On Christmas Eve, the Washington Post published a report by Sarah Pullian Bailey about the civil war inside American evangelism sparked by the now widely-know Christianity Today editorial on the Trump’s immorality and unfitness to serve in office (including an unambiguous call to the Senate to remove him from office). It was read by millions of Christians and was debated on radio and TV talk shows. Trump called the magazine, “left-wing” but the cancellation of subscriptions by his Jesus-denying followers was overwhelmed by new subscriptions, presumably by Christians who agree with their premise.
Journalist Napp Nazworth, who has worked for the Christian Post website since 2011, said he quit his job Monday because the website was planning to publish a pro-Trump editorial that would slam Christianity Today. Nazworth, who sits on the editorial board as politics editor, said the website has sought to represent both sides and published both pro- and anti-Trump stories.“I never got the gist they were gung-ho Trumpian types,” Nazworth said. “Everything has escalated with the Christianity Today editorial.”Nazworth, who has been critical of Trump and suggested leaders who supported him have “traded their moral authority,” said he doesn’t know what he will do next.“I said, if you post this, you’re saying, you’re now on team Trump,” he said. He said he was told that’s what the news outlet wanted to do.“I’m just shocked that they would go this path,” he said, adding that even though he felt “forced” to make the decision to quit, the parting was a mutual agreement between him and the outlet.…Since the editorial, many Trump supporters have decried Christianity Today as irrelevant and even “elite.” On Sunday, 200 evangelical leaders and other Trump supporters issued a letter slamming the publication. It was signed by many on the president’s evangelical advisory committee, pastors of Pentecostal and Southern Baptist churches, and Christian musicians such as Brian and Jenn Johnson and Michael Tait. Other evangelical leaders published a letter in support of the magazine on Tuesday.Dalrymple said Monday that the magazine has lost 2,000 subscriptions but gained 5,000, with the latter coming from a younger, more diverse and more global audience.“We don’t like to lose anyone,” he said. “We need to stay in conversation with one another even when we disagree.”Dalrymple, who wrote a piece Sunday about the editorial, said editors have received an “enormous outpouring of notes and messages speaking in deeply emotional terms about their gratitude.”“Clearly, there was a profound yearning for some evangelical institution or leader to stand up and say these things,” Dalrymple said. “One of the most consistent phrases was ‘stay strong.’ People had rallied to the flag, and they were afraid we would abandon them, afraid we’d buckle under the pressure and bend the knee, and then their disillusionment would be even worse than before.”...Even the children and grandchildren of the late evangelist Billy Graham, who founded Christianity Today, appear divided over the editorial on social media.Exit polls from the 2016 election showed that 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump. An NPR-PBS NewsHour-Marist poll from this month found that 75 percent of white evangelicals approved of Trump, compared with 42 percent of Americans overall.Among the small number of prominent evangelical leaders who have openly opposed Trump, many, like Galli, are retired or planning to retire soon. The group includes Minnesota pastor John Piper, who has called the president “unqualified,” and Texas pastor Max Lucado, who said in 2016 that Trump didn’t pass a “decency test.” Spokespeople for Piper and Lucado said they were not available Monday.Doug Birdsall, an evangelical leader who gathered a group of influential institutional leaders at Wheaton College last year to discuss the Trump era’s impact on the evangelical movement, said his decision to hold the event has affected him personally. Birdsall, who is honorary chair of Lausanne, an international movement of evangelicals that was started by Billy Graham, raised $21 million for a gathering of evangelicals in Cape Town, South Africa, in 2010 for “a congress on reconciliation.” Now, he said, many of those donors are alienated from him. He said he has had to self-fund some ministry work he’s doing using $400,000 in savings and home equity.“I think people have been waiting for someone of [Christianity Today’s] stature to say something,” Birdsall said. “I think Mark’s piece inspires others to be courageous.”
Obviously, evangelical Christians aren’t the only Americans facing internal dissension over Trump. Alex Henderson, writing for Alternet, also on Christmas Eve, noted that “The conservative movement in the United States used to pride itself on having intellectuals like George Will and the late National Review founder William F. Buckley, who spoke with a posh Mid-Atlantic accent that sounded quasi-British. But these days, many right-wing politicians and media figures champion a certain anti-intellectualism-- and journalist Christian Schneider, in an article for the conservative website The Bulwark, notes that some Republicans go out of their way to butcher the English language even if they have Ivy League educations. ‘Saying Democrat instead of Democratic has become a shibboleth-- a verbal handshake to signal that you’re on Team Red Hat,’ Schneider explains. ‘It’s about as annoying as people rolling their r’s when ordering a burrito to prove they once vacationed in Cozumel. But whatever. Triggering Democrats has become so important to Republicans that they’re willing to assault the English language if the people who like good grammar are the bad guys.’ Schneider observes that saying Democrat Party instead of Democratic Party ‘doesn’t make sense on any linguistic level’ because ‘Democrat’ is a noun and ‘Democratic’ is an adjective-- and ‘one should not use one in place of the other,’ he writes.”
