evangelicals

SCOTUS Is Helping The Christian Right Undermine The Force Of Anti-Discrimination Law
It is increasingly clear from the nation’s highest court that religious objections can invalidate anti-discrimination protections and provide popular intolerance with an end run around the law.
Nazi Germany Had Admirers Among American Religious Leaders – And White Supremacy Fueled Their Support
Americans’ support for Nazi Germany is best explained by belief in white supremacy.
Where Things Stand: Trump Judge Orders Lawyers To Undergo Training With Far-Right Christian Legal Group
This is your TPM evening briefing.

The far-right Christian legal group whose work you’re almost certainly familiar with is in the news today for an incredibly befuddling reason: a Trump-appointed judge in Texas ordered lawyers with Southwest Airlines to attend eight hours of “religious-liberty training” courses with the group, Alliance Defending Freedom.

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Where Things Stand: Desperate DeSantis Zeroes In On Evangelicals With Tucker Carlson’s Help
This is your TPM evening briefing.

Ron DeSantis is struggling in the polls, and at acting like a human being in public. The Murdochs are losing patience with his flailing efforts to become the alt-Trump for voters exhausted by MAGA. He’s getting a lot of negative headlines now that his Republican-dominated state legislature back home has ended its legislative session and is therefore no longer producing anti-woke bills for him to sign into law and pump into Fox’s news cycle.

So naturally he’s turning to a key voting bloc that — at times reluctantly — got behind Donald Trump in droves in 2016 to propel him to the White House: white evangelicals. It’s an intrinsic shift for any Republican but especially for one who is banking his entire 2024 bid on what he perceives to be his unique ability to scoop up disaffected Trump voters looking for an alternative to the former president’s various disagreeable features.

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Truth Social How Many Forms Of Antisemitism Can Trump Cram Into One Truth Social Post? Let’s Count.
Where Things Stand: Watching The Christian Right’s Power Play Out In Real Time
This is your TPM evening briefing.

I made the point yesterday that the language Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) is using to clean up his past marriage equality remarks — earlier this summer he said he had no reason to “oppose” codifying same-sex marriage into federal law — is an obvious cave to the Christian right. In frantic messaging in recent days, Johnson has flip-flopped on his previous position as he struggles with the impossible task of casting himself as a reasonable guy to Wisconsin voters and a reliable ally to Christian conservatives.

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Where Things Stand: Alito’s Roe Opinion Was Filled With Language Pushed By Evangelical Group
This is your TPM evening briefing.

A former leader of a religious right activist group recently admitted on a podcast that the language that Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito used in his damning majority opinion overturning Roe v. Wade mirrored rhetoric the Christian group has been pushing on Supreme Court justices for decades.

Rev. Rob Schenck recently appeared on an episode of the State of Belief podcast to discuss his efforts as a former member of the group Faith and Action to, essentially, sway justices’ views on social issues through prayer sessions. The interview is from earlier this month, but Politico surfaced it here. It’s worth a listen if you want to get a better understanding of how these unofficial evangelical lobbying-via-prayer efforts work, but it reinforces a theme we covered earlier this summer when an official at the evangelical organization, Liberty Counsel, was caught on a hot mic bragging about secretly praying with Supreme Court justices.

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Right-Wing Think Tank Family Research Council Is Now A Church In Eyes Of The IRS
The FRC, a staunch opponent of abortion and LGBTQ rights, joins a growing list of activist groups seeking church status, which allows organizations to shield themselves from financial scrutiny.
Evangelical Leader Brags About Secretly Praying With SCOTUS Justices
INSIDE: Bye Bye Boris ... Cipollone ... McConnell
Russia’s War Tests Evangelicals’ Longtime Support Of Putin As An Anti-LGBTQ World Leader
For the moment, Putin’s status as the global right’s moral vanguard is being severely tested, and advocates of traditional marriage may find themselves on the brink of divorce.
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