Donald Trump begins a troll of Ben Carson

All during the 2008 primary season and the 2012 primary and general campaigns Mitt Romney’s Mormon religion was fodder for the left. The silly twit, McKay Coppins, wrote a piece for BuzzFeed titled A Brief Guide To “Mormon Underwear”. The Atlantic promised Mormon Underwear, Revealed.

Now Donald Trump has brought up the fact that Dr. Ben Carson is a Seventh Day Adventist:

He also derided Carson, who in some Iowa polls is leading Trump, as “super low on energy.”

“He’s even lower-energy than Bush,” he said.

Trump also took an indirect shot at Carson for his religion.

“I’m Presbyterian. That’s down the middle of road,” he said. “I mean, Seventh-day Adventist I don’t know about.”

Carson is a Seventh-day Adventist, a Protestant denomination that believes in a literal reading of the Bible.

I am not a Seventh Day Adventist. What I do know about them is that they are Trinitarian Christians (which is all that is important) and they have religious practices that are deeply rooted in the German Sabbatarian movement and New England Universalism. Their practices are instantly recognizable to anyone vaguely conversant with the Old Testament. They are socially conservative, and, unlike Trump’s flavor of Presbyterianism, they do not recognize homosexual marriage, they do not ordain women, and they believe marriage is a holy covenant for life. This makes them much more of an orthodox Christian denomination than mainstream Presbyterianism.

As a Catholic, I don’t agree with a lot of their practices and interpretations. But as a Catholic I recognize that Protestants, in general, don’t agree with my perspective on a lot of things. Even as we are divided by our practices we are unified in our belief in the Trinity and the saving sacrifice of Christ on The Cross.

You don’t have to be a genius to see what Trump is up to here.

Stage 1. Imply Seventh Day Adventism is some sort of weird cult.

Stage 2. If anyone takes the bait, throw Ben Carson’s statement about Muslims should not be president at them.

This is how Trump operates. He starts these social media food fights and uses them to keep his name in the media. His schtick is wearing thin and I’ll suspect he will find that this line of attack on Carson will end badly for him.

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