Free Republic

CNN host Alisyn Camerota on Wednesday confronted the author of "God and Donald Trump," questioning how he can continue to back President Trump amid reports of extramarital affairs. "In order to receive forgiveness, don't you have to confess to your sins?" Camerota asked Stephen Strang, the founder of Charisma Magazine. "Isn't that a tenant of the Bible? I mean don't you have to own up to these things? You know, Donald Trump famously said he's never asked God for forgiveness." Strang said that issue is between Trump and God, adding that he focuses on Trump's policies. "He supports the kinds...

Michael Gerson's much-ballyhooed articles in The Atlantic and The Washington Post have made quite a splash, at least among evangelicals. Much of the response has been of the hand-wringing kind. As in, what right does Gerson have to throw evangelicals under the bus because of their support for Donald Trump? Well, count me as an evangelical who mostly agrees with Michael Gerson. I believe that the overall support for Donald Trump is a self-imposed obstacle to evangelicals' ability to be a faithful witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ.When Gerson, after listing just some of Trump's sizeable moral failings,...

(Skip) “Most evangelical Christians like me exclaimed, ‘Who are these people?’” wrote Mark Galli, the editor in chief of Christianity Today, in his essay. “‘I know hardly anyone, let alone any evangelical Christian[s], who voted for Trump.’” In trying to understand Trump-supporting evangelicals, journalists and commentators have often smoothed over the vast diversity within evangelicalism. “Many of us shake our heads at the ‘evangelical leaders’ that the news media anoints for us,” wrote Tom Lin, the president of InterVarsity Fellowship, in his essay. (Skip) Fundamentalism, argued Mark Labberton, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, is the driving force behind the...

Charmaine Pruitt wrote the names of 12 churches on a sheet of paper, tore the paper into 12 strips, and dropped them into a Ziploc bag. It was Sunday morning and time to pick which church to attend. This time of the week two years earlier, there would have been no question. Ms. Pruitt, 46, would have been getting ready for her regular Saturday afternoon worship service, at a former grocery store overhauled into a state-of-the-art, 760-seat sanctuary. In the darkened hall, where it would have been hard to tell she was one of the few black people in the...

The Roman Catholic Church in Belgium has been hit by one of its most dramatic drops in baptisms in decades, a survey has said, with less than 50 percent of children undergoing the ritual last year. Evangelical Focus reported on Wednesday that the survey, which is to be released later this year, was commissioned by the Bishops Conference of Belgium, and confirms that parents have a diminishing interest in traditional relationships with the Church. The decline in baptisms was reportedly highest in Brussels, the nation's capital, which has seen a 32 percent drop since 2010, and it was also significant...

A Pew Research Center survey shows that while most evangelicals oppose legal abortion in high numbers, some have edged close to the national figure of 57 percent in their support.Members of the Presbyterian Church in America (PCA) are the highest-ranked evangelicals in support of legal abortion (54%), followed by those in the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod (46%) and Seventh-Day Adventists (42%). All other evangelicals are below 40 percent in their support of abortion: Churches of Christ: 36% Southern Baptist Convention: 30%Church of the Nazarene: 27%Assemblies of God: 26%Church of God (Cleveland, Tennessee): 20% “Among all those who are part of...

When it comes to the Stormy Daniels story, it is hard for me to understand the silence from evangelical Christians. Let it sink in: It is now confirmed that the president’s personal lawyer paid a porn star for her silence. After the story broke, a friend sent me an old article from a left-wing website. Democrats, the story said, beat themselves up for not better understanding white, Christian support for President Trump.

It is usually easier for an outsider to defend a person or a group that is attacked than for the person or group to defend itself. In that vein, this Jew would like to defend Evangelicals and other Christians who support President Donald Trump. They are regularly attacked as religious hypocrites who give Christianity in general, and Evangelical Christianity in particular, a bad name. The people writing such things are often Christians, including Evangelicals. Ross Douthat, a New York Times columnist, wrote: “Whether the subject is the debauched pagan in the White House, the mall-haunted candidacy of Roy Moore...

"Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God." (Romans 13:1) That verse, written by Paul the Apostle, is one of the most difficult for modern evangelicals to fully accept. It was written at a time when the Roman authorities were bad dudes. They actively discriminated against the early Christians, murdering some, imprisoning others, including Paul, who was among their most ardent persecutors before his conversion. Modern Christians sometimes suffer from the notion that God is only active when someone...

I was scheduled to be on CNN this week to debate another commentator about evangelicals and President Trump, but due to breaking news, the debate was cancelled. Had I been on the air, I planned to make this point: With all respect to our president, and with my appreciation for the good things he has done, he did not die for my sins, and I have not staked my soul’s salvation on his reputation. That distinction belongs to Jesus the Messiah, and to Jesus alone. Why the need to state something that is so totally self-evident? It’s because evangelicals are...

