FSTDT

Hardly a day goes by without a huge amount of negative media coverage surrounding President Trump. Yet many evangelicals are continuing to back the President. The informal spokesperson for those evangelicals who advise the Trump administration, Rev Johnnie Moore explains why

On my regular visits to Europe, I am often asked about the support of American evangelicals for President Donald Trump. I certainly understand the curiosity given Mr Trump's well-documented reputation prior to his presidency, his unfiltered stream-of-consciousness approach to social media, and his unconventional foreign policy - to put it mildly.

Yet, many American evangelicals are so close to the administration that the President and First Lady invited them to the equivalent of a state dinner last week “celebrating evangelical leadership.” At a certain point during the evening an open microphone prompted nearly two dozen of the dinner’s 100 guests to thank the administration.

Here are some of the reasons why evangelicals said they are grateful for the policies of the Trump administration, even when they are sometimes offended by the President's sensibilities:

1. He prioritises religious freedom
The Obama administration held court over the most significant threats to America's sacrosanct first amendment as have been witnessed in modern, American history. The most egregious example was when the administration attempted to require religious Catholics, including nuns, to provide contraception against their sincerely held religious beliefs.

When the Trump administration began their term, there were more than 50 active lawsuits against the Department of Justice for similar incidences. The Trump administration prioritised religious freedom in domestic and foreign policy by immediately auditing the entire federal government to identify incidences where administration policies violated the first amendment, and they corrected them, including by settling dozens of the active, aforementioned courts cases.

On the international front, the administration began reorienting humanitarian programs to assist persecuted religious minorities which had been overlooked in countries like Iraq by United Nations’ programs, and just a few months ago the State Department hosted a global symposium on international religious freedom that brought together senior government officials from more than 70 countries.

An entire book could be written on the way the Trump administration supports religious freedom, but one of the more recent examples is their use of severe sanctions against Turkey in response to their ongoing and unjust imprisonment of an American pastor, Andrew Brunson.

2. He protects the unborn
Without question, the Trump administration is more obviously pro-life than any previous administration since abortion became legal in the United States, and at a time when public opinion has moved rapidly against abortion, even among Democrats despite the party leaderships’ near-total unwillingness to accommodate pro-life Democrats.

The head of the Susan B. Anthony List, a noted pro-life organisation, didn't initially support candidate Trump but has since come to deem him "the most Pro-life president in American history" because of numerous policies he has introduced.

During the 2016 campaign, many evangelicals were deeply moved by hearing Trump's own story as to why he changed his opinion on abortion and one of the most profound moments of the election was in the final presidential debate when Secretary Clinton startlingly voiced her ongoing support for late-term abortion, despite the grotesque practice being banned by both the US Congress and the United States Supreme Court. Trump has fulfilled his promise to greatly strengthen pro-life policies.

3. He's addressing judicial over-reach
In many ways, the 2016 election was an election not made by Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump but by the sudden death of the reliably conservative Supreme Court Justice, Antonin Scalia, putting the long conservative balance of the court in jeopardy.

President Trump's successful appointment of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court as Scalia's replacement represented the fulfillment of his single most important promise to the evangelicals who put him in office.

This week, his second nominee to the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, will begin his confirmation process and he is equally regarded as a trusted conservative, whose confirmation could guarantee a conservative Supreme Court for at least a generation. This is another fulfilled promise.

4. He's advancing criminal justice reform
While not an issue he campaigned in support of, President Trump has become a surprising advocate for criminal justice reform in the United States, a policy concern long advocated for by evangelicals whose passion for prisoners finds its roots in the New Testament itself.

The President’s son-in-law and senior advisor, Jared Kushner, came into the White House with his own unrelenting passion for prison reform and has found in the evangelical community a natural and effective ally.

Because of it all, the United States’ Congress is on the verge of passing the first significant reform to America’s widely criticised prison system in over 30 years. The President’s evolution on the issue is largely considered the result of his evangelical advisors as has been the case with the President’s evolution on certain immigration issues, such as providing his support for undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States by their parents when they were children.

5. He's addressing the opioid epidemic
The abuse of opioids in the United States is the nation's most significant drug problem, directly or indirectly affecting millions of Americans. The administration has forcefully taken on this addiction crisis, even when it meant taking substantial measures against large American companies despite opposition from the President's own party.

Evangelical pastors, who walk through addiction with members of their congregations, have been on the frontline of this developing crisis for years. The Trump administration has acted with the full force of the federal government, and it has already saved many lives.