“Low-key shittiness is now a rite of passage for calling yourself a Republican,” Schneider writes. “And with a tidal wave of nonsense coming from the right on a daily basis, it’s impossible to correct the micro-idiocies. And so, here we are.”
Bernie grew up in my neighborhood and comes from a family very much like mine. Although he’s got a few years on me, we went to the same elementary school and the same high school. That background makes me feel like I know him-- much more than the couple of times I’ve actually spoken with him. His adherence to democratic socialism is the same ideology I learned from my grandfather. Journalist Dave Lindorff is around our age as well, and he wrote this week about how frustrated and disappointed he is that people in our age group are shying away from Bernie’s idealism and gravitating to the calculated conservatism of career-long corporate whore, Status Quo Joe Biden. Or worse-- “Mike Bloomberg or some other ossified mainstream Democratic pol. Speaking as a 70-year-old Baby Boomer myself, and increasingly an admirer of Sanders, I gotta ask: OK Boomers, what's happened to you?”He asks his readers to “Think back: What were you doing back in the late 1960s when you were in your teens or early 20s as the Civil Rights Movement was finally winning the right to vote for Black people, when the Vietnam War was raging and classmates of yours were coming home in body bags? Where were you when President Nixon in 1970 urged Ohio Republican Governor James Rhodes to send the Ohio National Guard onto the Kent State Campus to put down a student protest against his illegal invasion of Cambodia, expanding an ugly war to yet another country, and the ‘heroic’ guardsmen shot and killed four unarmed students? Where were you when we were all shattering the walls of prudery, experimenting with sex, the mind-freeing wonders of marijuana and yes, even LSD? Where were you as women and their male supporters suddenly stood tall and said that just having the vote wasn't enough; they demanded equality with men on the job, in the home, in politics and in their relationships? … [W]e were,” he added, “for the most part I would argue, happier and freer than we are today.”
Somehow, in the intervening years since the victory of the Vietnamese over the country's US invaders, the impeachment hearings and resignation of Nixon, the end of the draft, passage of the Voting Rights Act and creation of Medicare and Medicaid, and the at least partial liberation of women, we've lost our way. We got married, raised families, fretted over the size of the IRA and 401(k) plans we and our weakened trade unions if we still had them, were forced to rely on instead of the real pensions workers in an age of stronger unions used to have. And even worse, we became consumers instead of people, morphing into better-off versions of our own parents. Some of us even became Republicans or Neo-liberal Democrats, worried more about our own gain than about those who were being left behind or crushed by what we used to call the "System," and ignoring what our nation was and still is doing to the world.During all these intervening years, as we've lost our way, Bernie Sanders has stayed the course. Four years too old to be officially a Baby Boomer, Sanders, born in 1941, hails from that demographic cohort that, during the Nixon years, to its undying disgrace, came to be known, and even to self-identify, as the Silent Generation consisting of those born between the wars or during WWII. Sanders, though, has never been silent. He protested and faced arrest as a student defending the rights of American blacks and opposed both US apartheid and the Vietnam War. He then entered politics as a socialist, winning election as mayor of Burlington, VT (which under his leadership become known jokingly as "the People's Republic of Burlington" " and admiringly as one of the best US cities to live in). Later he moved on to Congress, first as a representative and then as the state's junior senator-- a position he still holds.Bernie Sanders, my fellow Boomers, is the person we had intended to be as we grew older and wiser: Obstinate and outspoken defenders of the downtrodden, rejectors of consumerism, and advocates of the notion that we all are better off when we demand that government help those who are the neediest, not those who are the most wealthy and powerful. Sanders may have on occasion failed to remember our Edwin Starr mantra "War: What is it good for? Absolutely Nothin!," but he seems to be coming around to that view again in this race for the presidency.We Boomers as a group need to do the same. In fact, those of us who are not supporting Sanders in this coming election year need to do some soul searching about who we really are and what we really stand for.Maybe my insurance plan (at a significant cost) is really great, but that is no reason for me to oppose expanded and improved Medicare for All as proposed by Sen. Sanders. Not only would Medicare for All cost me a lot less than I pay now for healthcare coverage, but with Medicare for All I would know that everyone else in this nation-- all my fellow citizens-- would have the same access to free high-quality health care as me.Maybe if the government subsidized the