A Politico study finds that support for The Donald is located chiefly — though not exclusively, of course — amongst evangelicals, and that Christian broadcasters are his most reliable boosters.
A generation ago—even a few years ago—this would have been unthinkable. Christian TV was largely the province of preachers, musicians, faith healers and a series of televangelism scandals. Politicians were leery of getting too close. To establishment evangelicals, not to mention the rest of America, Christian TV was hokey at best, and disreputable at worst.
But in the past two years, largely out of view of the coastal media and the Washington establishment, a transformation has taken place. As Christian networks have become more comfortable with politics, the Trump administration has turned them into a new pipeline for its message. Trump has forged a particularly tight marriage of convenience with Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, which since early in the 2016 campaign has offered consistent friendly coverage and been granted remarkable access in return.
Remember this when you hear tedious mewling about “religious freedom” from evangelicals: They voted for a man who proposed a religious test as a condition of admittance to the United States, and at one point spoke positively of creating a Muslim registry. In America, land of the free and the home of the brave, and whose greatest conceit is its freedom to think and believe as you like.
Evangelicals are innately hostile to American ideals, and don’t believe in religious freedom; they believe in privileges for their club.