I’ve been writing as to how the republican President Donald Trump has been working overtime to keep his power base of anti-immigration hard-liners/ racist/ anti-LGBTQ/ anti Semitic supporters intact.

But he has also been doing likewise to maintain the backing of his other reliable voting bloc, White Evangelicals, who voted in favor of President Trump by a 80% margin in 2016. Two years later, he still has their backing by about 70%.

Both these factions within his base are strongly in favor of the president building his US SW border wall.

The president has two high profile Evangelicals working for him, Vice President Mike Pence and his US Secretary of  State Mike Pompeo. Both have been obsequious to President Trump to where I find it disquieting in observing that both these political professionals don’t appear to act as a check on any of his seemingly ill-planned, impulsive, uninformed policies.

Remember that many of these Evangelicals had jumped on Donald Trump’s band wagon when he was questioning the validity of the former Democratic President Barack Obama’s US citizenship. Keep this in the back of your mind when you listen to State Secretary Pompeo’s recent speech delivered in  Cairo.

Here’s the rest of the story…

On January 11, 2019, Julian Borger of the Guardian penned the following report, ‘Brought to Jesus’: the evangelical grip on the Trump administration” (“The influence of evangelical Christianity is likely to become an important question as Trump finds himself dependent on them for political survival”)

Excerpts:

“In setting out the Trump administration’s Middle East policy, one of the first things Mike Pompeo made clear to his audience in Cairo is that he had come to the region as “as an evangelical Christian”.

“In his speech at the American University, Pompeo said that in his state department office: “I keep a Bible open on my desk to remind me of God and his word, and the truth.”

“The secretary of state’s primary message in Cairo was that the US was ready once more to embrace conservative Middle Eastern regimes, no matter how repressive, if they made common cause against Iran.”

“His second message was religious. In his visit to Egypt, he came across as much as a preacher as a diplomat. He talked about “America’s innate goodness” and marveled at a newly built cathedral as “a stunning testament to the Lord’s hand”.

“The desire to erase Barack Obama’s legacy, Donald Trump’s instinctive embrace of autocrats, and the private interests of the Trump Organisation have all been analysed as driving forces behind the administration’s foreign policy.”

“The gravitational pull of white evangelicals has been less visible. But it could have far-reaching policy consequences. Vice President Mike Pence and Pompeo both cite evangelical theology as a powerful motivating force.”

“Just as he did in Cairo, Pompeo called on the congregation of a Kansan megachurch three years ago to join a fight of good against evil.”

“We will continue to fight these battles,” the then congressman said at theSummit church in Wichita. “It is a never-ending struggle … until the rapture. Be part of it. Be in the fight.”

“For Pompeo’s audience, the rapture invoked an apocalyptical Christian vision of the future, a final battle between good and evil, and the second coming of Jesus Christ, when the faithful will ascend to heaven and the rest will go to hell.”

“For many US evangelical Christians, one of the key preconditions for such a moment is the gathering of the world’s Jews in a greater Israel between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. It is a belief, known as premillenial dispensationalism or Christian Zionism – and it has very real potential consequences for US foreign policy.”

“It directly colours views on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and indirectly, attitudes towards Iran, broader Middle East geopolitics and the primacy of protecting Christian minorities. In his Cairo visit, Pompeo heaped praise on Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, for building the new cathedral, but made no reference to the 60,000 political prisoners the regime is thought to be holding, or its routine use of torture.

Pompeo is an evangelical Presbyterian, who says he was “brought to Jesus” by other cadets at the West Point military academy in the 1980s.”

“He knows best how his faith interacts with his political beliefs and the duties he undertakes as secretary of state,” said Stan van den Berg, senior pastor of Pompeo’s church in Wichita in an email. “Suffice to say, he is a faithful man, he has integrity, he has a compassionate heart, a humble disposition and a mind for wisdom.”

Link to entire report: theguardian.com/