The locusts have arrived.
Via Helena IR:
As images of dead Syrian children flashed across his television this month in Montana, David LeBleu prayed it would finally change minds.
“Could this be our chance?” he wondered.
LeBleu, 73, had been campaigning for a year to bring refugees to his tiny mountainside town of Whitefish. But in conservative Flathead County, he was making little headway.
Donald Trump had won the county with 65 percent of the vote in the presidential election and found widespread support there for his “America first” message and pledge to halt refugee resettlement nationwide. In that sense, the region wasn’t much different from a broad swath of the nation.
If the deaths of “beautiful babies” — as Trump had put it — in what the U.S. said was a poison gas attack couldn’t sway people, LeBleu figured nothing could.
“They don’t like newcomers here,” he said. “They want to just keep things the way they are, in the past.”
LeBleu himself is a newcomer, part of a wave of liberal-minded transplants drawn to Whitefish, population 6,357, for its natural beauty and slower pace of life. He moved from Long Island, N.Y., three years ago, following his daughter after retiring from teaching high school social studies and losing his wife to multiple sclerosis and cancer.
He was delighted that people would “talk to you on the street and ask how you were doing.” As a lifelong Christian, he was pleased to see churches everywhere.
But the faith that dominated northwest Montana was far more conservative than LeBleu had ever experienced.
To him, being a Presbyterian meant a life of public service and openness to other cultures. Back in Long Island, he sat on a refugee council at his church and once housed a Vietnamese refugee and her two sons. He joined churchgoers for a trip to refugee camps in the Middle East, and his church hosted a Coptic Christian priest from Egypt and a pastor from Syria.
But in Whitefish, the Presbyterian churches he visited were more interested in the Bible than the wider world and didn’t share his passion for women’s or gay rights.
LeBleu finally found a spiritual home alongside other liberal transplants at the Whitefish United Methodist Church. It was already working internationally to pay the salaries of Christian pastors in Angolan villages.[…]
By the time Trump took office, LeBleu was on the verge of giving up.
His church committee stopped meeting and he started spending more time with his fiancee, a Montana native and a liberal like him. He saw more of his daughter, who runs the kitchen for a mountain guide company, and her two children.