The Christianity Today Editorial on Trump: “We’re Not Like Those Evangelicals”

The Aquila Report ^ | December 23, 2019 | William B. Evans

[Lee N. Field]

It occurred to me yesterday in the context of a somewhat heated exchange with someone who is all gaga over CT-editor Mark Galli’s call for Trump’s removal from office, that all this progressive evangelical blather about Trump as a threat to “the gospel” is really coded language about other evangelicals. His fervent opposition to Trump, he said, is all about “the gospel.” When I pressed the guy about how Trump undermines “the gospel,” the conversation quickly turned to his perception that prominent Trump apologists like Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell, Jr. are discrediting evangelical Christianity and thus making it harder to “share the gospel.” In other words, this brouhaha really isn’t so much about Donald Trump simpliciter. Rather, it’s about tensions WITHIN evangelicalism, and opposition to Trump is really a sort of “boundary posturing mechanism” (to use the sociological jargon), saying in essence that “we’re not like THOSE evangelicals.”

.....

Not to sound Marxist or anything, but I’m prepared to argue, using Peter Berger’s new-class thesis, that this is really about class warfare and that Trump came along at precisely the time when the class tensions between the information-economy-manipulators-of-symbolic-knowledge new class on the one hand and the entrepreneurial-class/working-class elements within evangelicalism were becoming acute.

[dfwgator]

The Left has successfully defined Christianity down.

[Zuriel]

Jesus Christ didn’t condemn the adultress, but he DID tell her to go and sin no more. He didn’t deny that she was a sinner, for he told her to sin no more.

(sometimes I wonder if he maybe wrote this in the dirt in eyeshot of her accusers: “where is the other half that was supposedly caught in the act of the accused transgression?” Maybe he even wrote his name down.)

Peter, after telling convicted hearts how to be converted, said “save yourselves from this untoward generation.”

Untoward what. The faith and obedience to the true and living God.

The gospel is no good if sin is not condemned.

[chajin]

class tensions between the information-economy-manipulators-of-symbolic-knowledge new class on the one hand and the entrepreneurial-class/working-class

That sounds like the 21st century reiteration of the Gnostics vs. the orthodox. The more things change...

[Lee N. Field]

where is the ‘Well, Bye” meme?

I passed on CT a long time ago.

[Grampa Dave]

Hey, Galli and other elite liberals,no matter how much you cry, moan and bitch, Trump will still be your president today and tomorrow.

[Grampa Dave]

I suspect the biggest cheerleaders of Galli are atheists and those who hate Christians.

Faux Christians/conservatives/republicans.

[Sir Bangaz Cracka]

“...how can someone who calls himself “Evangelical” vote for a candidate who supports late term abortion, homosexuality and gay marriage? These are antithetical to the teaching of scripture(?).”

************************************************************

Nail. Head.

[GingisK]

It is just fine the way it is.

[GingisK]

But did tolerate the sinners.

[Bon mots]

[Cincinnatus.45-70]

It is a good commentary on Galli’s editorial. But I hear Galli echoing someone else:

“9. He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous, and treated others with contempt: 10. “Two men went up into the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector. 11. The Pharisee, standing by himself, prayed thus: ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12. I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I get.’...”

The way it sounds to me, Galli is mimicking the Pharisee in Luke 18.

[grey_whiskers]

This is how they portray Trump voters.

They seem to have forgotten Mary and Joseph being blue collar; that the Pharisees perceived that Peter and the Apostles were uneducated; and St. Paul's writing in 1 Corinthians :

26Brothers, consider the time of your calling: Not many of you were wise by human standards; not many were powerful; not many were of noble birth. 27But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. 28He chose the lowly and despised things of the world, and the things that are not, to nullify the things that are,29so that no one may boast in His presence.

[JimRed]

Right now everything is social justice.

And social justice has come to mean "Take from the productive and give to the unwilling-to-work", much as the phrase "women's health care" has come to mean "Kill the baby".

[cornelis]

Sociology is the engine of its demolition. I suppose he means a sociologism.