Donald Trump’s worldview
The eyes of the world this week will be focused on the Republican National Convention, but almost no one is talking about the vast majority of Donald Trump-supporting delegates who are Evangelical Christians. The billion-dollar question begging an answer is: Why are they supporting him? As an Evangelical journalist, the answer to me is clear, but since presidential candidates are not judged based upon this matter, few would know it.
The answer is worldview. Trump’s worldview is one of moral clarity, or simply put: Good versus evil. Liberals such as President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have a difficult time seeing moral issues clearly because they are moral relativists. They reject absolute standards of good and evil right and wrong.
In their worldview man is capable of perfection, human nature is on a path toward enlightenment and the concept of original sin is primitive. Secular humanists make excuses for evil, or worse, deny evil exists and coddle it by refusing to confront it. Humanists invented Yasser Arafat as a peacemaker and gave him the facade of a freedom fighter, not a terrorist.
In Donald Trump’s worldview, America was attacked because it is a Christian nation, and Israel is attacked because it is a Jewish nation. The Left mocks such beliefs as simplistic and ignorant because they do not believe that evil really exists, that people are basically good, and it’s better to talk with people and show tolerance.
The Left hates both Israel’s obsession with a Jewish state, and the America in which evangelicals dream. They subject Christians to scorn, ridicule, and discrimination. The leftist belief is that a perfect world is a weak and endemic America that embraces the perpetrator and castigates the victim.
The Left has convinced many Americans that the war on terrorism cannot be won. Conversely, Evangelicals believe that those who wage war against us are evil. The Left sees Americans as evil for retaliating against the malevolence of terrorists, and that self-loathing and appeasement should replace righteous indignation.
Evangelicals see the terrorism in Europe as a result of weak leftist immigration policies. They also see the cop killings in America as a result of Obama’s leftist policies of appeasement.
Evangelicals are uncompromisingly pro-Israel in their view. They believe that the vast majority of Gulf Oil states are simply family-owned corporations— thugocracies—funding terrorism as blackmail to keep the jihadists from attacking them. Many also deem Obama’s cowardly policy on terrorism as emboldening it.
I was invited to Donald Trump’s meeting with Evangelical leaders in New York on June 21 at the New York Marriott. While there, I met with Dr. Ben Carson and said to him, “Please tell Donald Trump to write the pope and tell him who he is.” I had met with the pope the day before in Rome, and was not asking Trump to send his bio, but rather to share his worldview based upon moral clarity.
Ronald Reagan had a similar worldview influenced by author C.S. Lewis in his book Mere Christianity, Right versus Wrong. He was also influenced by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and especially his speech, “A World Set Apart,” at Harvard in 1978. Solzhenitsyn characterized the current global conflict as a physical and spiritual war that has already begun and cannot be won without dealing with the forces of evil. I was invited to briefly address the Republican Convention in 1984 in Dallas, Texas on a Sunday afternoon when Ronald Reagan was reelected. I asked him, “How will you defeat communism?” He smiled and replied, “Oh, I think I will bankrupt that evil empire.”
The author is a #1 New York Times bestselling author. His book Islamic Infidels is available at www.Timeworthybooks.com.