And many evangelical leaders have doubled down in recent days, including Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr., who said that Trump was a “blue-collar billionaire” who “resembles Winston Churchill.” The younger Graham, while he danced around formally endorsing Trump last week in Raleigh, made it clear that the election was about ending abortion and protecting the “sanctity of the Supreme Court.” He instructed his followers to “hold your nose” and vote. It’s not that rancor in politics is unusual in fact, it’s been a hallmark of Donald Trump’s rallies.īut what place does this toxicity have among followers of Franklin Graham, a man whose father, the evangelical heavyweight Billy Graham, served as a spiritual counsel to Hillary Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal? More to the point, what drives this white evangelical hatred of Clintonand, by extension, anyone (journalists included) lumped under the umbrella of “the liberal left”? And what has led them to line up behind Trump, a thrice-married libertine philanderer and confessed sexual predator?Īccording to a recent Washington Post-ABC poll, more than 70 percent of white evangelical Protestants are backing Trump. That was Graham’s point: to gin up religious conservatives’ enthusiasm in a battleground state.

Not everyone in the crowdwhich some estimates put in the thousands, and almost all of whom were whitewas hostile, but they were all fired up. He’s a fucking Jew-boy.” Another attendee opined that the INDY was “fag propaganda.” Yet another told me that the freedom this group was demanding didn’t apply to people like me (whatever that means). I was standing outside the Capitol at the post-Carolina Values Summit Franklin Graham rally Thursday morning, attempting to interview Christian conservatives about their political views, when a seventy-year-old man in a cowboy hat called me a “fucking sodomite” after I asked why he was shouting about HB 2 being “essential.” A few moments later, a forty-six-year-old heard me interviewing his mother and said to her, “Look at his nose.

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