"It's based completely around the idea of persecution and loss of power," said journalist and author Jared Yates Sexton, who has written two books on the subject, one of them forthcoming this September. and Paula White, the firebrand Florida pastor who has known Trump since 2002 and once called for "all satanic pregnancies to miscarry."
There's Pence, Pompeo and Perry, but also outside advisers such as Jerry Falwell Jr. The evangelical Christians who infamously carried Trump to victory now surround him, insulate him, advise him and steer his policies. Of course, another generation was already there. When President Trump named McEnany his new press secretary on April 7, two weeks before the Columbine massacre turned 21, the martyr generation, Manseau says, "reached the highest levels of political influence." If I have to sacrifice everything … I will." I am not going to justify my faith to them, and I am not going to hide the light that God has put in me. As Congress tries relentlessly to squelch religious liberty and remove God from our public buildings, our schools, and our heritage, let's choose instead to honor the written word of Rachel Joy Scott this April 20th: "I am not going to apologize for speaking the Name of Jesus. Manseau cites a column quoting Scott, published in The Blaze to mark the 14th anniversary of the Columbine shootings. McEnany has writtem about Scott frequently.
That generation saw in Scott's death "a template for how to respond to anything they regard as evil - which, in practice, can include not only actual violence but perceived attacks upon their beliefs," Manseau writes.Ī line from Scott's journal - "I am a warrior for Christ" - became the "rallying cry" for young people who saw the world as "a story of faith held at gunpoint," Manseau writes.
Rooted in fact or not, the myth riveted a generation of evangelical Christians McEnany's age, who carry Scott's martyrdom with them to this day - percolating up as recently as the 2016 movie "I Am Not Ashamed." It is unclear whether this actually happened. As the story goes, Scott was shot four times one of the shooters came up to her and asked if she believed in God she said that she did he shot her dead. One of the most influential people in McEnany's life, Manseau says, is Rachel Joy Scott, the 17-year-old Christian who was the first victim at Columbine High School in 1999. Manseau's article, however, focuses on the martyrdom. But to evangelicals, martyrdom is an internalization of the crusader mentality - two sides, same violent coin. Those officials are more commonly thought of as crusaders, as opposed to martyrs. If a representative of that strand was now speaking on behalf of the president of the United States, it had already sewn itself into the tapestry of the administration, in the figures of evangelical fundamentalists such as Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Energy Secretary Rick Perry. In McEnany, he writes, "a uniquely American strand of faith formed by ideas of religious persecution has found an opportunity for profound influence": Christian martyrdom. Manseau places McEnany in the vein of conservative evangelicals whose embrace of Trump seemingly requires them to abandon core tenets of their faith.
"This spring I had a different experience: A former student became the most prominent storyteller in America, and now the future of the country seems to hang on the meaning of the stories she might tell," he continued. "Friends who teach writing, as I once did, often relate the pride they feel seeing young women and men who sat in their classrooms launch careers as authors or journalists," he wrote.
Bush at the time - so his insight is perhaps unique among other professors. Manseau taught McEnany in an undergrad memoir-writing class - she was interning for President George W. His article, published earlier this month in the New Republic, is a warning in all but name, a American religious historian's observations about the underpinnings of his former student's worldview - an analysis one could read as sacrificial or suicidal. When Peter Manseau heard that a former student of his at Georgetown, Kayleigh McEnany, had been named the new White House press secretary, he felt compelled to write about it.