WHERE ARE CHRISTIAN LEADERS?
Evangelicals squander their moral authority by sticking with President Trump
In the wake of President Trump’s waffling on white supremacy, his supporters and advisers have abandoned him in droves. After CEOs defected from the president’s Manufacturing Council and Strategy & Policy Forum, Trump decided to disband both. On Friday, the entire President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities resigned. As the members’ joint letter to Trump declared, “Ignoring your harmful rhetoric would have made us complicit in your words and actions.” The first letter of each paragraph spelled “resist.”
Amid the mass exodus, one group is standing by its man: evangelical Christians. Pastors and activists on Trump’s informal faith advisory council have stated their unwavering support of a man whose statements and behavior consistently clash with the convictions they claim to hold.
PORN AND GAMBLING
Evangelicals have historically opposed pornography and gambling, but Trump once performed a cameo in a soft-core porn film and appeared on the cover of Playboy magazine. One of his erstwhile casinos even housed a strip club.
Evangelicals have often advocated for abstinence education in public schools and the “sanctity of marriage,” but the thrice-married Trump has repeatedly bragged about his loose sexual exploits. The group has widely lamented the secularization of society, but Trump doesn’t regularly attend church.
While evangelicals have fought against rights for the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community, the president has repeatedly stated his unwillingness to overturn the legalization of samesex marriage. When Trump invited Peter Thiel, the openly gay founder of PayPal, to speak at the Republication National Convention, nary a peep was heard from evangelicals. When rumors emerged that Trump would nominate Richard Grenell, a gay man who once served as U.S. spokesman to the United Nations, to be ambassador to NATO, members of Trump’s faith advisory council stated they’d support the president’s decision.
Just a few years earlier, Mitt Romney selected Grenell as a foreign policy adviser, and religious leaders revolted. Pressure grew until Grenell resigned.
When tensions with North Korea escalated, the president insinuated he might launch a nuclear attack on the communist country. Though such a strike would fail to pass the criteria for the historic Christian concept of a “just war,” Trump’s evangelical cadre shrugged it off. Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church in Dallas and member of the executive committee of the White House Faith Initiative, even stated that God had given Trump the authority to take out Kim Jong Un.
‘VERY BALANCED’
After the demonstrations in Charlottesville, Va., the president enraged the nation by vacillating between kind-of-sort-of condemning and openly defending white supremacists.
How did his evangelical advisers respond? By reiterating their support.
Jeffress emailed me that Trump’s response to the Charlottesville protests has been “very balanced.” When asked about the feelings among the faith council, Jeffress said, “The vast majority of this council is just as enthusiastic about President Trump as we were on Election Day.” Why would they stick around? Part of the answer is the lure of White House access at a time when the cultural cache of Christianity is low and religious freedom is at issue in the halls of power, particularly the courts soon to be stocked with Trump appointees.
Council member Johnnie Moore tweeted, “No, I am not pulling out as an evangelical adviser to the White House. It’s not our job to take advice but to give it.” One must wonder at what point the president must not be advised but rather criticized. Conservative Christians have never been meager when criticizing their opponents on the left. As Martin Luther King once said, “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state.”
Four decades ago, evangelical leaders warned that America was entering a period of moral decline. Moral Majority leaders claimed to take up the mantle as the nation’s conscience. Under the Trump administration, the moral decline has been realized, and Christian leaders have ironically enabled it.
If Trump’s bad behavior persists and conservative Christians refuse to jump ship politically, they could end up jumping the shark culturally.
Jonathan Merritt is a contributing writer for The Atlantic and senior columnist for Religion News Service.