Renewable Revolution

Robert Harrington | 12:12 pm EDT October 10, 2018

Palmer Report » Analysis

When last year CNN fired sometime commentator and full time religious studies scholar Reza Aslan for tweeting that Donald Trump was a “piece of s h i t,” one was left to wonder if it was because he employed a profanity in describing the President of the United States, or merely because he committed the journalistic heresy of stating the obvious. Whichever it was, one cannot also help but wonder if CNN knew not what it did. For it was also about that time that Aslan put his perspicacious finger on the not-so-obvious reasons why “the Donald” has gathered unto himself so rabid a following, and how, after all this time, that following appears to have remained bafflingly loyal.

The good news is the aforementioned following we are concerned with here is at least confined to the pulpits and pews of white fundamentalist Christians. Were it not for Aslan, the question of why Trump should gain such popularity with such a group might remain an ostensible head scratcher. But for this recipe for Dragon Stew, Aslan actually provides us with a plausible dragon: Donald Trump is a religious cult.

That cult comes compliments of something called “the prosperity gospel.” The idea goes that the more righteous a man is, the more God blesses him with material wealth. Trump’s ostentatious trappings of wealth are the obvious proof that God must think Trump a pretty groovy guy.

Some of the cynical among us noticed that “the prosperity gospel” started to appear right around the same time that the dorsal fins of the big-haired, Rolex-wearing televangelists started to cut the water. Mansions needed sanctification, luxury cars and private jets required the consecration of Elijah’s chariots of fire. The prosperity gospel gave the perfect fit.


“But none of this … explains the most important phenomenon about white evangelicals in America,” Aslan says, “and that is this: In the span of a single election cycle, white evangelicals have gone from being the group in America that is most likely to say that a politician’s morality matters to the group that is now least likely to say that.”


In other words, the cult of personality surrounding Donald Trump has managed in a single election cycle to convince good people that doing bad things is okay. The last time we witnessed a phenomenon like that was when a community of Americans settled in a little regarded country called Guyana led by a little known evangelical named Jim Jones. This time the stakes are much, much higher.

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Robert Harrington  is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.

https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/prosperity-gospel-donald-trump/13333/

Agelbert NOTE: The Heretical Doctrine of Demons called "Prosperity Preaching" (a principle tenet of the Antinomian Christian Heretical teaching), that the pseudo-Christians in the USA are enthralled with, is thousands of years old.

an·ti·no·mi·an
[an-ti- noh-mee- uhn]

NOUN

a person who maintains that Christians are freed from the moral law by virtue of grace as set forth in the gospel.

I have a deceased brother-in-law who worshipped monetary wealth above any Christian duty to help the disadvantaged and poor of this world. He thought it was A-OKAY to be GREEDY, as his wife (my sister, also a Mammon worshipping Pseudo-Christian) still, unfortunately for her, does.

In the Epistle II Peter in the New Testament, Peter addresses the Antinomians who claimed to be Christians. These Heretics were defined by their insistance that it was okay to sin to get more money and wantonly engage in just about any worldly lust they wanted to engage in based on a deliberate twisting of the Holy Scripture (SEE Paul: "We are saved by Grace, not works"). 

Peter makes it crystal clear that claiming to be a Christian and chasing money, comfort, power and the lusts of the flesh is HERESY. Anyone practicing it is doomed to perdition, period.

II PETER 2: 17-22

17  These are wells without water, clouds that are carried with a tempest; to whom the mist of darkness is reserved for ever. 18  For when they speak great swelling words of vanity, they allure through the lusts of the flesh, through much wantonness, those that were clean [5] escaped from them who live in error. 19  While they promise them liberty, they themselves are the servants of corruption: for of whom a man is overcome, of the same is he brought in bondage. 20  For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning. 21  For it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known it, to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them. 22  But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog is turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire.