(1) White Evangelical Leaders Already Distancing Themselves from the “81-Percenters” |Religion Dispatches
On Election Day, exit polls indicated that 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump. …Still, some evangelical leaders are challenging these findings. “No, the Majority of American Evangelicals Did Not Vote for Trump,” reads the headline of an article published this week at the Gospel Coalition. In the piece, Joe Carter argues that rather than 81 percent, only “somewhere between 35 percent and 45 percent of all evangelicals in America voted for Trump.”
…News media did not report, as Carter asserts, that “an overwhelming number of evangelicals” voted for Trump. Instead, news media, including the The New York Times, Washington Post and Fox News, to name a few, all made clear time and again that a majority of white evangelicals supported Trump.
…In his outrageous bid for the presidency, Donald Trump has upended many norms of American politics. But the disavowal by evangelical leaders of their political influence after 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for the winning Trump-Pence ticket may be one of Election 2016’s most revealing features.
The desire of some evangelical leaders to distance their faith from the atrocity of a Trump presidency is surely understandable, but doing so after white evangelicals provided Trump with his most solid voting bloc seems especially cruel given the political reality we all must live with now.
(2) Is the Religious Right Dead or Alive? |First Things
***Two weeks ago, this question was all but settled. The obituary was already written. Now, the discussion continues. This column is one of many already written to explain the living-dead state of the Religious Right.
(3) The No. 1 Bible Verse and Top 25 Topics of Trump’s Election | Christianity Today
***Christians have always used 2 Chronicles 7:14 as a verse to prompt them to pray. And when praying, Christians pray for their country, the land of their birth—the place and time where God sovereignly placed them to live their lives. This election season was no different, though there was a concerted effort to shame Christians for quoting this verse within 100 miles of also mentioning the United States.
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