MSNBC host Joe Scarborough predicted on Tuesday that the “bill will come due” for Evangelical churches who support Donald Trump and Christian nationalism.
“One thing we have found is the bill always comes due,” he said, mentioning Fox News having to pay $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems over lies the network told about the company after the 2020 Presidential election, and far-right radio show host Alex Jones, who was ordered to pay $965 million for the conspiracy theories he spread about the deadly Sandy Hook shooting of 2012.
“You always have to pay the bill. Dominion taught us that. Alex Jones learned that” with Sandy Hook, Scarborough said. “You look at these people that beat the hell out of cops. They learned that on January 6th, the bill always comes due.
“The bill will come due for a church that embraces Christian nationalism, and embraces a guy who says it may be a good thing that stars can rape women in 2023,” Scarborough said during a panel discussion titled, “Why Do Evangelicals Continue to Stand Behind Trump?”
Scarborough, while recalling his own Christian upbringing in various Baptist churches in Mississippi, added, “This foray into politics has been devastating for evangelicals,” as, he said, more and more young people avoid many churches’ increasingly conservative stance.
Panelist Donny Deutsch, a branding and marketing professional, was dumfounded over the Religious Right’s continued embrace of Trump. “It’s not what’s wrong with Donald Trump. What’s wrong with this country?” he asked. “Republicans follow him like lemmings off of a cliff. What’s wrong with people that they still follow the charlatan, this animal?”
Rev. Al Sharpton also weighed in that, unlike in the past, when religious leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. urged John F. Kennedy to support the civil rights movement, no one in the evangelical camp is calling for Trump to “do the right thing”: “The people that ought to be putting the Donald Trumps in check, are checking off the box to vote for Donald Trump,” he said. “Where is their moral barometer?”
Eddie Glaude Jr, a professor of African American Studies at Princeton, added that Trump brings out the “underbelly of society.”
He added, “It’s a deeply existential threat that we face… We’re saying that people aren’t being moved by moral leadership and then on the other hand, we’re saying more leadership is absent because they’re afraid of [losing their congregation]. And so the question we have to ask ourselves [is], ‘What does Donald Trump stand for for all of these folks, when this man is so clearly flawed?’”
