No U.S. presidential election in the last 40 years engaged its voters with religion, precisely Christian faith, as seriously as the 2024 election, scheduled for Tuesday, November 5.
Two elections ago, in 2016, Republican Donald Trump, did receive a furious reaction from Christian leaders over his alleged sexcapades, but their opinion apparently did not matter. Trump won the election and became the president. The perception of Christian leaders, who view Trump as a ‘sinner’, has kept them away from voting over the last two elections.
According to Ben Carson, famed neurosurgeon, who took to politics, 20 million evangelical Christians did not cast their vote in the last election. “ Most of the close elections in the states,” Carson told a meeting of religious leaders in North Carolina, “were determined by a few thousand votes.” He told people to recognise and execute their responsibility by voting.
Carson, who is rooting for Trump, said, “I know there are a lot of Christians who say both sides are corrupt and I don’t want to be involved in a corrupt system, I don’t want to have to choose between two evils. Well, unless Jesus Christ is on the ballot, you are always choosing the lesser of the two.”
That Carson’s words had a great impact is evident. Five days after his address, religious leaders demonstrated their support for Trump with a public prayer and blessing session in Powder Springs, Georgia.
The religious leaders’ support for Trump, in many ways, is circumstantial. In the new America of the last decade and more, where there has been a frenzy around transgenderism and now over pre-puberty sex change operations in a strong section of society, and where politics itself is being defined by support or opposition to these issues, there is a powerful counter reaction, not just from social leaders, scientists and parents, but also from religious leaders.
The sub-culture of anti-machoism/ same sex relationships, that started in 1969, has grown to be a cult. Not being ‘straight’, far from being a taboo, is the ‘in’ thing today. Attended upon by the market forces, trends feed out-of-the-box thinking and behaviour as well as feeding off them, creating a lot of confusion and chaos, especially in young minds and bodies.
A few years ago, I was horrified to read an interview with music icon Michael Jackson’s daughter, Paris Jackson, in which she casually gave explicit details of her sexual alliances with transgender and other partners. The 11-year-old crying on stage after the tragic loss of her father in 2009 was heart-breaking, but the interview of the adult Paris was a reminder of a lot more suffering endured by her.
Reducing individualism to the body level, as many American liberals and celebrities have done, has a terrible downside, especially when it becomes a cult. The Newton’s law of every action having an equal and opposite reaction comes into play, and that is what we are witnessing in the American presidential election.
Faith leaders, not just Christian, but also Jew and Muslim, are revolted by the Democratic Party’s endorsement of the sexualising of pre-puberty children through sex change operations.
Compared to what they have to fight now, their struggle for an anti-abortion legislation must seem easy. In fact, even when they are sure that Trump, if elected, would veto the anti-abortion law (he said it on record, and wife Melania , in her media interview a fortnight ago, emphatically supported bodily autonomy for women), the religious leaders are telling their followers to support Trump.
The religious leaders find the drum-beating and aggressive LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) community scary. They would rather not see life come into being than a fully grown boy or girl go through a neurotic identity crisis under the influence, as they look at it, of the devil.
Tens of thousands of Christians gathered on the National Mall in Washington DC on October 12–to pray for “America’s atonement and for Trump’s victory.” The organisers described the gathering as the ‘Last Stand Moment’ to save the nation from the forces of darkness. There sure is a devil scare in the 2024 presidential poll.
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