She had known exactly what Ben Carson meant when he spoke of leaders who are trying to “destroy America.” That meant President Obama. She had understood perfectly when he spoke of all the “secular progressives who don’t like *Judeo-Christian values” and “want to destroy your family.” That meant all the liberals who would ridicule Christians like her.
But to see Carson from Mike and Toni Ledet’s front porch, the reverse is true: To them, Carson is the only candidate who fully grasps what they see as the one reality that matters most — that America has fallen away from God. And while other Republican contenders express some version of that sentiment, Toni says it is Carson who seems both the closest to God and the furthest from Obama, who troubles her deeply.
The rise of Carson toward the top of the polls in the Republican presidential primary race has baffled many political pundits, liberals and some within the GOP establishment, who find his positions short on details, and certain assertions — that the biblical figure Joseph built the Egyptian pyramids to store grain, that the Chinese are operating in Syria — out of touch with reality
“I think there is going to be an issue in the near future,” she says, sitting in her rocking chair. “He’s got, what, eight months left in his term?”
“A year,” says Mike, a doctor, sipping a glass of water.
“Still, that’s the short term,” says Toni, a fiction writer. “I think he’s staging a certain situation for himself before he leaves office. I think he’s preparing this country to suit his benefit — i.e. refugees, medical issues, gun laws . . .* ”
“I read his book, and I was just awed,” Mike says, referring to “Gifted Hands,” Carson’s book about his rise from impoverished child to world-famous brain surgeon, in which he describes a God who answered his every prayer, no matter how urgent or mundane — from taking away his anger to giving him exam answers to locating his passport. “He believes there’s a higher power.”
“He has to have a higher power to do what he does,” says Toni, who saw the movie version on a Christian TV channel. “Anybody would know that.”
“I know it’s not politically correct to say,” she began. “But every nation that has fallen has fallen because they are anti-God. We have no future if we keep going like this. Except beheadings.”
Nearby was Mike Wilson, 49, who said he loves that Carson is “not afraid to offend people” by talking about the thing that worries him most: “radical Muslims.”
“If we don’t have godly people running the country, we are going to be in trouble,” said a woman named Aurelia, who didn’t want to give her last name and whose comment elicited nods from the people sitting around her, including a pale young woman named Kinsley who said only a godly person could stand up to Muslim terrorists.
