Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Trump’s National Prayer Breakfast speech infused God-and-country references
Washington Post ^ | February 8 | Sarah Pulliam Bailey

Posted on 02/08/2018 7:27:59 AM PST by nikos1121

President Trump spoke at Thursday’s National Prayer Breakfast in a God-and-country infused speech that would appeal especially to people who appreciate Christian nationalism — the belief that God has a uniquely Christian purpose for the United States.

“We can all be heroes to everybody and they can be heroes to us,” Trump said, “as long as we open our hearts to God’s grace, America will be free, the land of the free, the home of the brave and the light to all nations.”

The National Prayer Breakfast is a massive ecumenical gathering put on annually by a group of Christians who want to focus on a shared admiration of Jesus. Every president since Dwight D. Eisenhower has attended the prayer breakfast, which draws several thousand people from all over the world and especially attracts evangelicals.

At last year’s breakfast, Trump vowed to end the Johnson Amendment, a provision in the tax code that prevents nonprofit organizations such as churches from endorsing or opposing political candidates. It would take an act of Congress to repeal the measure, but attempts by Republican leaders to do so last year were unsuccessful.

This year, however, Trump made no policy promises at the Washington Hilton gathering. This speech followed the line of previous presidents who highlight faith as a part of America’s history and tradition, but Trump spent the bulk of his speech on God-and-country references alongside stories of Americans who sacrificed for others.

“America is a nation of believers, and together we are strengthened by the power of prayer,” Trump said.

Trump noted that God is mentioned four times by the Founding Fathers in the Declaration of Independence. Our currency declares “In God We Trust,” he pointed out, and our Pledge of Allegiance states, “We are one nation, under God.”

(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Front Page News; News/Current Events; Politics/Elections
KEYWORDS: johnsonamendment; prayerbreakfast

1 posted on 02/08/2018 7:27:59 AM PST by nikos1121
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | View Replies]

To: nikos1121

“President Trump spoke at Thursday’s National Prayer Breakfast in a God-and-country infused speech that would appeal especially to people who appreciate Christian nationalism”

Nice editorial comment to start off with to frame the article. What a disgrace.


2 posted on 02/08/2018 7:29:38 AM PST by TallahasseeConservative ( Isaiah 40:31)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: nikos1121

What was The Donald thinking? Giving honor to God and America at a prayer breakfast???


3 posted on 02/08/2018 7:30:10 AM PST by rjsimmon (The Tree of Liberty Thirsts)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: nikos1121

WaPo hates, Hates, HATES Christians.


4 posted on 02/08/2018 7:31:03 AM PST by backwoods-engineer (The GOP-Democrat-Media Uniparty must be destroyed.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: TallahasseeConservative

Yes, why can’t he be more like his predecessor and take the opportunity of the Prayer Breakfast to denigrate Christianity?


5 posted on 02/08/2018 7:32:46 AM PST by rightwingintelligentsia (Democrats: The perfect party for the helpless and stupid, and those who would rule over them.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: nikos1121

Remember when Obama used a prayer breakfast , to tell us to get off of our high horse , because of alleged Christian atrocities committed during the Crusades??


6 posted on 02/08/2018 7:34:18 AM PST by Dilbert San Diego
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: nikos1121
A National Prayer Breakfast infused with God and Country!

My Lord, who woulda thunk.

I watched it, It was uplifting, it was inspiring. It was all about God's Grace!

7 posted on 02/08/2018 7:36:09 AM PST by saywhatagain
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: nikos1121

Ah, it was a prayer breakfast.

So nice to not hear about islam.


8 posted on 02/08/2018 7:38:29 AM PST by ilovesarah2012
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: backwoods-engineer

Christians founded and developed this nation as most know. God was part of everyday American life until the commies/progressives.


9 posted on 02/08/2018 7:39:38 AM PST by Lumper20
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 4 | View Replies]

To: nikos1121

I should have searched youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zkUfXMlKyg - but I wanted to see the WaPo spin...

The WaPo readers must be cognizance impaired to read that crap. Unreadable propaganda written by ethically-challenged morons!