6. He's strengthening the family
The administration's widely supported tax cuts, which were passed by the Republican-controlled Congress, under the direction of the President, included the doubling of the standard tax credit given to parents for their children, and the administration is now well on its way to finally introducing to American life a meaningful program to support "paid family leave."

The United States is far behind Europe in these types of social programs, but the Trump administration appears to have found an approach that would be considered fiscally responsible by Republicans even while meeting a long-term policy priority of Democrats.

7. The economy is thriving
The administration's economic policies - from deregulation to workforce development - have resulted in nearly 3 million Americans being taken off of government assisted food programs, over 5 trillion dollars being added the United States' economy, and the lowest ever unemployment numbers among African Americans, Hispanic Americans, young people, and women.

The overall unemployment number is at its lowest since 1969. In 2017, Americans were also more generous than ever before donating at least $410 billion to charity, the highest number on record.

Taking our seat at the table
Those are some of the reasons why President Trump enjoys the highest approval rating any Republican president has ever received from the Republican Party.

Obviously, these highlights only represent part of an always-imperfect picture, but we mustn't deceive ourselves into thinking there aren't logical reasons to support this unconventional president.

Earlier this year, when liberal American Bishop Michael Curry decided to parlay the gift of newfound fame into a candlelit march on the White House just two days after he was entrusted with preaching at the Royal Wedding, I was asked by CNN what I thought of the opinions of Christians like Curry who so ardently oppose the Trump administration.

Here was my answer, "many of them are my friends, too, and we happen to mainly agree on the challenges facing our country and our world. We just sometimes disagree on the solutions."

One might disagree with the merits of the administration’s policies or the by-product of their approach, but one must acknowledge that many reasonable people support the administration’s policies on the basis of facts, not ideology.

As for evangelicals, I’ve personally seen the constructive work of many in our community precisely because we’ve taken our seat at the table, very often serving as the reasonable center building bridges between polarised extremes.

Rev. Johnnie Moore is an author, religious freedom advocate and the founder of The KAIROS Company, one of the world’s leading, boutique public relations consultancies. Moore is often referred to as the informal spokesperson for those evangelicals who advise the Trump administration.

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It's become fashionable to draw comparisons between the popular television adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Donald Trump's America.

It's become fashionable to draw comparisons between the popular television adaptation of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Donald Trump's America.

Margaret Atwood, whose work I have long admired, is now being hailed as a prophet. It is quite the phenomenon. According to the pundits, Atwood's 1985 work, The Handmaid's Tale, which Mary McCarthy once savaged, and the recently-published 2019 sequel, The Testaments, are dystopias which aptly describe the contemporary climate change crisis, toxic environments, the rise in infertility, and the enslavement of women in Trump's America.

Is this all Atwood is writing about? Do the increasing restrictions on abortion in America parallel the extreme misogyny of Gilead, the theocratic state in Atwood's saga? Is the unjust separation of mothers and children, a la Trump on the southern border, what Atwood has foretold? Every review and interview with Atwood that I could find strongly insists that this is the case.

Michelle Goldberg, in the New York Times, attributes the current popularity of The Handmaid's Tale to Trump's ascendancy. She writes: "It's hardly surprising that in 2016 the book resonated—particularly women—stunned that a brazen misogynist, given to fascist rhetoric and backed by religious fundamentalists was taking power."

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Gilead-inspired handmaid outfits have become popular at anti-Trump rallies as far away as Poland.

Gilead-inspired handmaid outfits have become popular at anti-Trump rallies as far away as Poland.

... At the anti-Trump pro-women's rights marches around the country, some feminist protesters dressed like Handmaids in billowing, shapeless red dresses, their facial identities obscured by large, white Victorian-era bonnets, carrying signs that read: "Make Margaret Atwood fiction again" and "The Handmaid's Tale is not an instruction manual."

They have a point. Abortion rights are being steadily challenged and nearly eviscerated in the formerly slave-owning American states. Right-to-life lawyers insist that the protection of unborn children without any gestational markers is the law of the land. We now have free states and slave states in terms of access to high quality, insurance-funded abortions. Pregnant, drug-addicted women are being jailed for child abuse.

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Gilead most reflects what is happening not in America, but in most Islamic countries.

Gilead most reflects what is happening not in America, but in most Islamic countries.

