alabuck Loc: Tennessee

President Trump took the Lord’s name in vain Thursday in remarks to Republican members of Congress.

By Julie Zauzmer 
September 14, 2019 at 6:00 a.m. CDT

President Trump has had trouble with a number of the Ten Commandments. There’s the adultery. There’s the prohibition against giving false witness, for a man who has made more than 12,000 false or misleading claims (a.k.a. lies) during his presidency. And then, there’s this commandment: Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain. That’s the one the president violated again on Thursday night (September 12, 2019), when he joked about “goddamn windmills” while talking about energy policy with House Republicans in Baltimore. For some of the president’s evangelical supporters, Trump’s occasional use of the word “goddamn” is a bridge too far, even for a president whose behavior they’ve grown accustomed to excusing as they fervently support his policies.

“I certainly do not condone taking the Lord’s name in vain. There is a whole commandment dedicated to prohibiting that,” said the Rev. Robert Jeffress, a Texas megachurch leader who is one of Trump’s most outspoken evangelical advisers and supporters. “I think it’s very offensive to use the Lord’s name in vain. I can take just about everything else, except that,” when it comes to off-color language.

In spite of his crude, crass and vulgar utterances, the vast majority of evangelicals are expected to still stand by Trump in 2020. Trump has been urged, in the past, to cease using this particular word. A state senator from West Virginia, Paul Hardesty, told Politico in August that he got calls from three constituents after one Trump rally alone. He wrote a letter to the White House: “Never utter those words again.”

At that rally, the president had told a North Carolina crowd about the Islamic State, “They’ll be hit so goddamn hard,” and had recalled warning a businessman, “If you don’t support me, you’re going to be so goddamn poor.”

President Trump on July 18 falsely said he stopped the crowd at his July 17 rally from chanting "Send her back!" toward Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a chant Democrats decried as r****t. Trump allowed ‘Send her back!’ chants for 13 seconds. But it was the blasphemy that spurred some West Virginians to call their Trump-supporting state senator to ask him to do something about the president’s language.

That’s not surprising to Timothy Jay, a retired psychology professor who made it his business for 40 years to be the world’s leading expert on swear words. “I’ve done surveys where I ask people: What’s the most offensive word?” Jay said. “Some [religious] women would say the word ‘f---,’ but they wouldn’t say ‘Jesus Christ.’ Some of my interviewees have said, ‘We could say ‘f---’ and ‘s---’ at home, but we weren’t allowed to use profane language.”

Profanity, Jay notes, is not the same as obscenity. An obscenity is a crude term for a bodily function. Profanity demeans something from the sacred realm — for example, misusing the words ‘hell’ or ‘damn,’ which in some Christian interpretations ought to be reserved for talking only about God’s role in judging the dead.
Blasphemy is a specific type of profanity — an insult to God.

Donald Trump uses the rhetorical strategies of Cicero, the greatest orator in history. American culture tends to consider obscenities to be more taboo. An f-bomb sounds much more crude to most listeners than “hell” or “goddamn” or an exclamation of “Jesus Christ.”

“Theologically, that’s backwards,” said Karen Prior, an English professor at Liberty University, the conservative evangelical school in Virginia. “You can look at any culture and see what it values by its swear words. Wh**ever it is that it values most, those are the things that will have words related to them that are verboten.”

In other words, she said, Christians ought to hold the sacred in the highest esteem and care much more about words that demean it. When she teaches her students at Liberty about the plays “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Death of a Salesman,” shows replete with sexual expressions and coarse arguments, she lectures: “As Christians, the most offensive thing probably should be Willy Loman’s taking of the Lord’s name in vain throughout the play.”

She noted that Christian squeamishness about vulgar bodily terms arises out of the Victorian era, not the early church, and can change with the times. “Martin Luther had quite a mouth,” she said.

Jeffress agreed that profanity is more problematic than other crass language. Asked to compare Trump’s use of “goddamn” to his infamous reference to certain nations as “s**thole countries” — a statement which several evangelical pastors did condemn — Jeffress said the worse offense was the profanity.

“I would never condone taking the Lord’s name in vain,” he said. “When it comes to other types of foul language, that’s a concern, but it’s certainly not the major concern when we’re in a virtual battle for the soul of the nation.”

Language aside, Trump remains highly popular among evangelical v**ers. Almost 70 percent of white evangelicals told Pew Research Center this year that they approve of his performance in office. Most evangelicals support him for appointing conservative Supreme Court justices, restricting a******n access and L**T rights, favoring Israel and other policy priorities.