10 posted on 02/08/2018 7:45:46 AM PST by heterosupremacist (Domine Iesu Christe, Filius Dei, miserere me peccatorem!)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: nikos1121
Trump's "We can all be heroes. . . ." might remind us of that great and articulate author of "The Conservative Mind," Dr. Russell Kirk, who told us a thing or two about "heroes," and how they are raised up among us:
"What raises up heroes and martyrs is the fear of God. Beside the terror of God’s judgment, the atrocities of the totalist tyrant are pinpricks. A God-intoxicated man, knowing that divine love and divine wrath are but different aspects of a unity, is sustained against the worst this world can do to him; while the goodnatured unambitious man, lacking religion, fearing no ultimate judgment, denying that he is made for eternity, has in him no iron to maintain order and justice and freedom. Mere enlightened self-interest will submit to any strong evil. In one aspect or another, fear insists upon forcing itself into our lives. If the fear of God is obscured, then obsessive fear of suffering, poverty, and sickness will come to the front; or if a well-cushioned state keeps most of these worries at bay, then the tormenting neuroses of modern man, under the labels of “insecurity” and “anxiety” and “constitutional inferiority,” will be the dominant mode of fear. And these latter forms of fear are the more dismaying, for there are disciplines by which one may diminish one’s fear of God. But to remedy the causes of fear from the troubles of our time is beyond the power of the ordinary individual; and to put the neuroses to sleep, supposing any belief in a transcendent order to be absent, there is only the chilly comfort of the analyst’s couch or the tranquilizing drug. By fashionable philodoxies (opinions) of our modern era, by our dominant system of education, by the tone of the serious and the popular press, by the assumptions of the politicians, by most of the sermons to the churchgoers, post-Christian man has been persuaded to do what man always has longed to do—that is, to forget the fear of the Lord. And with that fear have also departed his wisdom and his courage. Only a ferocious drunken farmer is unenlightened enough to affirm a primary tenet of religion in great red letters, and he does not know its meaning. Freedom from fear, if I read St. John aright, is one of the planks in the platform of the Antichrist. But that freedom is delusory and evanescent, and is purchased only at the cost of spiritual and political enslavement. In ends at Armageddon. So in our time, as Yeats saw, Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Lacking conviction that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, the captains and the kings yield to the fierce ideologues, the merciless adventurers, the charlatans and the metaphysically mad. And then, truly, when the stern and righteous God of fear and love has been denied, the Savage God lays down his new commandments. Sincere God-fearing men, I believe, are now a scattered remnant. Yet as it was with Isaiah, so it may yet be with us, that disaster brings consciousness of that stubborn remnant and brings, too, a renewed knowledge of the source of wisdom. Truth and hardihood may find a lodging in some modern hearts when the new schoolmen and the parsons, or some of them, are brought to confess that it is a terrible thing to be delivered into the hands of the living God. . . ." - "The Rarity of the God-Fearing Man" - Russell Kirk.

11 posted on 02/08/2018 9:12:10 AM PST by loveliberty2
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: nikos1121

Hopefully the concern trolls who were oh-so-worried he might be an atheist are resting a bit easier - now if they could only get a grip on their other “concerns”....


12 posted on 02/08/2018 9:16:37 AM PST by trebb (I stopped picking on the mentally ill hypocrites who pose as conservatives...;-})
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: loveliberty2

What an absolutely fantastic quote! Is that whole book as good as this quote?


13 posted on 02/08/2018 10:04:02 AM PST by boxlunch (Pray for Donald Trump and his administration! Disband the Democrat Media Communist Complex)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 11 | View Replies]

To: nikos1121

.
The Washington Compost hangs its head in sorrow.

Eff’m!
.


14 posted on 02/08/2018 10:09:08 AM PST by editor-surveyor (Freepers: Not as smart as I'd hoped they'd be)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: ilovesarah2012

.
What do you have against the “religion of peas?”
.


15 posted on 02/08/2018 10:11:32 AM PST by editor-surveyor (Freepers: Not as smart as I'd hoped they'd be)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 8 | View Replies]

To: editor-surveyor

Everything


16 posted on 02/08/2018 10:16:46 AM PST by ilovesarah2012
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 15 | View Replies]

To: boxlunch
Re your Post #13 and Dr. Russell Kirk's writings. The quotation you referred to is from a larger work, but Dr. Kirk's "The Conservative Mind," was published many years ago, and still available.

The following is from an October post here, and includes more of the original quotation from which today's selection was excerpted (quoted from Kirk's original, including lack of paragraphing).

