In recent weeks, the Trump administration has plunged into fights long sought by the religious right, issuing a 25-page memo bolstering legal protections for people of faith, rolling back employers’ requirement for birth-control coverage and reversing a policy that included LGBT employees under US anti-discrimination law.
“I pledged that, in a Trump administration, our nation’s religious heritage would be cherished, protected, and defended like you have never seen before,” President Donald Trump said at a Values Voter Summit in Washington. “That’s what’s happening… We are stopping cold the attacks on Judeo-Christian values.”
Overall, the Trump administration has revved up the culture wars, much like his predecessor President Obama, but from the opposite point of view. He is appealing to religious conservatives and recalling elements of President Ronald Reagan’s administration which emphasized positions against abortion rights and for school prayer, and, in one of his Justice Department’s first moves, sought tax-exempt status for the fundamentalist Christian Bob Jones University in South Carolina, despite allegations that its policies are racially discriminatory.
As candidates, both Trump in 2016 and Reagan in 1980, won office with significant support from white religious conservatives. Trump, however, drew a greater percentage and now seems even more intent on catering to that constituency. “Bureaucrats think they can run your lives, overrule your values, meddle in your faith, and tell you how to live, what to say, and how to pray,” he asserted on Friday, vowing to enhance religious interests.
Trump’s emphasis will likely shape his policy efforts in upcoming months. His administration is working to reverse a tax-code provision preventing churches from endorsing politicians, withdraw federal funding from Planned Parenthood, and engage in legal disputes against LGBT people claiming bias and in favor of Christian individuals or entities who say, for example, that they are being excluded from secular aid programs or have been penalized for declining to serve gay customers.
In 2016, according to CNN polling, Trump won 61% of white Catholics, compared with Hillary Clinton’s 37%. Trump won 80% of the white evangelical voters, compared to Clinton’s 16%. In 1980, Reagan took 52% of white Catholics to Carter’s 39%. Trends for evangelicals were not documented in 1980, yet Reagan was plainly helped to the White House by groups such the Moral Majority, founded by Baptist minister Jerry Falwell — whose namesake son became an early and enthusiastic supporter of Trump in 2016.
Much of Trump’s evangelical support last year appeared to derive not from who he is but rather who he was not: Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. That was the posture of Richard Land, president of Southern Evangelical Seminary in North Carolina. Trump was his “18th choice” (17 candidates) among the Republican field (he favored Florida Sen. Marco Rubio), but Land found himself joining Trump’s evangelical executive advisory board and then being “pleasantly surprised” by his actions on religion since his January inauguration. Like Trump, Land believes religious conservatives are under siege in America today. He praised the President for the move to exempt more employers, based on religious objections, from the contraceptive insurance-coverage requirement of the Affordable Care Act. “I think he likes us,” Land said, referring to evangelical Christians. “I don’t think he is just using us… I don’t think he was ever around evangelicals very much until he ran for president… We’re not exactly thick on the ground in Manhattan or Queens.” Land also said he is heartened by the presence of Vice President Mike Pence, a former Indiana governor and congressman long identified with the religious right.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, another forceful presence for conservative Christians in the administration, issued the 25-page October 6 memo designed to protect “religious observance and practice” in employment, contracting and other areas. It would enhance the ability of employers and others claiming a religious objection — for example, to hire or serve a gay person — to win exemptions from anti-discrimination law.
Liberals spin Trump’s actions as hostile to freedom or religion. “Trump’s action and policies turn religious liberty on its head,” said Daniel Mach, director of the ACLU Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief. “Through his Muslim [travel] ban, the president has shown outright hostility toward an entire faith. At the same time, his administration has embraced the deeply troubling idea that religious freedom is a blank check to discriminate and to harm others.”
These sorts of sentiments stoke further separation of left and right in an already polarized nation. Stoking the religious right too hard might even end up restricting some forms of religious liberty. For instance, lifting the so-called Johnson Amendment with bars nonprofit organizations from endorsing or opposing candidates, such as turning houses of worship into “partisan outposts,” said Holly Hollman, legal counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. Making such a move could eventually give evangelicals so much power that they would seek to force America to comply with worship laws, such as observance of Sunday, something predicted in Revelation 13.
Mr. Trump has certainly engaged the culture wars, and is attempting to restore more traditional understandings of religious liberty, though it is in the context of big cultural changes in America over the last decade.
“The dignitaries of church and state will unite to bribe, persuade, or compel all classes to honor the Sunday. The lack of divine authority will be supplied by oppressive enactments. Political corruption is destroying love of justice and regard for truth; and even in free America, rulers and legislators, in order to secure public favor, will yield to the popular demand for a law enforcing Sunday observance. Liberty of conscience, which has cost so great a sacrifice, will no longer be respected.” The Great Controversy, page 592.
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