The largest evangelical magazine, founded by Billy Graham:
To the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record, we might say this: Remember who you are and whom you serve. Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior. Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency. If we don’t reverse course now, will anyone take anything we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come? Can we say with a straight face that abortion is a great evil that cannot be tolerated and, with the same straight face, say that the bent and broken character of our nation’s leader doesn’t really matter in the end?
We have reserved judgment on Mr. Trump for years now. Some have criticized us for our reserve. But when it comes to condemning the behavior of another, patient charity must come first. So we have done our best to give evangelical Trump supporters their due, to try to understand their point of view, to see the prudential nature of so many political decisions they have made regarding Mr. Trump. To use an old cliché, it’s time to call a spade a spade, to say that no matter how many hands we win in this political poker game, we are playing with a stacked deck of gross immorality and ethical incompetence. And just when we think it’s time to push all our chips to the center of the table, that’s when the whole game will come crashing down. It will crash down on the reputation of evangelical religion and on the world’s understanding of the gospel. And it will come crashing down on a nation of men and women whose welfare is also our concern.
Trump’s response only made the story bigger:
….have a Radical Left nonbeliever, who wants to take your religion & your guns, than Donald Trump as your President. No President has done more for the Evangelical community, and it’s not even close. You’ll not get anything from those Dems on stage. I won’t be reading ET again!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 20, 2019
The idea of Christianity Today being “far left” is silly. And he refers to it as “ET”, a very strange thing to call a magazine that he supposedly reads (he clearly does not).
Billy Graham’s son:
It’s perversely revealing that Trump’s response to all this is to rage that evangelicals are indeed getting a good deal out of their bargain with him.
But this transaction — as Trump himself defines it here — also requires pretending along with Trump that his conduct was “perfect.”
This is the rub. As Galli puts it, the problem that should be staring evangelicals in the face is that we’ve all discovered about Trump’s corruption and amorality “is actually true.”
Trump has granted evangelicals power in exchange for their unwavering support, but the bargain now includes a requirement that they pretend Trump’s wretchedly corrupt subversion of the country’s interests to his own simply isn’t happening, or that it’s absolutely fine.
For some evangelicals, at least, this bargain has crossed over into a species of scam that they can no longer accept.
Worth a read, however, is this Huffpost piece about the evangelical support for Trump:
Trump’s evangelical base is a sprawling, interconnected network of political advocacy groups, megachurches, White House advisers, televangelists and prayer warriors. It also includes a formidable, data-driven get-out-the-vote operation. Top names in this circle include Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council and Ralph Reed of the Faith & Freedom Coalition. The two are part of a group of about two dozen Christian leaders who meet regularly at the White House and who blast out full-throated defenses of the president through their organizations’ mailing lists, radio shows, podcasts and television programs.
Inside this ecosystem, impeachment is, at best, a partisan sideshow concocted by Democrats to distract the public from Trump’s many important accomplishments. At worst, it is a satanic scheme to upend God’s plan for America, which was to install Trump in office in order to ensure the nation is governed by Christians who espouse “biblical” values.
***
In the eyes of evangelical loyalists, Trump is a salvific figure who must be defended to save Christian America from a catastrophic downfall at the hands of overweening Democrats. After 25 evangelical advisers met with him at the White House in late October, participants, including the Christian public relations guru Johnnie Moore, whom Trump appointed to the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, pushed out photographs of them praying with the president on social media. (Moore did not respond to interview requests for this article.) In an interview the day after the meeting, evangelical adviser Robert Jeffress, the Dallas megachurch pastor and Fox News personality, said that most evangelicals “believe this impeachment is an attempt to overthrow the 2016 election and therefore negate the votes of millions of evangelical Christians.” These voters, he went on, “see it as a war for the soul of our nation.” Jeffress predicted that evangelicals would react “very poorly” to Republican senators voting to convict Trump in an impeachment trial.
Trump’s evangelical boosters have also mobilized their foot soldiers into a spiritual army of prayer warriors who fervently believe their intercession will aid Trump against demonic enemies. This effort fans out far beyond leading Beltway players like Perkins or Reed, or popular television stars like Huckabee or Jeffress. In fact, Trump’s validation has meant greater celebrity for a proliferating network of “prophets” and televangelists, like Lance Wallnau, a speaker and author known for comparing Trump to the biblical King Cyrus, who restored Jerusalem. Wallnau claims to receive divine revelations about Trump, his power, and the attacks on him from a demonic left. Bakker’s Prophetic Encounter conference also featured the evangelist Jeremiah Johnson, who claims to have received many visions from God about Trump, and wrote a book called “Trump, 2019, & Beyond,” in which he claims, among other things, that God warned him about Hillary Clinton in 2012, telling him to “take careful notice of the secrecy that she operates in,” and warning, “The Church must resist her. She has plans to control, plans to influence. Beware!”
Yyyyikes.