Franklin Graham, a prominent evangelical supporter of President Trump, is calling for Christians across the country to set aside this Sunday as a “special day of prayer” for the president, the HuffPost reports.
Said Graham: “President Trump’s enemies continue to try everything to destroy him, his family, and the presidency. In the history of our country, no president has been attacked as he has. I believe the only hope for him, and this nation, is God.”
Vice President Mike Pence, who has been facing criticisms of his own religious views, warned Liberty University graduates that they have to stay strong against the challenges they’ll face from Hollywood, the media and the secular left, USA Today reports.
Said Pence: “Some of the loudest voices for tolerance today have little tolerance for traditional Christian beliefs. Be ready.”
He added: “Throughout most of American history, it has been pretty easy to call yourself Christian. It didn’t even occur to people that you might be shunned or ridiculed for defending the teachings of the Bible. But things are different now.”
Miami New Times: “Giancarlo Granda, the former Fontainebleau pool attendant whose business bizarrely received $1.8 million in loans from famous evangelist Jerry Falwell Jr., wants the world to stop calling him a ‘pool boy.’ He finds the term demeaning.”
“And, perhaps more notable, he officially denies knowing anything about alleged ‘racy’ photos referenced in a Reuters story published yesterday.”
Mayor Pete Buttigieg suggested that if God did have a political affiliation, it wouldn’t “be the one that sent the current president into the White House,” CNN reports.
Buttigieg went on to say “what we see in the White House is so different than what I hear in scripture when I am in church.”
He elaborated: “I hear about taking care of the marginalized and defending the weak and supporting the poor and visiting the prisoner and welcoming the stranger and humility and decency. These are the things that are taught in Sunday schools around this country. And so the idea that that is the property of the Republican Party, especially this Republican Party and some of the choices they have made in recent years, it just doesn’t add up to me.”
“The Trump administration is pushing to issue an order that would designate the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization, bringing the weight of American sanctions against a storied and influential Islamist political movement with millions of members across the Middle East,” the New York Times reports.
Washington Post: “White evangelicals had a substantially different reaction when asked about Trump or Clinton. When primed to think about Trump, only 6% of them say that an elected official who acts immorally in private is incapable of being ethical in public life. But when Bill Clinton is mentioned, that rises to 27% — a 21-point increase.”
“By comparison, Catholics differed by only 5 points when asked about Trump or Clinton. And, as we might expect, mentioning Clinton makes secular Americans less likely to worry about the public ethics of a privately immoral official.”
“In short, white evangelicals are far more likely to shift their view of a politician’s private behavior when asked about a Trump than when asked about Bill Clinton.”
Evangelist Franklin Graham called on Pete Buttigieg to “repent” for being gay.
Graham called homosexuality “something to be repentant of, not something to be flaunted, praised or politicized.”
He added: “God doesn’t have a political party. But God does have commandments, laws & standards… Mayor Buttigieg says he’s a gay Christian… The Bible says marriage is between a man & a woman—not two men, not two women.”
“In my lifetime I have never seen a more biblical president than I have seen in Donald Trump. He is highly biblical and I would say to your listeners that we will, in all likelihood, never see a more godly, biblical president again in our lifetime.”
— Former Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), quoted by TPM.
New York Times: “During the 2016 campaign, he would not rule out creating a registry of Muslims in the United States. He claimed to have seen “thousands” of Muslims cheering on rooftops in New Jersey after Sept. 11, a statement that was widely debunked. After deadly attacks in Paris and California, Mr. Trump called for a moratorium on Muslims traveling to the United States.”
“Now, with 19 months until the 2020 election, Mr. Trump is seeking to rally his base by sounding that theme once again. And this time, he has a specific target: Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota and one of the first Muslim women elected to Congress.”
“Mr. Trump and his team are trying to make Ms. Omar, one of a group of progressive women Democratic House members who is relatively unknown in national politics, a household name, to be seen as the most prominent voice of the Democratic Party, regardless of her actual position. And they are gambling that there will be limited downside in doing so.”
“His fluency on faith and his willingness to speak about it is an asset. Carter, Clinton, and Obama — they all shared that quality. It was one of the cues that opened the door to voters.”
— David Axelrod, quoted by New York Magazine, on Pete Buttigieg.
“For the first time ‘No Religion’ has topped a survey of Americans’ religious identity, according to a new analysis by a political scientist. The non-religious edged out Catholics and evangelicals in the long-running General Social Survey,” CNN reports.
“Ryan Burge, a political scientist at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor, found that 23.1% of Americans now claim no religion. Catholics came in at 23.0%, and evangelicals were at 22.5%.”
“Breaking years of silence on major church affairs, Pope Benedict XVI has written a lengthy letter devoted to clerical sex abuse in which he attributes the crisis to a breakdown of church and societal moral teaching and says he felt compelled to assist ‘in this difficult hour,'” the Washington Post reports.
“The 6,000-word letter, published in tandem Thursday by a Catholic outlet and an Italian newspaper, decries the 1960s sexual revolution, laments the secularization of the West and describes seminaries filled with ‘homosexual cliques.'”
“I’m reluctant to comment on another person’s faith, but I would say it is hard to look at this president’s actions and believe that they’re the actions of somebody who believes in God. I just don’t understand how you can be as worshipful of your own self as he is and be prepared to humble yourself before God. I’ve never seen him humble himself before anyone.”
— Pete Buttigieg, in an interview with USA Today, when asked if President Trump is a Christian.
Julia Ioffe: “One of the best things I learned on my last trip to Russia is that in Muslim communities there, Maga is short for Mohammed.”
Rep. Mike Johnson (R-LA) told USA Today that he believed that House Democratic leadership was purposely attempting to strike God from committee hearings, something he says would upset Americans.
Johnson confronted House Judiciary Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) on Wednesday after Nadler left off “so help you God” out of an oath to a witness, continuing a skirmish that began last week.
Tarrant County Republicans in Texas will vote Thursday on an effort by a faction to remove their vice chairman, Shahid Shafi, because he’s Muslim, the Texas Tribune reports.
“Those in favor of the motion to recall Shafi, a trauma surgeon and member of the Southlake City Council, have said he doesn’t represent all Tarrant County Republicans. They’ve also said Islamic ideologies run counter to the U.S. Constitution — an assertion many Texas GOP officials have called bigoted and Shafi himself has vehemently denied.”
Pew Research: “The 116th Congress includes the first two Muslim women ever to serve in the House of Representatives and is slightly more religiously diverse overall than the prior Congress. Still, 88% of the members are Christian, compared with 71% of U.S. adults overall.”
Taegan Goddard
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire -- which for more than two decades has been one of the nation's most influential political news sites.
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