Woodznutz
Platinum Member
- Dec 9, 2021
- 18,033
- 8,492
- 473
Trump would have gotten their vote anyway...lesser of evils.'Religion is a cheap shorthand for tribal allegiance, but it also has the power to distract from important issues that actually affect governance....Reagan revived Nixon's Watergate distractor and did so early, when he accepted the Republican nomination for president in 1980:
"I'll confess that I've been a little afraid to suggest what I'm going to suggest - I'm more afraid not to - that we begin our crusade joined together in a moment of prayer.
[about ten seconds of silence] God bless America."
Reagan's supplications is now standard practice for every president. With this speech, Reagan inaugurated a modern strain of Christian nationalism.
Madison wrote that "religion and government will both exist in greater purity, the less they are mixed together." Indeed, Madison's writing is a prescient warning about Donald Trump.
Like Eisenhower's, Trump's personal religion seemed to appear alongside his political ambitions.....Lawrence O'Donnell wrote some dialogue in The West Wing that captures the point perfectly: "And I want to warn everyone in the press and all the voters out there: if you demand expressions of religious faith from politicians, you are just begging to be lied to....And it will be the easiest lie they ever had to tell to get your votes." Voters are not just asking to be lied to, they are demanding it.
Trump was simply exploiting religion, casting it about like a net to snare voters.'
(Seidel, The Founding Myth, pp. 291-2)
Madison never divulged that precisely because of this church-state purity, two prepositions are required to reveal the obvious Constitutional mistake: freedom of and freedom from, religion. There is no purity of State without the second preposition.