the 42-year-old Ambruno said of Sandigo. "I trusted her with my little ones and she didn't let me down."

Sandigo can relate to the immigrants she helps. She fled Nicaragua as a teen, leaving her own parents behind, after the socialist Sandinista government confiscated her family's farm. 

During the 1980s, Sandigo provided the U.S.-backed Contra insurgents with clothes and other supplies and later spirited her brother out of the country at age 16, before he could be drafted into the military.

She became a U.S. citizen in 1996 and became active in immigration issues, helping fellow refugees from Nicaragua. Sandigo has since become well known for broader efforts, which include filing a lawsuit last week against the Trump administration on behalf of children with citizenship whose parents have been deported.

"Nora has proven that she has a deep, caring heart and is committed to giving many immigrant kids a good start in life," said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a South Florida Republican.

The first time Sandigo signed a power of attorney to help someone being deported was in 2006, when a woman from Peru needed help getting a young child back to the South American country.

"I'm a mama warrior, ready to protect children and their parents," she said.

Money for the effort comes from donations to the Nora Sandigo Children Foundation or from the businesses she runs with her husband, which include a plant nursery and an elderly care home. Some lawyers also offer voluntary help.

Sandigo has been setting up agreements with migrant parents for nearly a decade, but over the past 12 months the number of new ones has grown nearly 40 percent. She gets barraged with email, Facebook messages and phone calls from interested parents.

More than 110,500 immigrants were detained on suspicion of being in U.S. illegally in the first nine months under Trump, a 42 percent increase over a year earlier, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The administration has also ended programs that spared some categories of immigrants from deportation, including people from countries devastated by natural disaster such as Haiti and El Salvador.

The power of attorney forms don't confer full legal guardianship or transfer parental rights. No court order is required. State and local officials don't get involved unless there are allegations of fraud or abuse, in which case a judge can be asked to void the agreement. Similar arrangements are often used by elderly people who want someone to look out for their interests.

Others provide this service for immigrants around the U.S., though immigration experts say they know of no one who has done it to the extent of Sandigo.

For the Mexican woman who called Sandigo on a recent morning, it's a way to make sure her kids have someone to call and take care of them if she is suddenly arrested, someone who could send them to her in San Luis Potosi.

The woman showed up at Sandigo's house the following evening with her 2-year-old son after her eight-hour shift picking squash near Homestead, leaving her 11-year-old daughter with a neighbor. The woman, who asked that she be identified only by her first name, Lucia, said the drive was tense because she was afraid she would be pulled over and turned over to immigration.

Sandigo, who seems to always have a cup of coffee in her hand, embraced Lucia as if they had known each other for years. The boy headed off to play with a ball while they sat down to talk in the living room. Lucia said her husband crossed the border in 2006 and she followed the next year. Now, they fear their time in the U.S. is coming to an end. The husband was detained as he came back from a construction job near Miami.

She had heard of Sandigo through the immigrant grapevine. "She's a good person and that's why I'm going to her for help," Lucia said, still in tears after talking about what happened to her husband.

Sandigo tries to offer comfort, but as the woman drives away into the night, Sandigo says there is only so much reassurance she can give. "People are afraid, knowing that at any moment there's a possibility that their family can be destroyed," she said.

Trumpzism and cultism: echo essay by Ed Simon

"implicit in all cults – a complete and utter disregard for the contours of objective reality..", Ed Simon, the Editor-at-Large for The Marginalia Review of Books,a channel of The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Ed Simon is a writer, a scholar of early modern religion and literature currently working as an adjunct Assistant Professor in the English and Media Studies department of Bentley University in Waltham Massachusetts

ECHO essay ~ Toward the end of the Second Great Awakening, a series of revivals that marked the first half of the American 19th Century, one Baptist preacher named William Miller confidently predicted that “Jesus Christ will come again to this earth, cleanse, purify, and take possession of the same, with all the saints, sometime between March 21, 1843 and March 21, 1844." Based on his complex calculations derived from the Bible, the minister was certain that the millennium would arrive no later than that spring day, when melting snow often still blankets the woods of the preacher’s native upstate New York.

