In a February 29 Washington Post article Russell Moore, President of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, blasted evangelicals for supporting Donald Trump for president.
He went so far as to say this election has made him “hate the word ‘evangelical’,” accusing evangelical supporters for Trump of corrupting everything evangelicalism stands for.
A day later Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center who served in the last three Republican administrations, wrote a similar article for the New York Times.
Like Moore, Wehner is shocked by the support evangelicals are giving a man who he insists is basically a moral degenerate.
Progressive voters in general and Christians in particular should welcome articles like the ones Moore and Wehner have written, except for the fact that…
Well, except for the fact that without realizing it Moore explains exactly why it is entirely consistent with modern evangelicalism that so many evangelicals are supporting Trump…
And Wehner shows that he really does understand what evangelicalism is.
Let’s start with Wehner.
He writes, “At its core, Christianity teaches that everyone, no matter at what station or in what season in life, has inherent dignity and worth. ‘Follow justice and justice alone,’ Deuteronomy says, ‘so that you may live and possess the land the Lord your God is giving you’.”
The problem is, what Wehner believes is the core teaching of Christianity is not at all what evangelicalism teaches and what evangelicals believe.
Evangelicals for Social Action may believe in justice seeking, but the group was only founded in 1973 precisely because justice had not been on the evangelical radar up to that point. Today its members have at best a tangential influence within the evangelical movement.
What is much more impactful on evangelicalism is precisely what Moore says in his article is its heart and soul:
“…good news for sinners through the life, death, resurrection and reign of Jesus of Nazareth as the son of God and anointed ruler of the cosmos…[and] “a commitment to the truth of God’s revelation in the Bible and a conviction that the blood of Christ is offered to any repentant, believing sinner as a full atonement for sin.”
Translated he is saying: “All Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and all other non-Christians have been doomed to hell by a God who set only one gate at the entrance to heaven with a sign over it that reads, Christians only.”
This is what evangelicals have been taught to believe, making the support of Trump among rank ‘n file evangelicals entirely predictable.
After all, Trump speaks with certainty about everything, especially the decline of America and whose fault that is, Islam as an enemy of America and all Muslims as a potential threat to our way of life, or the need to build walls to heaven to keep out whoever he says should be kept out.
Trump is the perfect candidate for evangelicals precisely because he thinks politically the way they think religiously – in absolutes.
In short, the Republican Party created Trumpism, and evangelicalism gave birth to many of its supporters.
This is what Wehner doesn’t understand and Moore doesn’t like.
It is difficult to be sympathetic to their dilemma since, to paraphrase an old axiom, Republicans and evangelicals chose to ride on the back of a tiger and now don’t know how to dismount without ending up inside.
linnposts.com 