Official White House Photo by Joyce Boghosian
Faith leaders lay hands on Trump and pray.
This Christmas should be remembered as the year a clear Christian voice finally called out the hypocrisy of the overwhelming majority of evangelical Christians for supporting a “profoundly immoral” president whose policies of hatred and cruelty toward racial and religious minorities and those most in need among us violate every fundamental Christian principle.
Many of us have been appalled to watch those claiming to be deeply religious evangelical Christians bestow a lopsided 75% to 80% majority of their political support upon Donald Trump, a man constantly demonstrating his total lack of human decency through his cruel social policies, sleazy personal behavior, ceaseless torrent of lies and vicious, hate-filled slurs spewed at anyone who refuses to bow down before him.
But Mark Galli, the retiring editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, an evangelical Christian magazine founded by the late Rev. Billy Graham, clearly had enough of evangelical Christians being associated with a president whose words and actions were a profane violation of every teaching of Christianity.
Galli began his editorial, “Trump Should Be Removed from Office,” with what he identified as the unambiguous facts leading to Trump’s impeachment by the U.S. House of Representatives: “The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.”
Since most elected Republicans refuse to admit even those basic, uncontested facts, Galli added: “Whether Mr. Trump should be removed by the Senate or by popular vote next election—that is a matter of prudential judgment. That he should be removed, we believe, is not a matter of partisan loyalties but loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments.”
‘Blackened Moral Record’
Galli expressed concern evangelical support for Trump was doing long-term damage to Christianity itself. “To the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record,” he wrote, “we might say this: Remember who you are and whom you serve... Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency. If we don’t reverse course now, will anyone take anything we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come?”
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It’s easy to recognize the ongoing destruction of respect for professed evangelical Christians and their leaders. They’ve earned it by disregarding all the beautiful teachings of Christianity about love and kindness toward others to support a cruel, hateful demagogue who intentionally divides us against each other.
Even those of us don’t publicly flaunt our spiritual beliefs often received our basic sense of right and wrong as children in Sunday School. God was love, not hate. Loving your neighbor and treating others as you wanted to be treated doesn’t allow anyone to take children away from immigrant parents and cage them. No one really needs commandments engraved in stone to be disgusted by the idea of a president being spanked by a porn star with a magazine that has his picture on the cover.
Trump treats evangelical Christians as any another extremist interest group. He buys their support by pandering to their beliefs the same way he kept neo-Nazis and David Duke’s Klansmen in his fold after they violently terrorized Charlottesville, Va., by praising their supporters as “very fine people.” For evangelical Christians, Trump appoints judges many of them expect to destroy a woman’s right to decide whether to end a pregnancy while continuing to defund Planned Parenthood whose contraception services could end the need for abortion.
Galli had this warning for Christians who put opposition to abortion above all other Christian values: “None of the president’s positives can balance the moral and political danger we face under a leader of such grossly immoral character.”
Trump reacted as he always does whenever anyone truthfully describes his vile presidency—with absurd lies and angry attacks on Christianity Today. Trump denounced it as “a far-left magazine, or very ‘progressive,’ as some would call it... The fact is, no President has ever done what I have done for Evangelicals, or religion itself!” The president declared he would never again read Christianity Today, which he almost certainly has never read before.
A Washington Post reporter couldn’t find many at Elmbrook Church in Brookfield, Wis., which draws thousands of evangelical Christians to its weekly services, who actually read Galli’s editorial. But a long-haul truck driver attending the church was eager to join Trump in accusing the magazine of embracing the same “social justice movement” he said “infected” many Christian churches over the past 25 years.
Actually, Christians have been strong advocates of social justice for centuries. Wait until those folks find out Jesus Christ also could be described as a socialist.