Cultists doomsday clock

At the height of his movement there were numerous Millerites across the United States, with some historians estimating that believers may have numbered close to half a million. When the appointed March 21st came and passed without the breaking of the seals, the blowing of Gabriel’s trumpet, or the appearance of Christ in the heavens, both former believers and the press called the anticlimactic non-apocalypse “The Great Disappointment.” Miller’s error, however, did not lead to the dissolution of Milleritism, for those who still kept the faith were quickly able to proffer explanations as to why their leader hadn’t been in error, though with plain eye it was obvious that the world hadn’t ended.

Miller was by all accounts a pious and steadfast man, a veteran of the War of 1812, and a decent, patriotic minister who upon his conversion remarked with genuine religious fervor that his entire countenance should be transfixed upon that “Being so good and compassionate as to Himself atone for our transgressions, and thereby save us from suffering the penalty of sin.” 

As a diverse and complicated movement, the Second Great Awakening encompassed a variety of beliefs, not just the crackpot sort that we associate with apocalyptic cults, but decent politically progressive ones as well. Which is all just to say that neither Miller nor his followers had much in common with one Donald J. Trump.

Save for a particular thing, perhaps a quality implicit in all cults – a complete and utter disregard for the contours of objective reality. In his book Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire, author Kurt Andersen argues that such irrationality is not just a phenomenon born of human psychology, but that it is particularly implicit in the American national character. He identifies the tendency of “letting the subjective entirely override the objective, [and] people thinking and acting as if opinions and feelings were just as true as facts” as being characteristic of American “magical thinking, anything-goes relativism, and belief in fanciful explanations, small and large fantasies that console or thrill or terrify us.” In that regard, there is a common characteristic between Miller’s followers waiting for the world to end and Trump’s followers seeing him “Make America Great Again,” holding to their faith regardless of all evidence to the contrary.

Awash in declarations that anything unfavorable is “fake news,” as if such a mantra could nullify all that his supporters don’t like, pining with eschatological yearning for the moment when America will be made “great again,” and policing the contours of national “purity,” Trumpism is far from a benign cult, but rather the most dangerous and destabilizing movement in the world today. For the most extreme of his partisans, “American greatness” is a millennial moment, with some factions of the far-right referring to their messianic president as the “Emperor God.” By all appearances, as we approach the mid-point of Trump’s second year in office, that is what Trumpism has become – a millenarian personality cult which invests its leader with an arbitrary, relativistic authority where he can define “truth” as being whatever he says it is, which psychologically justifies all manner of transparently corrupt and malignant policies embraced by his adherents.

Such a diagnosis was made by Greg Grandin in The Nation last January, who upon analyzing Trump supporters’ unwillingness to ever condemn any aspect of the administration, or to explain away the myriad inconsistencies in thought and behavior exhibited by the president, as being hallmarks of extremist religion. Grandin explains that “Trumpism is a death cult.” Don’t take this as the assessment of another liberal with so-called “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” None other than Republican Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee, who was an early supporter of Trump, argues much the same thing, as reported by Jordan Carney in The Hill on Wednesday that “We are in a strange place. I mean, it’s almost, it’s becoming a cultish thing, isn’t it? And it’s not a good place for any party to end up with a cult-like situation.” If that doesn’t strike you, then consider the president’s own son, Donald Trump Jr., who in response to Senator Corker’s accusation bragged to the hosts of Fox and Friends that if their movement is a “cult it’s because they like what my father is doing.”

Certainly, any number of politicians in U.S. history, from across the political divide, have inspired a fervency among their most devoted supporters. Charisma, oratory, and choreographed political theater all contributed to the mythmaking which bolstered the support of John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama. However, the current situation departs from those earlier examples because the most committed enthusiasts for those previous figures supported them due to their political positions, not in spite of them. As such there was a tethering to objective reality that the hard-core fringe of Trumpists have abandoned. While most people will rationalize away their favored politicians’ inconsistencies, the majority of Trump supporters seem to completely overlook not only his deviations from conservative orthodoxy (which could at least be offered as an explanation for his initial support), but his relentless, dizzying flip-flops on his own positions as well.