However ... [t]here's another contemporary parallel that also gets scant attention. Gilead's system of pseudo-theocratic totalitarian control in both her novels and in the MGM/Hulu versions does not accurately reflect what is happening in America today; it mirrors what is happening in most Islamic countries, a fact that Atwood and her admirers are too politically correct to notice.

Obscuring one's individual identity, masking one's face, sequestering women at home, may have been true of many previous cultures and regimes. However, in this day forced niqabs (face veils) and burqas (head, face, and body bags) are mainly realities for women in Muslim countries and communities in the West. In Iran in July, three women were sentenced to a total of 55 years between them for protesting against the veil.

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In July 2019, an Iranian court sentenced Yasaman Aryani (left), Monireh Arabshahi (center), and Mojgan Keshavarz to a total of 55 years in prison for protesting against the veil.

In July 2019, an Iranian court sentenced Yasaman Aryani (left), Monireh Arabshahi (center), and Mojgan Keshavarz to a total of 55 years in prison for protesting against the veil.

In The Handmaid's Tale Atwood does mention Islam twice (to exonerate Muslims as the suspected mass murderers of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Oval Office in Gilead (p.174) and again in a reference to the "obsession with harems" on the part of allegedly Orientalist Western painters who did not understand that they were painting "boredom" (p.69). Atwood's quintessential Bad Guys are Caucasian, Bible-thumping, right wing, conservative, American Christians.

Where else but in the Islamic world do we see forced face veiling, forced child marriage, women confined to the home, polygamy (a "wife" and a "handmaid" under the same roof), male guardians and minders, cattle prod shocking, whipping, hand amputations, stoning, crazed vigilante mobs stomping and tearing people apart, and tortured corpses publicly displayed on city walls or hanging from cranes in order to terrify the populace? Or the torture murder of homosexuals? This is how Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, the Islamic Republics of Iran and Afghanistan, the tyrants of Somalia and Saudi Arabia, interpret, correctly or incorrectly, Sharia law.

How could all the reviewers not see what I so clearly see? Perhaps here's how.

I once lived in a harem in Afghanistan—a harem simply means the "women's quarters." It is forbidden territory to all men who are not relatives. If you can't leave without permission or without a male escort, you are in a harem and living in purdah.

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"I once lived in a harem ... the property of a polygamous Afghan family."

"I once lived in a harem ... the property of a polygamous Afghan family."

After a 30-month courtship, I married the glamorous, wealthy, very Westernized, foreign student whom I first met at college when I was 18. We never once discussed religion. Not a word about Islam. He had not prepared me for what life would be like in his country, even temporarily. For example, he had never even mentioned that his father had three wives and 21 children, that most Afghan women still wore burqas or heavy hijab, that I would be pressured to convert to Islam, and would have to live with my mother-in-law.

When we landed in Kabul, officials smoothly removed my American passport—which I never saw again. Suddenly, I was the citizen of no country and had no rights. I had become the property of a polygamous Afghan family. I was not allowed out without a male escort, a male driver, and a female relative as my chaperones.

This marriage had transported me back to the 10th Century and trapped me there without a passport back to the future.

I experienced what it was like to live with people who were permanently afraid of what other people might think—even more so than in Small Mind Town, USA.

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Read more about the author's captivity in Afghanistan in her acclaimed 2013 book.

Read more about the author's captivity in Afghanistan in her acclaimed 2013 book.

I was terrified when I first saw women wearing ghostly burqas—ambulatory body bags, sensory deprivation isolation chambers—huddled together literally at the back of the bus. My Afghan family laughed at my over-reaction, which was considered abnormal, not their practice of burying women alive.

My dreamer-of-a husband kept assuring me that the dreadful burqa and my captivity would both soon pass. He lived to see this dream come true for about 15 years for the middle classes until it was shattered again, perhaps forever.

Many Afghan women have mothers-in-law who beat them and treat them as despised servants. Mine never hit me or ordered me to cook or clean, but she tried to convert me to Islam every single day and tried to kill me by telling the servants to stop boiling my water and washing my fruits and vegetables. I got deathly ill.

Poor woman, she was a deserted and much maligned first wife. She feared me, envied me, hated me—as a woman, an infidel, a Jew, an American, and mainly, as a "love match," something considered too dangerously Western. Afghan mothers-in-law do collaborate in or even perpetrate the honor/horror killings of their daughters and daughters-in-law. So do rural India-based Hindu mothers and mothers-in-law, Muslim mothers and mothers-in-law world-wide, and Sikhs, to a lesser extent.

