It's not especially ironic that sexual predator and felonious con man Donald "Rump" Trump's most devoted supporters are right-wing white evangelicals. They're committed to turning this country's culture and laws back six or seven decades, undermining women's rights and voting rights for African-Americans, and they're deeply hypocritical enough to ditch their supposed "Christian beliefs" to support a libertine crime family boss if he delivers on those goals. Just look at some of their elite leaders who've lied, cheated and stolen: Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, Robert Tilton, etc. White evangelicals were also unquestioning supporters of the depraved accused child predator Roy Moore in his run for the Senate in Alabama, and so on. With political pastors like Jerry Falwell, Jr., Franklin Graham and Robert Jeffress pushing a clearly corrupt Rump on their followers, they've cast their lot, as have the money-worshiping "prosperity Gospel" hucksters exemplified by Rump's "preacher" Paula White.
Unfortunately for these corrupt Bible thumpers, demographics matter. There's evidence that younger members of evangelical churches are abandoning their elders over their embrace of Rump and their extreme stands on social issues. White evangelical Protestants, 80% of whom supported Rump in 2016, have declined as part of the population from 21% in 2003 to 13% in 2017. As older evangelicals die off, the younger cohort appears less tied to the hard-right political agenda favored by their senior leadership.
More and more Americans are walking away from religion, with 21 percent saying that they have no religion, nearly double from 2003. With more people exiting their mega-churches, the political pastors can see their extremely lucrative incomes dropping in the future, and they've bet some of that money on the Trump golden calf to reverse the trend, one which Rump is causing. It won't work in the long run.
(photo: The odor of sulphur was everywhere as the pastors prayed over the golden calf.)