To borrow from the president’s own anemic vocabulary, consider the “tremendous” example of how with whip-lash alacrity he’s gone from condemning North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un as “little rocket man” to now appraising him as a “very talented” young man who “loves his country.” Most worryingly, and maybe with a bit of envy, Trump stated that Kim’s “people love him,” perhaps thinking of the terrifying and obviously staged mass pageants in North Korea. If we were only reflecting on a politician being inconsistent in rhetoric that would be one thing, and even if we were only still discussing the foreign policy contradictions that allowed the administration to abandon the relatively strict Iranian nuclear deal while embracing a flimsy agreement with Kim that gets nothing while conceding much, we could simply chalk that up to Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s exceeding amateurishness.

Where we do see intimations of a cult are in the right-wing media’s reaction to the Singapore photo-op, with Fox News correspondent Sandra Smith attacking Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida for his criticism of Kim, asking the senator if his condemnation of one of the most murderous tyrants on Earth was actually “about the president.” In just a few months we’ve gone from threatening to reign down “fire and fury” on North Korea to our equivalent of state-run media defending that country’s Stalinist regime, all because Trump happens to like Kim after they got lunch together. Cliché often has the ring of truth, so I’ll say without too much critical embarrassment that the whole thing has a whiff of Orwell about it.

Something has been fermenting within the more extreme currents of contemporary American conservatism for a while, something that in Trumpism seems to finally be metastasizing into a full-on political cult. That the hallmarks of this particular cult, Trumpism’s casual cruelty, valorization of garish commercialism, and vulgarity seem a far cry from the sorts of millenarian, communal groups we associate with periods like the 19th century Second Great Awakening religious revivals is of no accounting. Rather the death cult that is Trumpism has completely subsumed the GOP, so that now the standard bearers for the party of Lincoln are men like Corey Stewart, the Minnesota-born Confederate apologist and avowed white supremacist who was selected as Virginia’s GOP candidate for the U.S. Senate, and Representative Steve King of Iowa, who unapologetically retweeted a prominent British neo-Nazi last week.

There is a disingenuousness among moderate Republicans who cynically brainwashed the bulk of their supporters with Fox News conspiracies for the better part of a generation only to now find themselves actually governed by the sorts of folks who believe those theories. At Esquire, Charles Pierce makes the important point that the cultist perspective of Trump supporters has been inculcated on the right for a very long time. The disregard for the truth, the defense of anything no matter how heinous, the dehumanization of marginalized people – all of this runs so deep and for so long that at The New Republic last month Kevin Baker made a credible argument that it’ll take truth and reconciliation committees for our nation to sort out the disarray in which we find ourselves.

What is there to be done in the meantime? Conservative Never Trumpers not only have a role, they have a responsibility in grappling with the fruits of a cynical legacy that allowed Trump to come to power. The rest of us are tasked with every legal means to remove the president and his supporters from their positions of power. What we must contend with is that we’re dealing with not a traditional political adversary, but a death cult. Good faith liberals who hold that dialogue and rational argumentation will somehow convince the hard-core of Trump’s supporters that they’re wrong are motivated by a stunning naivety. They’d do well to keep in mind the observation of the religious studies scholar Richard Landes, who observed that “millennial grand narratives carry an elating coherence that skeptical dismissals cannot hope to touch, and even postmodernism does not escape.” He explains that millennial conspiratorial worldviews “are the mother of all grand narratives,” and so for Trump’s most extreme supporters there is no evidence that can be presented to make them reconsider their positions.

It is, of course, a moral duty to engage our fellow citizens in dialogue, but the hope that such discourse will convert hardcore Trump supporters in any great number is a strategically losing proposition. If some Trump voters should realize their error then all the better, but the most important legal and political goal of the Democratic party must be both getting out the vote for likely supporters and ensuring that those who want to and can vote are able to do so. Diverging resources from that goal in the hopes of convincing people who can’t be convinced that they’re wrong would be a profound misstep.

Trump may be distant in demeanor and theology from the preachers and founders of intentional communities which marked that earlier period in American history, but he’s developing a cult which denies objective reality as fully as Miller’s partisans awaiting to greet Christ on his return one warm day in 1844. If anything, it’s the particular fusion of fundamentalist Protestantism, predatory capitalism, and P.T. Barnum-style confidence man grift that makes Trumpism such a particularly American malignant faith. We should scarcely be shocked that he’s arrived, all the dark currents of our culture have predicted him from the beginning.