Politico Magazine: Millions of Americans Believe God Made Trump President [View all]

[highplainsdem]

And yeah, I know -- the obvious subtitle should be:

Millions of Americans Are Batshit Crazy


But this Politico magazine is about a book by a Pentecostal writer/publisher that explains their "reasoning":


https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/01/27/millions-of-americans-believe-god-made-trump-president-216537

If Donald Trump gets a little bored on his flight home from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, he can always page through a book handed to him by a delegate not long after he arrived: “God and Donald Trump.”

The volume, written by Stephen Strang, a leading Pentecostal figure and the longtime publisher of Charisma magazine, is an easy read—part spiritual hagiography, part Fox News bulletin and part prophecy. It ultimately says far less about Trump than about the charismatic Pentecostals who were some of his earliest religious supporters and who now view his election as the fulfillment of God’s will.

-snip-

From early in Trump’s presidential candidacy, his biggest religious supporters—indeed, his only religious supporters for a while—were charismatic Christians like pastors Paula White and Darrell Scott. They were drawn to Trump, and he to them, because of their embrace of the prosperity gospel. Also sometimes referred to as “health and wealth” theology, this belief holds that God rewards faith with good health and financial success. By those very simple metrics, a billionaire like Donald Trump, whether his fortune came from family, scams or a higher power, must be a very faithful man.

Other religious conservatives, Strang argues, supported Trump in 2016 for reasons familiar to any Fox News viewer: a fear of globalism, the deep state, George Soros the former Nazi collaborator, wide-scale election fraud. They liked Trump because he said he liked them, told them they were persecuted, and vowed to stand up for them. He said he would bring back “Merry Christmas.” He told them they were important.

But there were other, more spiritual reasons as well. Strang outlines a string of charismatics who had visions—or who now retroactively claim to have had visions—that Trump would one day win the White House. A Catholic holy man named Thomas Zimmer who spent much of his life in Italy even claimed to have received a prophesy in the 1980s that Trump would “lead America back to religion.” And the book is filled with testimony after testimony from Christian leaders who were amazed to find themselves supporting Trump in 2016, who each claim that he was their very last choice up until he won the Republican nomination.

In fact, while some conservative Christians speak about Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton as the work of God, it seems the real divine intercession was in clearing the GOP field for Trump. The unspoken assumption for each of the religious figures Strang references—from Franklin Graham to Robert Jeffress to Kenneth Copeland—is that God would only want a Republican president and so if Trump captured the GOP nomination, then ipso facto he must be God’s choice. And the more unlikely the selection, the better proof it is of divine intent.

-snip-

Once it became clear to the community of conservative charismatics that Trump was God’s candidate, they mobilized to support his campaign. It’s in this area that Strang’s book is most useful, revealing the devotion and certainty of a faith group that went largely unnoticed throughout the presidential race. Cindy Jacobs, cofounder of the Reformation Prayer Network, organized 10,000 charismatics to “prayer walk” seven key states for Trump, asking God to move the hearts of voters in those states and to bless their work.

Another network called As One led 40-day prayer walks—40 days being a significant time period in the Bible—and cast their efforts as part of a spiritual battle against the forces of evil seen on the secular left and the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Lou Engle, a prominent revivalist based in California, prevailed upon his supporters to engage in what he called an “Esther Fast,” which involved three days with no food or water, in order to beg God for mercy and victory.

-snip-

Emphasis added.