Evangelicals and Trump: Why as an Evangelical, I Support President Trump Despite His Flaws

In a recent Christian Post editorial, Napp Nazworth claims that evangelical Christians who voted for Donald Trump have compromised their witness and hurt the work of the gospel. He also believes that evangelical leaders who have been brought into Trump’s inner circle have become nothing more than useful idiots (my words), being duped by the allure of power.

With all respect to Napp, whom I honor as a committed Christian and fine journalist, I believe he has overstated his points and confused the roles of politics and the gospel.

Before sharing my perspective, however, let me make clear that: 1) to the extent evangelical supporters of Trump have looked to him to change the moral fabric of the nation, we have made a gross miscalculation; 2) to the extent evangelical leaders have excused the President’s bad behavior (especially in the present, with his tweets and his treatment of others), we have compromised our moral authority (a major point made by Napp); and 3) to the extent evangelicals have exchanged voting for praying and preaching, we have lost sight of our mission.

As the author of the book Donald Trump Is Not My Savior: An Evangelical Leader Speaks His Mind About the Man He Supports As President, I am under no illusions when it comes to our Commander in Chief.

1. First, he confuses our vote for a political leader with our personal morality and witness. He wrote, “Before the election, I warned my fellow evangelicals to not vote for Trump, that associating with a person of Trump's character would damage us.”

But you can vote for someone without tying your soul to that person. You can vote for someone with reservation, even expressing that publicly. You can vote for someone while having a moral difference.

One of the main reasons I voted for Trump (after opposing him strongly in the primaries) was because I was voting against Hillary Clinton.

I felt she would be a staunch opponent of our religious liberties, a zealous advocate for abortion, and a supporter of radical LGBT activism.

In my view, her presidency could have negatively affected our country for many years to come, impacting our kids, our grandkids, and beyond.

Despite my very real concerns about Donald Trump, I hoped he would keep his promises in these key areas (along with supporting Israel). Thankfully, he has, which is why I’m still glad I voted for him, despite the collateral damage.

In the last two years, I have had serious gospel conversations with Trump-hating non-believers, and when I explained why I voted for Trump, expressing my reservations as a Jesus-follower, those I spoke with were able to separate my vote for Trump from my witness for Jesus.

2. Second, some evangelical leaders have made a positive impact on the president without compromising their moral authority at all.

One of my dearest friends is close to President Trump, and on several occasions, he has lovingly rebuked Trump in strong and clear terms. My friend’s public ministry goes on just the same, affecting as many people as he has for years, and he remains unimpressed by the lure of the White House, having been in different presidential circles over the years.

And he is not alone. There are strong evangelicals on the Cabinet, along with strong evangelical voices like former Ambassador Nikki Haley, who often spoke with prophetic clarity to the UN on behalf of Israel. And there is Vice President Mike Pence, who recently penned a strong article condemning the infanticidal comments of Virginia Governor Northam, calling his position “morally reprehensible and evil.”

This is highly significant, helping to energize the pro-life movement as well. How different things would be if Hillary Clinton had been elected!

It is not just the Supreme Court that Trump is impacting. He is also impacting many other federal courts, again, with the possibility of changing the face of the courts for the next one to two generations.

Before Trump, we were facing a rising tide of judicial tyranny – what Mark Levin famously called Men in Black – a tyranny that was rewriting the Constitution and threatening our most fundamental liberties.

And while having better justices in the courts will not win the lost or bring revival – who ever thought it would? – it will protect some of our most cherished liberties and institutions.

Martin Luther King, Jr., once said, “The Christian gospel is a two-way road. On the one hand, it seeks to change the souls of men, and thereby unite them with God; on the other hand, it seeks to change the environmental conditions of men so the soul will have a chance after it is changed.”

We might say today that, while we seek to change the souls of men, we also want to preserve our right to live in accordance with our faith.

Not only so, but in my view (and the view of many), the issue of abortion is today’s slavery issue. How will we respond?

If Trump were a strong anti-slavery candidate in the 1850s, I would have voted for him. And I would have had no problem giving a Christian reason for doing so.