‘He gets it’: Evangelicals are thrilled by Trump’s first term
Jeffress said he hears from pastors and congregants in conservative parts of the country who are concerned about Trump’s language, including the insults he uses on Twitter. But the president is not losing their v**es, the evangelical leader said.
“He enjoys a tremendous amount of support from people of faith not because of his language, but in spite of his language,” Jeffress said. “Most Americans did not oppose the salty language of General Patton. All they cared about was that he led us to victory. Many Christians believe we are in a war … for the culture, a war for the soul of America.”

In his speech in Baltimore on Thursday, Trump came out swinging against many of his favorite targets, including his 2016 rival Hillary Clinton and several of his prospective 2020 rivals, for whom he engaged in another of his favorite rhetorical moves: name-calling. He referred to “Sleepy Joe,” “Crazy Bernie” and “Pocahontas.”

He arrived at the profanity when he turned to criticizing wind power, with an incorrect description of the technology.
“The energy is intermittent. If you happen to be watching the Democrat debate and the wind isn’t blowing, you’re not going to see the debate. ‘Charlie, what the hell happened to this debate?’ He says, ‘Darling, the wind isn’t blowing. The goddamn windmill stopped,’” Trump said to the Republican congressmen, who laughed. Just so you know, wind power does not stop electrical appliances when the wind stops blowing. Electrical power grids don’t work that way.

Trump is not alone in the 2020 field in employing strong language once considered unfit for polite discussion. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) and New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) have all said “damn” in Democratic debates. Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio), Andrew Yang and Julián Castro have all used obscenities in debates, interviews or tweets.

Former congressman Beto O’Rourke has become so well-known for cursing on the campaign trail that his campaign sells official $30 T-shirts that use the words “hell” and “f*cked up.” But Jay, the expert who has published decades of research studies on swearing, says that Democrats remain deeply cautious about one taboo when it comes to language: terms that are offensive on the basis of g****r or race. That’s another taboo-line that Trump has long ago crossed, and re-crossed, many, many times.

Canuckus Deploracus Loc: North of the wall

Don't care about the language a man uses...

Place importance on the policies he champions...

There is not a single v**er out there who is not aware of Trump's mouth...

Kevyn

Trump is the new lord and savior to his slavishly sycophantic cult, for him to blaspheme the old God that they have turned their backs on to worship him is entirely irrelevant to them.

lpnmajor Loc: Arkansas

Religion has nothing to do with it...........................it's all about power and influence. Religion and religious precepts are a smoke screen.

alabuck Loc: Tennessee

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Not knowing your religious inclinations, I can understand your viewpoints if spoken from a non-believer or, at best, a theologically neutral viewpoint.

As to his policies, well just have to agree to disagree. To me, his policies - if one can count his, “...using my gut...” to make decisions - are resulting in his undermining every political norm and law he disagrees with. His “governing by fiat” is doing far more harm to the country than I thought possible. The degrees to which he un-dues and disregards legal statutes and procedures is terrifying to most.

He holds himself above the law and defies anyone or any thing that has the legal authority to check him and his authority. Part of what drives his defying the acceptance of 3 co-equal branches of government comes in 2 parts. First is his own blatant ignorance of government and how it works. Second, he’s surrounded himself with unscrupulous people who aid him by looking for any loop-hole or even making-up lies in their efforts to circumvent the law and assist him in getting his way.

His words and deeds are a more modern version of f*****t techniques used in the 1920’s and ‘30’s, by Mussolini and Hitler. He’s convincing people that we’re under attack from armies of Mid-American Hispanics and making it sound like their goal is to take over the country when all they want is an opportunity to have a life free from gangs and abject poverty.

His constant lying, over 12,000 and counting, plus his childish insulting world leaders have cost us the trust of old allies and has embolden our enemies. He’s - willie-nillie - pulled us from viable treaties. He’s chosen to suck-up to dictators and has taken the word of their word over the word of our own intelligence community. He’s insulted various government agencies; even going to the point of having people threatened with losing their job for disagreeing with him and his wrong pronouncements. Case in point is Trump’s recent fiasco with his weather forecasting. That he would re-draw a weather map just to make blunder appear to be correct shows just how much of he’s afraid of appearing wrong, about anything. Then, he has his commerence secretary chew on the NOAA leadership and, in turn, chew on the worker-bees. Just how “p**********l” is that kind of behavior? It’s more like a dictator.

I could go on and on. I think you get my drift. Trump is not leader. He’s a menace to us, the world and himself.