The other day Mr. Trump dropped his God Card, accusing Mr. Biden of not loving God enough. Mr. Trump would have his faithful followers believe he spoke God’s words through his own lips.
I call it another example of Divine Propaganda — using "God authority" to bolster one’s otherwise earthly political agenda.
Since college I’ve been interested in trying to understand how propaganda works. I remember Father Coughlin, the founding priest of the National Shrine of the Little Flower church, located in Royal Oak, MI, off Woodward Ave near Detroit, was one of the propagandists we studied along with Gov. Huey Long and Joseph Goebbels.
Why do people accept without questioning and asking for some sort of fact/proof?
I guess it may be that their internal “B.S. identifiers” are turned off when it comes to their religious beliefs. When “God” is connected, the statement in question becomes synonymous with “the Word of God”, becoming fact because it comes from God Himself. It’s unquestionable because it’s from “God's Lips”, not from mere mortals. We know because the minister, in this case God’s servant on earth, Mr. Trump, said so.
I’ve been looking deeper into what I have come to call, Divine Propaganda, because Trump seems to be a master at it. For example, several friends, although highly educated, are Religious Right Trump supporters.
Also, perhaps some of my interest originates from our childhood exposure to evangelical ministers like Dallas Billington, Rex Humbart and Ernest Angley, the early TV evangelists.
Today’s Christian Right Evangelicals appear to be following a path blazed by those Akron-based pioneers.
These three quotes from, Church of The Donald, Ruth Graham, politico.com, May/June 2018, opened one door to help me understand how “Christians” accept Donald Trump:
“Evangelicals, going back to the time of the Scopes trial, have always been sensitive to being seen as pariahs,” Mark Ward says. “You can get a lot of credibility with evangelicals if you simply make them feel like they matter, if you appear on their TV shows and send your administration to appear on their TV shows.”
"In a fundamental way, TV people are Trump’s people. “Trump appreciates people who can communicate in an attention-grabbing way,” says Wear, author of the 2017 book Reclaiming Hope: Lessons Learned in the Obama White House About the Future of Faith in America. “I don’t think Trump would be drawn to a preacher who breaks down five chapters of Ephesians and lays out the Greek and Aramaic.”
"But viewers still appear to be loyal, and those viewers aren’t who you might think. Both TBN and CBN say their audiences are split almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans. This can likely be chalked up to another fact that might surprise people outside the evangelical bubble: their audiences’ racial diversity. Charismatic and Pentecostal preaching, and the related health-and-wealth “prosperity gospel,” are strong traditions within the black community. Popular black pastors including Creflo Dollar, Tony Evans and TD Jakes have all preached regularly over the years on TBN, Daystar, and other Christian networks. Paula White is the pastor of a largely black church. And CBN’s roster of reporters, hosts and regular guests is arguably more racially diverse than those of many cable news networks."
A few more quotes:
"Trump has always had a particular genius for circumventing normal channels, and he seems to understand the power of Christian television as a medium for directly reaching an important and particularly loyal segment of his base. When Pat Robertson interviewed him last summer, in a period in which Trump had granted no other non-Fox interviews for months, the president put it succinctly. “As long as my people understand,” he told Robertson. “That’s why I do interviews with you. You have a tremendous audience. You have people that I love.”
"For white evangelicals, who voted for Trump overwhelmingly and still approve of his job performance, the approach seems to be working. The networks continually polish Trump’s reputation, and perhaps more importantly, he’s talking to them. “Evangelicals, going back to the time of the Scopes trial, have always been sensitive to being seen as pariahs,” Mark Ward says. “You can get a lot of credibility with evangelicals if you simply make them feel like they matter, if you appear on their TV shows and send your administration to appear on their TV shows.”
"But viewers still appear to be loyal, and those viewers aren’t who you might think. Both TBN and CBN say their audiences are split almost evenly between Democrats and Republicans. This can likely be chalked up to another fact that might surprise people outside the evangelical bubble: their audiences’ racial diversity. Charismatic and Pentecostal preaching, and the related health-and-wealth “prosperity gospel,” are strong traditions within the black community. Popular black pastors including Creflo Dollar, Tony Evans and TD Jakes have all preached regularly over the years on TBN, Daystar, and other Christian networks. Paula White is the pastor of a largely black church. And CBN’s roster of reporters, hosts and regular guests is arguably more racially diverse than those of many cable news networks."
"TBN in particular has quietly become a major player, in part by capitalizing on the switch to digital TV two decades ago. When the Federal Communications Commission declared in 1996 that all television stations had to convert to digital broadcasting within a decade, the network’s founders, Paul and Jan Crouch, snapped up many local Christian stations that couldn’t afford the conversion. As a result, TBN is now the third-largest television group in the country, with access to 100 million households and more local television stations to its name than Fox or the three major networks. Its largest rival, Texas-based Daystar, also claims access to 100 million households, and carries many of the same programs. (CBN is no longer technically a network but a production company with a series of syndicated programs that air on stations owned by others, including TBN.)"
"Reliable data on the sector are hard to come by, but a 2005 survey by an evangelical pollster found that 45 percent of American adults watched Christian television on a monthly basis, just as many as in 1992. “It’s one of these stories that has just gone completely under the radar,” Ward says. “Even though it doesn’t have the same profile it had, it’s still a very decisive arbiter of the evangelical subculture.”
"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. Trump personally has appeared 11 times on CBN since his campaign began; in 2017 alone, he gave more interviews to CBN than to CNN, ABC or CBS. Trump’s Cabinet members, staffers and surrogates also appear regularly. TBN has embraced politics more gingerly—it is still not a news-gathering organization—but Trump has made inroads there, too, starting with his kickoff interview on “Huckabee.”
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