installation of point-of-use electrical generating equipment (wind, geothermal or solar panels) on all US homes, I'd be paying higher taxes, but our air would be vastly cleaner, our cars would all be electric and virtually cost-free to drive, and we'd no longer have power bills from climate-change-inducing and pollution-causing power plant operator. A Green New Deal that promises to find jobs for those displaced by the urgent shutdown of greenhouse gas polluters, as advocated by Sanders, even if jarring for some, would be good for everyone.If we ended our national imperial policy of endless wars and slashed military spending, maybe the U.S. military and the arms industry would lay off a lot of people, but Americans would be viewed a lot better by the rest of the world, and our nation would be able to spend a trillion dollars a year or more in productive rather than destructive ways-- like engaging in a crash program to save the earth from human-caused mass extinction.When we were younger and more idealistic, we always talked about "peace, love and understanding," remember? Now we talk about Russiagate, Trump, terrorism, the next recession, how or when we're going to retire, and our next Caribbean cruise.I'm not sure how it happened, but we as a generation have lost our way and our soul. We urgently need to "get back, get back, get back to where we once belonged."Bernie's been there all along, and now we need to not just support but to join him. We don't want or need a corporate lacky and banker's best friend like Joe Biden who was opposing busing while Bernie was joining anti-discrimination sit-ins, and who came up with the racist and classist idea of mass incarceration that has made the US the nation with the most people in jail in the world. Nor do we want or need a guy like Michael Bloomberg who as Mayor of New York saw his wealth grow from $4.6 billion to $36.7 billion, and who, when he was in charge of that city's struggling public college system, the City University of New York, chose to donate $1.8 billion not to CUNY but to Johns Hopkins, a wealthy private university in Baltimore with a $3-billion endowment at that time! And we don't want or need a guy like Pete Buttigieg who is backed by dozens of billionaire capitalists, and who spent his formative years working for firm, McKinsey, that makes its profits by advising companies on how to ditch massive numbers of their workers, and who calls for sending the U.S. troops into Mexico!…Now, I hear all the time when I mention Sanders to people my age-- generally liberal Democrats-- that Sanders "has no chance to win," that his socialist ideas like Medicare for All are "too far left for most voters," and that he's "a one- or at best two-issue candidate: Medicare for All and break up the banks." Meanwhile, the media are now claiming, on the basis of ignorance about the UK and of lazy thinking, that the drubbing of Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party on Dec. 12 is "a warning" for Democrats not to nominate a left-wing presidential candidate. So let me address these erroneous tropes. First of all, Sanders has been a combination of viciously attacked, ignored and/or misrepresented by the corporate media, and especially the liberal media. MSNBC has actually misstated his poll standing repeatedly. The New York Times has written more about Bloomberg (polling 0-1%) and Yang (polling 5% at best) lately than about Sanders who is in the lead in California polls and in second place or even leading in nationwide in some national polls. Don't believe me? Check out Real Clear Politics, which runs poll averages instead of just single polls. Don't think the media are being unfair in their reporting on Sanders? The LA Times actually was forced a few weeks ago by massive reader protests to correct a headline that said Warren and Biden were losing ground in California, but failed to mention that it was Sanders who was taking the lead!The truth is, Sanders is leading or gaining ground in the primaries nationally and in key states like South Carolina, California and Florida. Also true is that he is speaking not just to progressives, but to the core working class voters who abandoned the Democratic Party and voted for Trump last time. I saw this at work in 2016 driving through upstate NY in small towns where everyone is either Republican or independent but typically conservative, but where many, many people also depend upon Medicaid or lately, the ACA if they have jobs, to pay for their medical care. During the 2016 Democratic primary, the area sported lots of Sanders signs on lawns and bumpers. After Clinton won that primary, the signs and bumper stickers upstate switched to Trump or to "Lock her up!" signs. That should tell you all you need to know.As for my leftist friends who think Sanders is too squishy and liberal, check out his enemies: Virtually the entire mass media, Mayor Bloomberg, the $56-billion Man who joined the race for president fearing that the party might, god forbid, nominate an anti-capitalist like Sanders or and anti-billionaire like Elizabeth Warren. Remember two things: A candidate can be defined best by the enemies he or she makes, and perfection in a candidate means election failure.Sanders in 2020!
