10 May 2016

The New York Times: Is This the End of the Religious Right?

Deliberately or not, Mr. Trump may be the perfect candidate for an evangelical subculture that has increasingly become enamored with the prosperity, or health and wealth, gospel. In trying to build a singular religious faction that agreed on some core issues (like abortion), the Republican Party has courted that subculture, even though many evangelicals consider prosperity theology to be heretical. Mr. Trump acts more like a televangelist than an evangelical.

Although Ted Cruz used the traditional religious right playbook to win in Iowa, Mr. Trump’s subsequent successes in beating Mr. Cruz among evangelicals — including across wide sections of the Bible Belt — demonstrated that many Republican voters, and even many evangelical Republicans, were more swept up in Trump-style nativist culture wars than battles over abortion, marriage or, especially, bathrooms. Mr. Trump understood he could unite nativists and culture warriors using his diatribes against political correctness as an all-purpose code to stoke conservative resentments.

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