On the one-year anniversary of President Donald Trump's inauguration, CBN News Chief Political Correspondent David Brody gives him high marks on issues important to evangelicals.Saturday morning, Brody tweeted: .@POTUS first year "Evangelical Report Card" is in: A+ ! Judicial appointments,pro-life policy,religious freedom protection,moving the Embassy to Jerusalem, vital access and so much more.@realDonaldTrump has VALUED/EMPOWERED evangelicals more than any other president in history. pic.twitter.com/gTXYQCnPVv— David Brody (@TheBrodyFile) January 20, 2018 Just this week, Trump became the first president to make a live address to the annual March for Life and the Department of Health and Human Services announced a...

In a 12-minute YouTube video, international evangelist Luis Palau revealed yesterday that he has been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer. After Palau, 83, and his wife Patricia “had a super busy fall … traveling around the world sharing the Good News like they always do,” explained his son Kevin Palau, the evangelist returned from a long trip to the United Kingdom in December “with kind of a chest cold … that wouldn’t go away.” “We finally got Dad to go into the doctor,” said Kevin, president and CEO of the Luis Palau Association. “And to our surprise, the early...

President Trump and Vice President Pence signaled their support as thousands of anti-abortion activists rallied on the National Mall at the annual March for Life on Friday. “Under my administration, we will always defend the very first right in the Declaration of Independence, and that is the right to life,” Trump said in the White House Rose Garden, in a speech that was broadcast to the marchers gathered near the Washington Monument. The march — which typically draws busloads of Catholic school students, a large contingent of evangelical Christians and poster-toting protesters of many persuasions — falls each year around...

An evangelical megachurch was destroyed by Chinese Communist authorities Tuesday in the country's northern Shanxi province, sparking fears among Christians that the persecution they suffer will soon get worse.China Aid said in an update Wednesday that Chinese military police detonated explosives inside Golden Lampstand Church in Linfen, destroying the $2.6 million house of worship, which was owned by the Christians who worshiped there.A demolition crew broke apart the remaining pieces of the church after the explosion with diggers and jackhammers.Lampstand's head Pastor, Yang Rongli, had previously spent seven years in prison on charges of assembling a large crowd to disturb traffic...

I don’t know why this is so difficult. When the president does the right thing, we commend him and encourage him. When he does the wrong thing, with full respect for his office, we express our differences. Is this really so hard? That’s what I did with President Obama, for whom I didn’t vote and with whom I had much more occasion to be critical than to be positive. And that’s what I’ve sought to do with President Trump, for whom I did vote and with whom I’ve had a lot to be positive about and a fair deal to...

Last month, Pastor Timothy Keller wrote an important article in the New Yorker asking, “Can Evangelicalism Survive Donald Trump and Roy Moore?” And Keller, himself a respected evangelical leader, pulled no punches in answering his question, writing, “‘Evangelical’ used to denote people who claimed the high moral ground; now, in popular usage, the word is nearly synonymous with ‘hypocrite.’ When I used the word to describe myself in the nineteen-seventies, it meant I was not a fundamentalist. If I use the name today, however, it means to hearers that I am.”Is Pastor Keller right in his assessment? Is “evangelical” nearly...

Assumptions, understandings, impressions: 1. The Pope's results of his personality and goals appear to have created a massive and intense collection of controversial and probably more than a few unBiblical dynamics, assertions, policies, puzzle pieces currently in the RCC and on the wider global stage. 2. People of good Christian Biblical heart, values, intent, goals, feelings exist in the RCC and in Protestant circles. It 'ought' to be possible for them to be mutually supportive, iron-sharpening-iron; yoke-fellows in these dramatic and increasingly trying times. 3. What understandings, perspectives, deeds would the RCC's on FR wish to successfully transmit into the...

Trump's base in 2016 was defined not by race or class, but by belief in God. Evangelical Christians and Catholics came together and pushed Trump to the win, in defiance of the media, academia, Hollywood, the professional class, elite Republicans, the Democrat masses, libertarians, and self-professed moralists. Both the pope and many prominent Protestant leaders expressed antagonism toward Trump, so this mass of religious voters defied their church elders as well. This was nothing less than stunning. It was perhaps one of the great revolutions in America's religious history. Rather than a serious study of this event, we have had...

Despite Donald Trump’s sometimes boorish behavior, his approval ratings remain stubbornly high among evangelicals. According to an analysis of Pew Research surveys conducted in February and April 2017, Trump’s approval ratings are at 75% among evangelical Christians, almost twice as high as among the general populace. While some Democrats might express surprise at evangelicals’ support for a man whose extravagant lifestyle would seem to eliminate him as a conservative hero, a closer look reveals the alignment between Donald Trump’s rhetoric and the Biblical values of evangelicals. Evangelicals are by and large a churchgoing group. According to Pew Research Center, among...

Among some of the religious conservatives who helped place Donald Trump in the presidency, there is a subtle but growing sense of buyer’s remorse. To them, Trump has not been ennobled by the office as they had hoped. He has not allowed his newfound but much touted commitment to faith to lift him above the crass brawler he has been most of his life. For some of these religious conservatives, it is the pettiness that offends most. They had hoped for a healer, rather than the kind of man who would call protesting NFL players “sons of bitches” or who...