Napp argues that, at best, overturning Roe v. Wade would merely push the battle back to the States. But that is something we already know and we already embrace.

The alternative, which we are witnessing in front of our eyes, is the push to extend abortion “rights,” up to and including infanticide. Which do we prefer?

That, again, is why I can vote for Trump without compromising my moral authority. I was also voting for the lives of the unborn.

Napp writes, “But backing Trump won't end abortion. Just the opposite. In aligning with Trump, pro-lifers are only extending the time that will ultimately be required to end abortion because they're losing their moral authority to speak on this issue.”

To the contrary, the pro-life push under Trump has only highlighted the moral bankruptcy – and radicality – of the pro-abortion position, thereby clarifying our moral differences.

Of course, I agree that we will put an end to abortion on demand only by changing hearts and minds. But that also presupposes that, once someone’s heart is changed, they will then vote accordingly.

4. Fourth, while it is true that some of our witness has been hurt by evangelical leaders who defend Trump at every point, overall, I believe it is largely the leftwing media that is driving this narrative.

They are the ones shouting at every turn, “You must renounce Trump if you want us to take you seriously! No Christian can stand with Trump!”

I for one refuse to play this game (as I articulated in some of the chapters in my aforementioned book).

The fact is that this same media was mocking our position before we ever voted for Trump.

And I don’t believe for a split second that if we suddenly renounced him that these media leaders would say to us, “Please, share your views on abortion and homosexuality and the Bible. We would love to hear what you have to say.”

Moreover, this same media despises Vice President Pence, in particular, because of his strong Christian views.

Had he been our president (or, if he one day becomes president), evangelicals supporting him would be accused of seeking to set up a theocracy, and we would be vilified day and night.

In sum, I believe we make a grave, fatal mistake if we look to the President to bring spiritual renewal or moral reformation to America. Perish the thought.

And I believe if we excuse his ungodly conduct or feel the need to become his defenders in chief, we do compromise our moral authority.

But if we give our souls to our Savior alone, to Him who died for us so we might live for Him, and if we give the President our vote, our witness remains firm and our integrity uncompromised.

For decades now--since the late 1800's--America's founding ideas have been being undermined and threatened by those who first self-identified as "Liberals," and later as "Progressives."

Since that time, that tyrannical, groupthink, coercive ideology invaded and hypnotized citizens into participating in their own enslavement!

What happened?

A globalist, one-size-fits-all Democrat/Republican coalition gradually imposed itself--a coalition which would erase and obliterate the underlying principles and ideas which made America a place of individual freedom and opportunity and, over time, the Framers' ideas were replaced by another idea, which embraced socialistic economic mediocrity by calling it "equality," and groupthink by calling it "diversity."

That ideology was, itself, the "god" to be worshipped--a demanding and all-encompassing god which, while claiming "diversity," meant that interpretation of "diversity" to exclude any public square acknowledgement of religious foundations or traditional morality standards.

Dr. Russell Kirk's writings on "The Conservative Mind," are familiar to most who call themselves "conservative." The following, however, comes from another of his writings, and it seems to be worth reviewing here:

