Has Trump killed the Christian Right in America?
Americano
The Spectator
4 • 714 Ratings
🗓️ 4 November 2016
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
With Sohrab Ahmari, editorial writer of the Wall Street Journal and author of The New Philistines. Presented by Damian Thompson.
This is a guest edition of Americano and first appeared as an episode of Holy Smoke, The Spectator's new religion podcast.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Americano podcast, a special series of discussions about the biggest political event of this year, the 2016 US presidential election. |
| 0:14.2 | My name's Freddie Gray and I'm Deputy Editor of the Spectator. |
| 0:16.9 | Today I'm going to be handing over to Damian Thompson, our religion editor, who's going to discuss Donald Trump and the Christian right. |
| 0:24.4 | Today, I'm asking, whatever happened to the American religious right and Christian America in the light of this extraordinary presidential election? |
| 0:35.5 | My guest is Sorab Amari, editorial writer of the Wall Street Journal, |
| 0:39.9 | who will be voting this year for the first time as a Christian, because Sorab, you announced |
| 0:44.9 | your conversion to Catholicism on the very day that the French priest, Father Hamel was murdered |
| 0:50.4 | by ISIS, which caused quite a stir. I'm very interested in your take on the American |
| 0:56.0 | religious landscape as it's been illuminated by this remarkable and I think rather grotesque |
| 1:02.4 | presidential campaign. You've got 60% of evangelicals supporting Trump, including focus on the family, |
| 1:09.3 | supporting a thrice married man who boasts of groping their genitals of women. |
| 1:14.8 | But you have Catholics swinging the other way, as I didn't for Romney. |
| 1:20.5 | And the big picture is that only 20% of Americans go to church regularly. |
| 1:26.2 | 25% of them don't have any religious affiliation these |
| 1:30.4 | days. So my feeling is that Trump couldn't have become a Republican candidate if Christians |
| 1:37.5 | still had the influence in American politics that they think they do or they used to do. |
| 1:42.8 | What do you think? Well, I think you're right. |
| 1:45.0 | I think that as you alluded to it, the American society as a whole is becoming less religious, |
| 1:50.3 | less church-going. And you've had the evangelical movement, having peaked in 2004, when they came |
| 1:57.0 | out to support George Lillb Bush's re-election, they've suffered a number of defeats on |
| 2:02.6 | gay marriage, on religious liberty, and so forth, because the Obama administration has frankly |
| 2:08.0 | been very effective. So now you get to the point where they've embraced this figure of Donald |
... |
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