November 8: The Day Christians Changed America
September 06, 2017 - FAMILY RESEARCH COUNCIL
It hasn't even been a year since conservative evangelicals helped put Donald Trump in the White House.
Now, 10 months later, the movement is dead?
That's the amazing assertion of Robert Jones, who writes in USA Today that evangelicals are "fading" and "grieving their losses." In a column at odds with everything pundits have said about the growing influence of the politically-engaged church, Jones suggests there's been a "desperate end-of-life bargain" between the movement and the man they propelled to an historic, come-from-behind victory.
"White evangelicals have clearly seen Trump's presidency as a possible way to stave off changes that would constitute the real end of an era where their cultural worldview held sway."
That's interesting, George Barna would say, since his data points to the astounding impact evangelicals played in the 2016 election.
An impact, his science would show, that can be described in a lot of ways – but "dwindling" is not one of them. Of course, these premature death notices are as old as the evangelical movement itself. I wrote about them more than 10 years ago in my book with Bishop Harry Jackson, Personal Faith, Public Policy.
"With almost-predictable regularity, headlines heralded the so-called waning influence of evangelicals and their splintering unity. With each election cycle, hope sprung anew in editorial rooms and political back offices that this would be the year the Religious Right's strength would begin to fade. Some observers even had the audacity to actively explore what American politics would look like once the Religious Right was gone."
Even they conceded the Religious Right was anything but gone after evangelicals were the defining factor in a race that two weeks earlier looked like a Hillary Clinton runaway.
Months later, Barna, Executive Director of the American Culture and Faith Institute, is determined to prove why people like Jones are wrong.
In a new book, The Day Christians Changed America: How Christian Conservatives Put Trump in the White House and Redirected America's Future, he argues that the "March of the SAGE Cons" (Spiritually Active, Governance Engaged Conservative Christians) is far from over.
"The thing that impressed me the most," he says, "was the degree to which faith played a significant role in the campaign and the outcome.
It was a story that has not been told, and because of my research, consulting, and relationships related to the race, I had a unique vantage point.
The faith narrative deserves to be told.
You cannot understand the outcome unless you grasp the many ways that faith was intertwined in every facet of the election."
I encourage you to buy a copy of the book -- or, even better, have George Barna sign it at this year's Values Voters Summit. He'll be speaking, along with jam-packed line-up of conservatives who believe -- like we do -- that the evangelical movement is alive and well!
Tony Perkins' Washington Update is written with the aid of FRC senior writers.
My comments: It remains to be seen if Christians have the Endurance to Keep Up The Fight. The LEFT controls most of the Institutions in American Culture, and this cannot remain, if America is to have a Future, before the Living God.
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