I got out of the wild, wild East and I moved on. But I never forgot the way it was. I always understood that as imperfect as America and the West might be, it was still a much better place for women than the Islamic world. Forever after, I understood that barbaric customs are indigenous, not caused by foreign intervention; and that, like the West, Islam was also an imperial and colonial power, owned slaves, and engaged in gender and religious apartheid.

I owe Afghanistan a great deal for teaching me this. Perhaps my radical Western feminism was forged long ago in pampered purdah in Kabul.

Islamic or Islamist totalitarianism today and as I knew it nearly 60 years ago in Kabul is the more obvious face of Gilead than the one imagined by Atwood more than 30 years ago.

Like the handmaids and domestics in Gilead, the captive population in Orwell's 1984 is monitored around the clock through "telescreens" that can view every room, each person. The telescreens broadcast Big Brother's orders and conduct daily "hate" sessions. People are always anxious and paranoid; everyone has permanent enemies.

Today, Orwell's Thought Police sound a lot like the Afghan Taliban or like Iran's or Saudi Arabia's Virtue and-Vice squads, who arrest men and women for the smallest sign of "individuality" or difference, and who harass and arrest women for showing a single strand of hair, or a glimpse of ankle. Here's Khaled Hosseini's fictional description of life in Afghanistan under the Soviets in The Kite Runner:

You couldn't trust anyone in Kabul anymore—for a fee or under threat, people told on each other, neighbor on neighbor, child on parent, brother on brother, servant on master, friend on friend...the rafiqs, the [Afghan] comrades, were everywhere and they'd split Kabul into two groups: those who eavesdropped and those who didn't...A casual remark to the tailor while getting fitted for a suit might land you in the dungeons of Poleh-charkhi...Even at the dinner table, in the privacy of their own home, people had to speak in a calculated manner—the rafiqs were in the classrooms too; they'd taught children to spy on their parents, what to listen for, whom to tell.

And here he is describing Afghanistan in the Taliban era:

In Kabul, fear is everywhere, in the streets, in the stadiums, in the markets, it is a part of our lives here...the savages who rule our watan [country] don't care about human decency. The other day, I accompanied Farzanajan to the bazaar to buy some potatoes and naan. She asked the vendor how much the potatoes cost, but he did not hear her, I think he had a deaf ear. So she asked louder and suddenly a young Talib ran over and hit her on the thighs with his wooden stick. He struck her so hard she fell down. He was screaming at her and cursing and saying the Ministry of Vice and Virtue does not allow women to speak loudly. She had a large purple bruise on her leg for days...If I fought, that dog would have surely put a bullet in me, and gladly!

Hosseini's descriptions are right out of 1984 or The Handmaid's Tale.

Two memoirs set in Iran, Azar Nafisi's best-selling Reading Lolita in Tehran and Roya Hakakian's Journey from the Land of No, describe the savage curtailment of private life and thought—and of life itself—by radical Islamists.

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Two compelling accounts of life for women in Iran's Islamic Republic.

Two compelling accounts of life for women in Iran's Islamic Republic.

According to Nafisi, Khomeini's goon squads closed newspapers and universities and arrested, tortured, and executed beloved teachers, prominent artists, intellectuals, and activists, including feminists, and thousands of other innocent and productive Muslims. The squads constantly harassed women on the street and at work. If a woman failed the dress-code standards even slightly, or by accident, she risked being arrested, probably raped, probably executed.

In Journey from the Land of No, Roya Hakakian describes the indescribable "Mrs. Moghadam," the newly-installed head of the Jewish girls' high school. Mrs. Moghadam tyrannizes, terrifies, and shames the Jewish girls. She tries to convert them to Islam. However, her true passion is more Talibanesque. She informs the innocent girls that, although they do not know it, they are "diabolical," "abominable," "loathsome," "lethal," capable of "drowning everything in eternal darkness," capable of bringing the "apocalypse" by showing a single strand of hair. To Hakakian's credit, she presents a rather dangerous turn of events as a dark comedy.

Mrs. Moghadam is definitely an Aunt Lydia, the lead female tormentor of the Handmaids, right out of Gilead, circa 1985.

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Many Western feminists mistakenly see the face veil and head scarf as symbols of anti-racism.

Many Western feminists mistakenly see the face veil and head scarf as symbols of anti-racism.

