Controversy has swelled in the Evangelical Christian community since the departing Christianity Today editor-in-chief Mark Galli called for the removal of President Trump, “a human being who is morally lost and confused.” Galli has never been a fan of the President’s and certainly not of his supporters, Christian or not. Shortly after the President’s election, he contributed to a book with members of the left in which he wrote:
“I know hardly anyone, let alone any evangelical Christian who voted for Trump. I describe evangelicals like me as ‘elite’ evangelicals … and this class of evangelicals has discovered that we have family members so different they seem like aliens in our midst. These other evangelicals often haven’t finished college, and if they have jobs (and apparently a lot of them don’t), they are blue-collar jobs or entry-level work. They don’t write books or give speeches; they don’t attend conferences of evangelicals for social justice or evangelicals for immigration reform. They are deeply suspicious of mainstream media. A lot of them voted for Donald Trump” (qtd. by Larry Provost “Did You Hear What Christianity Today Editor Called Trump Voters?” 26 Dec. 2019, Townhall.com).
Any Christian reading this statement should immediately lose all faith in the wisdom of Mr. Galli, for surely all true Christians know that Jesus taught humility, not arrogance. When Mr. Galli describes himself and “evangelicals like [him] as ‘elite’ evangelicals,” he has neatly removed himself from among the followers of Jesus and placed himself squarely in the midst of the Pharisees and the Sadducees. One can easily imagine him praying loudly, “Oh God, I thank you that I am not like all these moronic evangelicals who voted for Trump!”
But Galli is correct in that he is not alone in his bastion of spiritual supremacy. Napp Nazworth, a self-described “Never-Trumper,” abruptly resigned from The Christian Post after that publication wrote an editorial supporting the President and criticizing Mr. Galli’s editorial.
Likewise, Baptist minister and MSNBC host, Al Sharpton, known for his anti-sematic and anti-white racial epithets, stated that evangelical supporters of Trump are so upset at the Christianity Today editorial because Galli has revealed them for who they are. “They would sell Jesus out if they felt they could get something from it. That’s the inference he’s making from his editorial,” Sharpton contended.
Franklin Graham, whose father Billy Graham founded Christianity Today, has a viewpoint that more closely aligns with mine. His father knew and liked Donald Trump and voted for him in 2016. Graham goes on to remind us that we Christians are all sinners, saved by grace. As Paul writes in Ephesians 2:8-9 “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast,” a verse that Galli has obviously forgotten.
We have determined, then, that we all fall short of God’s morality. But is President Trump so much worse, so much a reprobate, so lost to goodness that we should cast him aside as unworthy to be our President? Black columnist Walter Williams has more than once remarked that Donald Trump is not his Savior. Jesus is his Savior and Donald Trump, whom he supports, is his president. It is a crucial and important distinction. Were we looking for a Savior to lead our country, we would find not a single soul among the over 330 million who would qualify. Not a one of us is pure and without sin. Not a one of us is the Son of God. Not a one of us can save the souls of men.
But President Trump wasn’t elected to be our Savior. He was elected to be our President, to be loud and brash and to speak his mind rather than hide behind political expediency or niceties. He was elected to undo the misdeeds of former presidents: to return the country to prosperity, to protect the unborn, to support the religious freedom of believers, to keep us out of new wars. And these things he has done. Has he done them with flowery words and the decorum of some past presidents? Perhaps not, but he has done them none the less, and that is what is important to many Americans including the evangelicals so denigrated by Galli in his comments.
Two more points need to be made in regard to Galli’s call for the President’s removal from office based upon his being “morally lost and confused.” Has Mr. Galli heard of President Dwight Eisenhower who carried on an affair with his female driver the entire time he was in Europe during WWII while his wife, Mamie, faithfully and lovingly waited at home for his safe return? Or President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who refused to allow his wife at his bedside as he lay dying, but instead died in the arms of his mistress? Or President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, whose little black book contained more than 700 names, and who had the Secret Service smuggle women into the White House under his wife’s nose? Or President Lyndon Johnson who was not only famous for his womanizing, but also for his profanity-laced language, and, who, as “Land-slide Lyndon” won election to the Senate in 1948 solely because of votes which were mysteriously discovered after the polls had closed and the votes had been already counted? Or President Bill Clinton’s whose affair with a White House intern at one point involved a cigar in the Oval Office, and whose lying in a legal deposition and his obstruction of justice had him impeached in the House in 1998 for actual crimes? Or President Obama who both supported and celebrated Planned Parenthood, an organization who in the fiscal year of 2014-1015, for example reported that they had aborted (murdered) 323,999 innocent babies.
Although he is unlikely to find one in this year’s batch of candidates, Galli and his ilk would no doubt prefer a Democrat who attends church every Sunday, teaches Sunday school, and is morally upright with an unassailable character. As Columnist Cal Thomas points out, “Apparently, they forget we have already had such a president. His name is Jimmy Carter.”