"Before I began to think much on the spiritual diseases of our century, I revolted against the disgusting smugness of modern America—particularly the complacency of professors and clergymen, the flabby clerisy of a sensate time. Once I found myself in a circle of scholars who were discussing solemnly the conditions necessary for arriving at scientific truth. Chiefly from a perverse impulse to shock the Academy of Lagado, perhaps, I muttered, “We have to begin with the dogma that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.” I succeeded in scandalizing. Some gentlemen and scholars took this for indecent levity; others, unable to convince themselves that anyone could mean this literally, groped for the presumptive allegorical or symbolical meaning behind my words. But two or three churchgoers in the gathering were not displeased. These were given to passing the collection plate and to looking upon the church as a means to social reform; incense, vestments, and the liturgy have their aesthetic charms, even among doctors of philosophy. Faintly pleased, yes, these latter professors, to hear the echo of fife and drum ecclesiastic; but also embarrassed at such radicalism. “Oh no, “ they murmured, “not the fear of God. You mean the love of God, don’t you?” For them the word of Scriptures was no warrant, their Anglo-Catholicism notwithstanding. With Henry Ward Beecher, they were eager to declare that God is Love—though hardly a love which passes all understanding. Theirs was a thoroughly permissive God the Father, properly instructed by Freud. Looking upon their mild and diffident faces, I wondered how much trust I might put in such love as they knew. Their meekness was not that of Moses. Meek before Jehovah, Moses had no fear of Pharaoh; but these doctors of the schools, much at ease in Zion, were timid in the presence of a traffic policeman. Although convinced that God is too indulgent to punish much of anything, they were given to trembling before Caesar. Christian love is the willingness to sacrifice oneself; yet I would not have counted upon these gentlemen to adventure anything of consequence for my sake, nor even for those with greater claims upon them. I doubted whether the Lord would adventure much on their behalf. . . . The great grim Love which makes Hell a part of the nature of things, my colleagues could not apprehend. And, lacking knowledge of that Love, at once compassionate and retributive, their sort may bring us presently to a terrestrial hell, which is the absence of God from the affairs of men. . . . Every age portrays God in the image of its poetry and politics. In one century, God is an absolute monarch, exacting his due; in another century still an absolute sovereign, but a benevolent despot; again, perhaps a grand gentleman among aristocrats; at a different time, a democratic president, with an eye to the ballot box. It has been said that to many of our generation, God is a Republican and works in a bank; but this image is giving way, I think, to God as Chum—at worst, God as a playground supervisor. So much for the images. But in reality God does not alter. . . . What raises up heroes and martyrs is the fear of God. Beside the terror of God’s judgment, the atrocities of the totalist tyrant are pinpricks. A God-intoxicated man, knowing that divine love and divine wrath are but different aspects of a unity, is sustained against the worst this world can do to him; while the goodnatured unambitious man, lacking religion, fearing no ultimate judgment, denying that he is made for eternity, has in him no iron to maintain order and justice and freedom. Mere enlightened self-interest will submit to any strong evil. In one aspect or another, fear insists upon forcing itself into our lives. If the fear of God is obscured, then obsessive fear of suffering, poverty, and sickness will come to the front; or if a well-cushioned state keeps most of these worries at bay, then the tormenting neuroses of modern man, under the labels of “insecurity” and “anxiety” and “constitutional inferiority,” will be the dominant mode of fear. And these latter forms of fear are the more dismaying, for there are disciplines by which one may diminish one’s fear of God. But to remedy the causes of fear from the troubles of our time is beyond the power of the ordinary individual; and to put the neuroses to sleep, supposing any belief in a transcendent order to be absent, there is only the chilly comfort of the analyst’s couch or the tranquilizing drug. By fashionable philodoxies (opinions) of our modern era, by our dominant system of education, by the tone of the serious and the popular press, by the assumptions of the politicians, by most of the sermons to the churchgoers, post-Christian man has been persuaded to do what man always has longed to do—that is, to forget the fear of the Lord. And with that fear have also departed his wisdom and his courage. Only a ferocious drunken farmer is unenlightened enough to affirm a primary tenet of religion in great red letters, and he does not know its meaning. Freedom from fear, if I read St. John aright, is one of the planks in the platform of the Antichrist. But that freedom is delusory and evanescent, and is purchased only at the cost of spiritual and political enslavement. In ends at Armageddon. So in our time, as Yeats saw, Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. Lacking conviction that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, the captains and the kings yield to the fierce ideologues, the merciless adventurers, the charlatans and the metaphysically mad. And then, truly, when the stern and righteous God of fear and love has been denied, the Savage God lays down his new commandments. Sincere God-fearing men, I believe, are now a scattered remnant. Yet as it was with Isaiah, so it may yet be with us, that disaster brings consciousness of that stubborn remnant and brings, too, a renewed knowledge of the source of wisdom. Truth and hardihood may find a lodging in some modern hearts when the new schoolmen and the parsons, or some of them, are brought to confess that it is a terrible thing to be delivered into the hands of the living God. . . ." - "The Rarity of the God-Fearing Man" - Russell Kirk.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Chases Women

Seeks Power