As Muslim women are being tortured, honor-murdered by their families, or stoned to death, sometimes for refusing to wear the veil, many Western multiculturally and politically correct post-colonial feminists are deconstructing and wearing the face veil and the head scarf as symbols of anti-racism and as a form of respect when they visit Muslim countries. Such feminists are also silencing and demonizing all other views in academic journals, in the media, and on feminist internet groups.

I've written about this many times. Therefore, while I know that violence against women still remains a burning issue in the West, I agree with Allison Pearson's recent article in The Spectator: "The appalling vanity of Western Feminists who think Margaret Atwood writes about them."

Atwood depicts an all-female power structure in which the handmaids are kept in line by cruel female "Aunts," led by Aunt Lydia, who casually apply cattle prods and tasers, who blame them as evil sluts, punish them with group condemnation, bouts of solitary confinement, exile them to the "Colonies" to die cleaning up toxic waste, etc. Such behavior seems to contradict feminist views of women as morally superior to men and as more compassionate and intuitive.

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Aunt Lydia (left) and the al-Khansa Brigade of ISIS

Aunt Lydia (left) and the al-Khansa Brigade of ISIS

Like men, women are human beings and as such are as close to the apes as to the angels. Women are also aggressive, cruel, competitive, envious, sometimes lethally so, but mainly toward other women. I would not want to be at the mercy of a female prison guard—or a female concentration camp guard—in the West. But let's not forget the Wives of ISIS—the all-femaleal-Khansaa Brigade who whipped, beat, and mutilated the breasts of girls and women when their heavy black burqas slipped. Displaced ISIS women continue their anti-woman reign of terror.

Misogynist thinking and actions exist in America today but not only among right-wing conservatives. It is also flourishing among our media and academic elites. Such thinking is flying high under the banner of "free speech," "multi-cultural relativism," "anti-racism," and "political correctness." Dare to question this elite's right to silence and shame those who challenge their views—i.e., that the West is always to blame, that jihadists are freedom-fighters, that the Islamic face veil is a free choice or a religious commandment, that polygamy encourages sisterhood, that Islam is a race, not a religious and political ideology—and, as I've noted many times, one is attacked as a racist, an Islamophobe, and a conservative, and swiftly demonized and de-platformed.

While MGM/Hulu's TV series is dramatically compelling, part soap opera, part horror movie, part Warrior Queen fantasy, the series is radically different from Atwood's 1985 novel. For example, Atwood's narrator, Ofglen, is not an increasingly daring, crazed, female assassin, as Elizabeth Moss brilliantly plays her. She is hardly heroic at all; under totalitarianism, heroism, collective or individual, is quickly ferreted out and destroyed. It exists but is rare.

Contemporary viewers are hungry for multi-racial characters, interracial and same-sex couples, "badass" women. Hulu gives them to us. Hulu's Canada is a multi-racial, politically correct refuge for Gilead's escapees; same-sex couples and feminists are government leaders. This is not true in the novel. On the contrary, in her 1985 Epilogue, Atwood has Canada rounding up and returning all Gilead escapees.

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Media and academic elites are playing partisan politics with Atwood's original vision.

Media and academic elites are playing partisan politics with Atwood's original vision.

Atwood the divine novelist is absolutely entitled to depict whatever she wishes. But the current crop of reviewers as well as the filmmakers are playing partisan politics with her original vision and are refusing to see other and larger global dangers contained in her work.

Women's freedom and women's lives worldwide are under the most profound siege. To focus solely on the United States or on the Caucasian, Judeo-Christian West is diversionary. It scapegoats one country, one culture, for the far greater crimes of other countries and cultures.

Phyllis Chesler, a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum, is an emerita professor of psychology and women's studies and the author of eighteen books, including Women and Madness, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman, An American Bride in Kabul, and A Politically Incorrect Feminist.

Notes:

[1]Commercial surrogacy has been outlawed in India, Thailand, parts of Mexico, Malaysia, and South Africa, as well as in many European countries including Austria, Belgium, France, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, and the UK. Hence, the campaign to legalize commercial surrogacy in America has gathered momentum.

[2] Contemporary surrogacy has now become a way of slicing and dicing biological motherhood into three parts: an egg donor, who undergoes painful and dangerous IVF procedures; a "gestational" mother who faces all the risks of pregnancy, childbirth, and potentially negative and lifelong medical and psychiatric consequences; and an adoptive mother or father. This vivisection of motherhood makes it impossible for a birthmother to win custody for any reason.