Evangelicals Must Serve a Higher Calling Than a "Profoundly Immoral" Trump, Christianity Today Asserts. But Will They, as Evangelical Trump Ministers Who Betray Christ Rush to His Defense?
December 21, 2019
Jerry Falwell Jr., president of Liberty University, who vigorously defended Trump in reaction to Christianity Today’s call for Trump’s removal from office. (DonkeyHotey)
By Bill Berkowitz
The venerable Christianity Today, founded in 1956 by Billy Graham, is calling for President Donald Trump to be removed from office. Christianity Today’s editorial has caused big-time blowback from Trump’s reliable coterie of Christian conservative evangelical sycophants. The magazine, which has about 80,000 print subscribers, along with an online presence, and has long been thought of as a major contributor to debates within the evangelical community.Christianity Today “has been the flagship magazine of evangelicalism for decades, and contemporary trends in evangelicalism notwithstanding, and contrary to what some say, I think this editorial matters,” Frederick Clarkson, a Senior Research Analyst at Political Research Associates, told me in an email. “Consider that if it was a small thing of no consequence, Christian Right leaders, including Franklin Graham, would not be freaking out.”
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In a Christianity Today editorial, Mark Galli, editor-in-chief of the magazine, wrote) that despite the magazine’s usual position of “stay[ing] above the fray,” and despite believing that “The Democrats have had it out for [Trump] from day one, and therefore nearly everything they do is under a cloud of partisan suspicion,” “the facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.”
Galli, who is retiring from the magazine in January 2020, wrote:
“The reason many are not shocked about this is that this president has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration. He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals. He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his relationship with women, about which he remains proud. His Twitter feed alone—with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders—is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.”
Galli recognizes that “Trump’s evangelical supporters have pointed to his Supreme Court nominees, his defense of religious liberty, and his stewardship of the economy, among other things, as achievements that justify their support of the president.” None of these accomplishments, outweighs the damages Trump has caused to the office of the presidency, the “damages [to] the reputation of our country, and damages [to] both the spirit and the future of our people. None of the president’s positives can balance the moral and political danger we face under a leader of such grossly immoral character.”
Galli then issues a cautionary warning to Trump’s supporters and to critics of Christianity Today’s position: “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."
Blowback
As chronicler of the religious right Frederick Clarkson told me, “CT is a magazine with standing among thought leaders and moral leaders in their world, and their example may provide others with the courage to break ranks, as so many of them undoubtedly want to do. At the annual Value Voters Summit, we saw what to me was the first clear evidence of the erosion of the base -- at the leadership level. (Low turnout, grumbling about the Kurds, among other things.) People could see that Trump was becoming more deeply problematic in so many ways. Evangelicals, including white evangelicals, are not nearly as unbreakably monolithic as the Christian Right would like us to believe.
Trump himself, who has probably never picked up a copy of the magazine –referring to it in his tweet as “ET,” – immediately responded to the editorial with a pair of tweets:
“A far left magazine, or very “progressive,” as some would call it, which has been doing poorly and hasn’t been involved with the Billy Graham family for many years, Christianity Today, knows nothing about reading a perfect transcript of a routine phone call and would rather.....
"....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!”
Christianity Today is nowhere close to being, as Trump characterized it, a “far left magazine.” As Slate’s Ruth Graham pointed out, “It is a thoroughly centrist publication ‘in which evangelicals center left and center right have a home,’” Galli told Graham in an email. The magazine Graham noted “does not avoid politics completely, but it focuses largely on social, cultural, and spiritual matters.”
Jerry Falwell Jr, the president of Liberty University, responded to the CT editorial by tweeting: “@CTmagazine has removed any doubt that they are part of the same 17% or so of liberal evangelicals who have preached social gospel for decades! CT unmasked!”
“My father would be embarrassed,” Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, told The Washington Post. “It is not going to change anybody’s mind about Trump,” he added. “There’s a liberal element within the evangelical movement. Christianity Today represents that.”
According to The New York Times, “The magazine is not united about Mr. Galli’s call to remove Mr. Trump. A member of Christianity Today’s board of directors, the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, released a 17-paragraph statement opposing impeachment after the House vote on Wednesday. The editorial, he said in an interview on Thursday evening, came as a surprise.”
“’Christianity Today is very apolitical,’” Mr. Rodriguez said. “’We don’t do politics, we don’t even bring up politics in a board meeting.’” He added: ‘I don’t think it should affect anything.’”
Many CT supporters also made their feelings known: “CT’s statement is unlikely to change anyone’s mind on core issues,” the Rev. Duke Kwon, a D.C. pastor, tweeted. “But what it can do is help rebuild the church’s public witness, give courage to beleaguered Christians, illustrate the heterogeneity of ‘evangelicals,’ model the costliness of integrity for Christian institutions.”
“I believe my grandfather would have had a similar perspective,” wrote Boz Tchividjian, a grandson of Billy Graham, refuting his uncle Franklin.
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Read also this October 15 BuzzFlash Commentary: "First Fault Lines in Unified Evangelical Support for Trump Arise"