linnposts.com

Evangelicals are undergoing a complete moral collapse. I say this for two reasons.

The first is their morally indefensible support for Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy. This is a man whose entire life has been a contradiction to everything evangelicals say they believe and believe in.

He is also a man historian David McCullough describes as “unwise…unqualified, unprepared, and seemingly unhinged” (noted in an earlier blog of mine).

Numerous other historians, scholars, Republican leaders like the Bush family, and ordinary American voters believe the same thing.

Yet evangelicals insist Trump is the man of the hour. That brings me to the second reason for evangelical’s moral collapse.

It is their persistence in defending their support of Trump on moral grounds. Southern Baptist leader, Richard Land, President of Southern Evangelical Seminary in North Carolina, is a case in point.

In a piece he wrote justifying his intended vote for Trump he said: “Mr. Trump will in all probability not be a good president, and he will do many things with which I profoundly disagree. However, I fear Hillary Clinton may be a terminal president who will destroy this venerable republic. Consequently, with sadness of heart, I will cast my vote for Donald Trump and pray that God will have mercy on him and on my beloved country.”

Then, to explain why Hillary will “destroy the venerable republic,” he declared, “She is the most pro-abortion presidential candidate ever nominated by a major party.”

Hmm. Unless Land knows something the rest of us don’t, the only thing Hillary has said in public about abortion is that she supports a woman’s right to choose.

Well, so do I, and for years surveys have shown that the majority of Americans do as well. So if Hillary is “the most pro-abortion presidential candidate ever,” it is only because she is pro-choice like the rest of us.

How that justifies his hyperbolic judgment of Hillary is an enigma to me, but beyond that, think about the logic of believing as Land apparently does that being pro-choice is the same thing as being pro-abortion.

Based on that kind of logic, Voltaire was lying when he famously said, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”

In Land’s world you can’t support freedom of speech without also supporting hate speech that right makes possible.

OMG, I support Land’s right to make a moral mockery of himself so I must agree with him.

But let’s move on.

Land then says that the Clintons together are “morally and financially corrupt.” Well, actually he could be right about Bill, at least when it comes to sex, but his broad slap in Hillary’s face is a different story.

It would seem that the reason he would make that judgment is the AP story about donations to the Clinton Foundation buying favors at the State Department during Hillary’s term there.

Only he has a major problem. The AP story has been exposed for the shoddy journalism it turned out to be.

Journalist, Matthew Yglesia did a thorough study of what the AP claimed and found that in fact all the story showed was this: “Clinton tried to help a Nobel Prize winner. She went to the Kennedy Center Honors. She had a meeting with the head of the charitable arm of MAC Cosmetics about a State Department charitable initiative.”

“What we know, Yglesia concludes, “is that despite very intensive media scrutiny of the Clinton Foundation, we don’t have hard evidence of any kind of corrupt activity. That’s the story.”

In a follow-up after the AP tried to defend its reporting, Yglesia responded: “It’s possible there is misconduct lurking in the not-yet-released [Clinton meeting] schedules, but the story so far is that AP has looked into this and can’t find the goods.”

I have always considered it advisable to corroborate the evidence you want to use to prove a point. Land obviously doesn’t agree with me, or perhaps he just doesn’t care and decided on his own that Hillary is corrupt, whether she actually is or not.

It seems rather obvious when you look at what Land said, and what other evangelicals are saying about their support for Trump, that none of them is genuinely moved by moral outrage to oppose Hillary and vote for Trump.

No, the evidence points to something quite different, to evangelicals being moved by politics rather than morality. They are much more committed to being faithful Republicans than being faithful Christians.

What we are seeing in this election is what we have seen before, that evangelicals like Richard Land are what political commentators refer to as the Republican Party’s “largest and most reliable constituency.” They have been for many years now.

That fact makes their efforts to justify their support of Donald Trump on moral grounds an unmistakable sign of the degree to which they have become morally corrupted by politics, only this year their charade is collapsing under its own weight.

Land also made the comment in defending his intention to vote for Trump by saying: “I feel that if I didn’t vote for Donald Trump in order to defeat Hillary Clinton, I would have to apologize to Jesus.”

As I think about that statement, I think Land may be right. He could very well have to apologize to Jesus.

It just won’t be for the reason he thinks.