Trump’s true believers, part two
Last month, to mark Donald Trump’s first year as president, I checked in with Jeff Hunt, who directs the politically active Centennial Institute at Colorado Christian University.
The resulting column, “Donald Trump’s true believers,” focused on Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration, the president’s argument that the United States shouldn’t take in immigrants from mostly black countries, Charlottesville, Stormy Daniels, Roy Moore and etc.
The inspiration for the column sprang in part from a year spent trying to make sense of the many white evangelicals who gleefully support Trump despite the things he does and says that tread all over their core values.
My goal wasn’t then and isn’t now to attack, but to appeal for reasonableness in the public square. Evangelic Christians have much to add to the debate, so I would hope these people I hail from would be more critical when it should obviously suit their purposes.
But Hunt is playing the long game. “I look at a president that has empowered the faith community to be the faith community after dealing for eight years with a president who sought to reduce and restrict it,” Hunt said.
What specifically does this mean? The answer is that Trump’s administration has stripped protections against discrimination from the LGBT community, removed requirements that employers pay for contraception, rescinded the Cole memo and placed a conservative likely hostile to Roe vs. Wade on the Supreme Court.
I left those arguments unchallenged for reasons of space, but they deserve exploration, for at least one item in that list says quite a lot about this brand of Christianity that I can’t imagine Jesus would have tolerated.
I’m willing to give those who support Trump for religious reasons the employer-contraception argument and the Neil Gorsuch victory. While I’m prochoice, I understand the pro-life position and would choose life in almost all cases. It’s worth considering the community’s principled views on whether a fetus should be terminated, as long as women are still allowed to make the choice for themselves.
I also get the anti-marijuana sentiment that informs nixing the Cole memo. I find it a silly and reckless position to hold, but in the context of Christian support for the Trump administration, we should be able to agree that it’s certainly in keeping with those who believe drinking alcohol is a sin. (Though Trump did tell Coloradans he would support state’s rights on the issue, and Jesus was an excellent maker of wine.)
But without doubt, one item on this list should stand out as truly loathsome.
People of faith are free to believe what they want, but we should all have serious problems treating gay and transgender people as second-class citizens, unequal in any way before the eyes of our human-made laws. Jesus wouldn’t have done that. I see both practical and spiritual conflict here.
Practically speaking, it’s no longer where we are as a country in 2018. Religions evolve (see slavery, just for starters), and it’s time evangelicals come around.
This kind of bigotry was exactly among the faith’s contradictions that led to my loss of faith and pushed me away from plans to be an evangelic preacher, or missionary to places like Haiti.
Because there are a lot of people like me in this world, the fact should matter to evangelicals.
After all, the next generation of potential church-goers is growing up in a country where, finally, they are allowed to see what it looks like when the LGBT community has more equal rights. Turns out gay and transgender people can be just as cool or uncool as the rest of us.
Trump himself gave a shoutout to the LGBT community in his nomination speech, and promised he would be their president.
The church I went to preached that we are all natural born sinners. So it’s hard to believe that Jesus would have singled out one group for discrimination.
Certainly, Jesus would have expected the faithful to live good Christian lives, and preached against those living sinfully. But who among us would choose to go to church with others who deny basic civil rights?
Hard to understand how one could be accepting of Trump’s willful and unrepentant sins, but discriminatory to this human community based on who they love or how they understand their gender.
What the next generation knows is that the science of modern psychology tells us that gay and transgender people had little to no choice in their alignment. They were born that way.
Christians can believe otherwise, of course, but it’s way past time for our evangelic leaders to see the light of equal treatment and step away from the darkness of discrimination.