Two weeks after Donald Trump put the nail in Ted Cruz’s electoral coffin in Indiana, Samantha Bee set out Monday night to determine just how a “thrice-married, foul-mouthed tit judge” like Trump managed to win the evangelical vote so handily.
“Seriously, what is going on?” the Full Frontal host asked. “Are evangelicals that eager to get the apocalypse going?” Following a montage of Trump’s biggest Christian fails, Bee said that “to understand how we got there, we have to go back to origins of the new religious right,” which she likened to a “wasp in an airplane: they’re small and outnumbered but everyone still has to avoid pissing them off.”
Over the course of her in-depth opening monologue, Bee broke down just how evangelicals went from thinking of politics as a “dirty and ungodly business” to doing everything they could to elect leaders who hold their specific values.
Going back to the early 1970s, Bee said, “It wasn’t abortion that birthed the religious right, it was good old white nativism and anti-government anger when the IRS challenged evangelicals’god-given right to go to school without black people.”
“Please understand when I say the religious right, I’m not talking about people of faith — hashtag #NotAllChristians — but a political movement to harness voting evangelicals to the conservative Republican cause,” Bee added.
And she reminded her viewers that the Christian embrace of Trump is nothing new.
In 1980, at their leaders’ urging, evangelicals abandoned the devout Baptist farmer who taught Sunday school and helped the poor” — Jimmy Carter — “and switched their allegiance to the divorced movie star who hung out with Hollywood Jews and believers in evolution” — Ronald Reagan.
The “good news,” according to Bee, is that “the religious right has been losing ground for 15 years.” For instance, “gay people can marry and serve in the military and apart from a handful of bigoted bakers most people are fine with it.” And “when North Carolina Republicans tried to get people to the polls with a bathroom culture war, the country held their head in the toilet while the Attorney General gave them a swirly.”
“Old-fashioned values voters no longer have the clout to get their fat monster the nomination,” Bee said, bringing it back to Cruz, “much less the Oval Office.”
The bad news? “The new evangelicals are happy to ditch the Bible for good, old white nativism and anti-government anger.”
