VCU Prof: Brazilian Evangelicals Rise Up

The Post story, “In Brazil’s political crisis, a powerful new force: Evangelical Christians,” is an amazing account from a liberal perspective of how Christian conservatives are taking back their country. One leading critic of the ruling Workers Party in Brazil said, “We saw that communism was in their DNA.” We saw this coming more than a year ago in our story, “Anti-Marxist Counter-Revolution in Brazil.” The obvious question is, Can it happen here? The answer is, Not with Trump.

Andrew Chesnut, a Latin America expert and professor of religious studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, is quoted as saying, “They think the Workers’ Party put Brazil on a path to moral ruin. It legalized gay marriage. It has given Brazil one of Latin America’s highest per-capita abortion rates, even though the procedure remains illegal. There’s pornography all over the place.”

Some of these complaints could be made about the United States under Democratic Party rule. In fact, Obama’s Democrats seem to want to go even further and more quickly in a decadent direction than the Marxists in Brazil’s Workers Party. Consider the story in The Washington Times that Bibles are being removed from the “Missing Man” tables in several Veterans Affairs (VA) clinics. The Missing Man Tables recognize prisoners of war and those missing in action. Senator James Lankford (R-OK) and Rep. J. Randy Forbes (R-VA), co-chairmen of the Congressional Prayer Caucus, sent a letter Thursday to the Secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs, asking why Bibles have been removed from the displays at multiple VA clinics around the country.

The Post story needs to be read and understood by those forces in the United States anxious to overturn the Marxist policies pursued by President Obama over the last seven years. One of the lessons to be learned is that the official Catholic Church will be of no help in returning the country to conservative values. “With a population of 205 million, Brazil remains the world’s largest Catholic nation,” the paper notes. “But 22 percent of Brazilians identify as evangelical Christians, up from 5 percent in 1970.” It’s this growing force, not the Catholic Church, which has put the Workers Party on the defensive.

We also learn that a few of the new Christian activists in Brazil have “studied on Christian campuses in the United States, including Liberty University, founded by [Jerry] Falwell, which encourages students to promote religious values through civic engagement…” The paper explains, “Just as the Rev. Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority emerged as a force in the United States in the 1980s, Brazilian evangelical leaders have gone from the political sidelines to the center.”

Falwell’s son Jerry is now the president of Liberty University. However, he supports Trump for president of the U.S. But is Trump capable of leading the kind of conservative counter-revolution the United States needs? He is certainly not a Christian conservative and has never claimed to be.

There’s no evidence that the Trump Train intends to run over and obliterate the secular and Marxist forces that are leading America to ruin. Instead, his message is mostly one of economic nationalism and populism.

A good opportunity for Trump to prove to conservative Christians that he intends to save the U.S. from moral decay was missed when he chickened out of a debate with Sanders. After first agreeing to debate, he backed out, saying “it seems inappropriate that I would debate the second place finisher” in the Democratic primary.

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism, and can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. This column is excerpted from an article which he wrote for AIM.

Photo by Rodnei Reis Fotografia Sacramento/MG/BR

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