The kind of fear-mongering and street talk that Democrat/Progressives have engaged in from before the November 8 election has brought us here--all for the reason of protecting and continuing their "progressive"/regressive "transforming" America from its roots in Constitutional limitations on power to one in which "the People" are dumbed down and propagandized so that they will, like sheep, follow false "shepherds."

Many of the "sheeple" Progressives say they are "afraid." That is what they are hearing from their captors, the Progressives, who do fear they may lose grip on their control of everything from education to local government.

What is "fear"?

An ancient text enlightens us, "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom." - Holy Bible

On the other hand, man-induced fears induce nothing but ignorance and more fear.

We might seek out thoughts from the author of The Conservative mind, Russell Kirk, in the following excerpted portions of his, The Rarity of the God-Fearing Man:

"A Michigan farmer, some years ago, climbed to the roof of his silo, and there he painted, in great red letters that the Deity could see, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” These words are on that roof yet.

"Without knowledge of fear, we cannot know order in personality or society. Fear forms an ineluctable part of the human condition. Fear lacking, hope and aspiration fail. To demand for mankind “freedom from fear,” as politically attainable, was a silly piece of demagogic sophistry. If, per impossible, fear were wiped altogether out of our lives, we would be desperately bored, yearning for old or new terrors; vegetating, we would cease to be human beings. A child’s fearful joy in stories of goblins, witches, and ghosts is a natural yearning after the challenge of the dreadful: raw head and bloody bones, in one form or another, the imagination demands. . . . And there are things which rightfully we ought to fear, if we are to enjoy and dignity as men. When, in an age of smugness and softness, fear has been pushed temporarily into the dark corners of personality and society, then soon the gods of the copybook headings with fire and slaughter return. To fear to commit evil, and to hate what is abominable, is the mark of manliness. “They will never love where they ought to love,” Burke says, “who do not hate where they ought to hate.” It may be added that they will never dare when they ought to dare, who do not fear when they ought to fear. Time was when there lay too heavy upon man that fear of the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom. Soul-searching can sink into morbidity, and truly conscience can make cowards of us all. Scotland in the seventeenth century, for instance, tormented itself into a kind of spiritual hypochondria by an incessant melancholy fawning up upon the Lord’s favor. But no such age is ours. Forgetting that there exists such a state as salutary dread, modern man has become spiritually foolhardy. His bravado, I suspect, will stand the test no better than ancient Pistol’s. He who admits no fear of God is really a post-Christian man; for at the heart of Judaism and Christianity lies a holy dread. And a good many people, outwardly and perhaps inwardly religious . . . today deny the reality of reverential fear, and thus are post-Christian without confessing it. Christianity always was a scandal; and I rather think I began to fear God because I discovered that terror to be so unconventional, impractical, and off-color in our era. . . . Before I began to think much on the spiritual diseases of our century, I revolted against the disgusting smugness of modern America—particularly the complacency of professors and clergymen, the flabby clerisy of a sensate time. Once I found myself in a circle of scholars who were discussing solemnly the conditions necessary for arriving at scientific truth. Chiefly from a perverse impulse to shock the Academy of Lagado, perhaps, I muttered, “We have to begin with the dogma that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.” I succeeded in scandalizing. Some gentlemen and scholars took this for indecent levity; others, unable to convince themselves that anyone could mean this literally, groped for the presumptive allegorical or symbolical meaning behind my words. But two or three churchgoers in the gathering were not displeased. These were given to passing the collection plate and to looking upon the church as a means to social reform; incense, vestments, and the liturgy have their aesthetic charms, even among doctors of philosophy. Faintly pleased, yes, these latter professors, to hear the echo of fife and drum ecclesiastic; but also embarrassed at such radicalism. “Oh no, “ they murmured, “not the fear of God. You mean the love of God, don’t you?” For them the word of Scriptures was no warrant, their Anglo-Catholicism notwithstanding. With Henry Ward Beecher, they were eager to declare that God is Love—though hardly a love which passes all understanding. Theirs was a thoroughly permissive God the Father, properly instructed by Freud. Looking upon their mild and diffident faces, I wondered how much trust I might put in such love as they knew. Their meekness was not that of Moses. Meek before Jehovah, Moses had