The second point involves another couple of verses that apparently are not in Mr. Galli’s Bible. In Romans 13:1, Paul admonishes the Christians in Rome who were chafing under the booted heels of the Roman Legions, “Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God.” This should be a stark reminder to all professing Christians who consider themselves to be anti-Trump. But the next verse should frighten them to death. In verse 2 Paul warns, “Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves.” In other words, like him or not, Christians, according to the Bible, Donald Trump is President of the United States through the Will of God and to resist him is to resist God Himself.
Certainly the president has his flaws. He has been married three times and has been a womanizer, yet if he were currently cheating on the First Lady, it would be screaming across every headline and it is not. His tweets are often his only way to communicate with Americans since the media coverage of him remains over 90% negative, ignoring the good things that are occurring in the country or at the very least, brushing them off as unimportant or really the result of President Obama’s vapid economy from three years ago. That the media is in general extremely biased against him is demonstrated by a picture of several writers from the Washington Post lifting glasses and laughing into the camera with the words “Merry Impeachmas!” printed below them. Is it any wonder the President uses Twitter to talk to Americans? And if some of his tweets seem less than nice, if some of them make us cringe, then we need to remember not only what Paul told the Romans, but also the many examples throughout the Bible of flawed, often deeply flawed men and women, whom were used by God.
Let us begin with Moses who murdered an Egyptian who was beating a Hebrew worker and had to flee for his life. Yet it was he whom God chose to lead the Israelites out of Egyptian bondage and to the edge of the Promised Land. Rahab was a prostitute, but God used her to hide and aide in the escape of the Israelites who had entered Jericho to spy out the city’s strengths before the Israelites attacked it. King David, one whom God later called a man after his own heart, was both an adulterer and a murderer. Peter, one of the Lord’s disciples, denied Jesus three times on the night of the Lord’s betrayal and yet was restored to deliver the first Gospel sermon on the Day of Pentecost and first took the Gospel to the gentiles.
King Cyrus of Persia was used by God to conquer the Babylonians and allow the Israelites to return to rebuild Judah after over 50 years of captivity. In Isaiah 45, we read:
“Thus says the Lord to His anointed,
To Cyrus, whose right hand I have held—
To subdue nations before him
And loose the armor of kings,
To open before him the double doors,
So that the gates will not be shut:
2 ‘I will go before you
And[make the crooked places straight;
I will break in pieces the gates of bronze
And cut the bars of iron.
3 I will give you the treasures of darkness
And hidden riches of secret places,
That you may know that I, the Lord,
Who call you by your name,
Am the God of Israel.
4 For Jacob My servant’s sake,
And Israel My elect,
I have even called you by your name;
I have named you, though you have not known Me.
This barbarian king, who never followed any of the religious laws given to the Israelites by God, is the only non-Jew in the Bible who was called the anointed of God.
Many flawed men and women have been used by God to fulfill His plan, not only in Biblical days, but in the modern era as well. And many of our presidents have had moral failings every bit as bad and often worse than those attributed to President Trump. Thus it appears that Demo
crats and Never-Trumpers like Mr. Galli are selective in their outrage. They see the mote in President Trump’s eye, but ignore the planks in the eyes of others, many of them Democrats.
But what of his sometimes cringe-worthy tweets? Those are hardly presidential, are they? Perhaps not, but this man is a street fighter, not a polished politician and that is exactly why he was elected. And given what President Trump has had to contend with —non-stop rebellion from Democrats and the media from the day he was elected, top echelon of the FBI and DOJ conspiring with the Democrats and the Clinton camp to brand him as a Russian spy in order to impeach him, investigations into his businesses (now run by his children) in an effort to find a crime, any crime that he or one of his employees may have committed, the House impeaching him on made up charges —what man under that pressure would not tweet out some snarky remarks from time to time? It would take a saint not to respond to what he has faced.
How can a Christian support any president who is not the most moral of individuals? Mr. Galli would contend that we cannot and Al Sharpton would suggest that we are willing to abandon Jesus for the good things that President Trump has done for this country. Is that true? Are we sell-outs if we support the President, or as Galli contends, are we uneducated, unimportant blue collar workers — ignorant rubes, unworthy of the attention of our Christian betters?
The Pharisees and Sadducees had just such a view of the followers of Jesus; the tax collectors, the adulteress, the fishermen. But the Lord sees the heart and is not impressed by evangelicals for social justice or for immigration reform. What all Christians, Mr. Galli and his friends included, need to remember are the words of Paul in Romans. They, and we, must be wary that in our loyalty to a political party or in our personal dislike of the President, we do not by our resistance, put our souls in jeopardy.