Back in May, I penned a column for the weekly Spanish newspaper, Round Town News about the the increasing involvement of evangelicals in Trump’s administration (click here to read it).

This deeply upset Alan Roberton, resident minister at the English Church in Benidorm (click on image below):



My reply, due to appear in RTN next Friday, reads as follows:

When I penned the piece about Trump, I was angry because in that week a number of things happened to indicate that Trump’s election had set the US on a dangerous path towards Christian nationalism.

The Huffington Post explained in April this year that “Christian nationalism is an ideology that fuses Christians’ love of God and country. It hinges on the narrative that the United States has a special covenant with the Christian God.”

In this respect Trump’s election was not dissimilar to Germany’s 1932 election which brought Hitler to power – and most of Germany’s Christians welcomed the rise of Nazism in 1933, just as 80 percent of white evangelicals embraced Trumpism.

The Huff Post added: “This ideology [Christian nationalism] has emerged at various times in US history, but a distinct, aggressive iteration seems to have materialized in the Trump era. This most recent version rejects secular society and seeks to restore America’s identity as a ‘Christian nation’ by leveraging Christians’ influence in the public sphere. Some of Trump’s strongest evangelical supporters believe the president was divinely chosen by God to help them achieve the goal of a Christian nation.”

This is nothing if not chilling, and every day I read reports from the US which indicate that intolerance towards those who do not buy into Christian mythology is growing at an alarming pace.

Last week the world lost one of the 20th century’s great writer, Philip Roth, an atheist Jew. This is what he said about Trump shortly before he died:

I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.

Alan Robertson claims “Christians believers have never been guilty of spreading hate as the one that we follow always preached a message of love for all people.” Just like South Africa’s Christian apartheid regime encouraged love toward black people, eh?