no fear of Pharaoh; but these doctors of the schools, much at ease in Zion, were timid in the presence of a traffic policeman. Although convinced that God is too indulgent to punish much of anything, they were given to trembling before Caesar. Christian love is the willingness to sacrifice oneself; yet I would not have counted upon these gentlemen to adventure anything of consequence for my sake, nor even for those with greater claims upon them. I doubted whether the Lord would adventure much on their behalf. . . . The great grim Love which makes Hell a part of the nature of things, my colleagues could not apprehend. And, lacking knowledge of that Love, at once compassionate and retributive, their sort may bring us presently to a terrestrial hell, which is the absence of God from the affairs of men. . . . Every age portrays God in the image of its poetry and politics. In one century, God is an absolute monarch, exacting his due; in another century still an absolute sovereign, but a benevolent despot; again, perhaps a grand gentleman among aristocrats; at a different time, a democratic president, with an eye to the ballot box. It has been said that to many of our generation, God is a Republican and works in a bank; but this image is giving way, I think, to God as Chum—at worst, God as a playground supervisor. So much for the images. But in reality God does not alter. . . . What raises up heroes and martyrs is the fear of God. Beside the terror of God’s judgment, the atrocities of the totalist tyrant are pinpricks. A God-intoxicated man, knowing that divine love and divine wrath are but different aspects of a unity, is sustained against the worst this world can do to him; while the goodnatured unambitious man, lacking religion, fearing no ultimate judgment, denying that he is made for eternity, has in him no iron to maintain order and justice and freedom. Mere enlightened self-interest will submit to any strong evil. In one aspect or another, fear insists upon forcing itself into our lives. If the fear of God is obscured, then obsessive fear of suffering, poverty, and sickness will come to the front; or if a well-cushioned state keeps most of these worries at bay, then the tormenting neuroses of modern man, under the labels of “insecurity” and “anxiety” and “constitutional inferiority,” will be the dominant mode of fear. And these latter forms of fear are the more dismaying, for there are disciplines by which one may diminish one’s fear of God. But to remedy the causes of fear from the troubles of our time is beyond the power of the ordinary individual; and to put the neuroses to sleep, supposing any belief in a transcendent order to be absent, there is only the chilly comfort of the analyst’s couch or the tranquilizing drug. By fashionable philodoxies (opinions) of our modern era, by our dominant system of education, by the tone of the serious and the popular press, by the assumptions of the politicians, by most of the sermons to the churchgoers, post-Christian man has been persuaded to do what man always has longed to do—that is, to forget the fear of the Lord. And with that fear have also departed his wisdom and his courage. Only a ferocious drunken farmer is unenlightened enough to affirm a primary tenet of religion in great red letters, and he does not know its meaning. Freedom from fear, if I read St. John aright, is one of the planks in the platform of the Antichrist. But that freedom is delusory and evanescent, and is purchased only at the cost of spiritual and political enslavement. In ends at Armageddon. So in our time, as Yeats saw, Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Lacking conviction that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, the captains and the kings yield to the fierce ideologues, the merciless adventurers, the charlatans and the metaphysically mad. And then, truly, when the stern and righteous God of fear and love has been denied, the Savage God lays down his new commandments. Sincere God-fearing men, I believe, are now a scattered remnant. Yet as it was with Isaiah, so it may yet be with us, that disaster brings consciousness of that stubborn remnant and brings, too, a renewed knowledge of the source of wisdom. Truth and hardihood may find a lodging in some modern hearts when the new schoolmen and the parsons, or some of them, are brought to confess that it is a terrible thing to be delivered into the hands of the living God. . . ." - "The Rarity of the God-Fearing Man" - Russell Kirk.


17 posted on 02/08/2018 11:48:27 AM PST by loveliberty2
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 13 | View Replies]

To: nikos1121

It’s been nearly three decades but we finally have a true Christian as President


18 posted on 02/08/2018 11:49:41 AM PST by WashingtonFire (President Trump - it's like having your dad as President)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: nikos1121

Christian Nationalism? Never heard of that movement or organization. Probably just another “hate group” conjured up by the SPLC hate group.


19 posted on 02/08/2018 1:04:04 PM PST by fortes fortuna juvat ( Who are the idiots who elected this dreadful Pope? They need to unelect him. He is a disgrace.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson