STEVEN CURTIS CHAPMAN SONG for THIS ENTRY
Art by Malcolm McLaughlin
When I started this blog, I made a commitment to keep politics out of it beyond absolute periphery, as I am no expert or fan of politics and a firm believer of keeping politics out of ministry. For the most part, I am going to hold that line; you will see very little personal opinions on policies, no commentary on qualifications for the presidency, no assessments on the success or failure of any particular presidencies, or anything of that sort. I won’t even mention how I ended up voting (though I will give you a hint: it wasn’t Donald Trump and it wasn’t Joe Biden). Instead, I am going to focus on Christian principles and morals as they played out in the live reality show we call the American political system during the last five years (Trump’s presidency + the 2016 campaign season).
And these last five years were absolutely fascinating. I have never seen such loyalty, such fanaticism, such militant devotion to any particular politician in the U.S., and that it was Donald Trump of all people that inspired it really boggles my mind. I was barely coherent through the presidency of the (perhaps former) republican messiah, Ronald Reagan, but many friends who followed politics through that time have told me that the frenzy for Reagan was nothing like what’s going on for Trump. George H. W. Bush, who incidentally is my favorite republican president during my lifetime, and his son George W. Bush, a man whose presidency I didn’t have a high opinion of but whose character, integrity, and devotion to Christian principles I never once questioned, definitely did not inspire this kind of fervor. None of them turned the evangelical base from political loyalty into a cult-like mentality. That was all Trump, and it was amazing to see. This situation definitely affected me close to home, as I believe several friends no longer consider me as such due to my having been vocally critical of him.
Part of me can still barely believe that this actually happened.
From the strictly political perspective, it’s not necessarily unfathomable. After eight years of Obama, who represented a monumental loss for the republicans on multiple levels, Trump pretty firmly represented the conservative side of most issues, often dialed to 11, like his immigration policies. The key “Christian” political issue has always been abortion, and whatever faults may have been seen in Trump’s personal life, his political platform included the prolife stance, which in the eyes of most Christian voters, covers a multitude of sins, even if his long term history on this issue hasn’t really been consistent. As a stalwart and perhaps even extreme prolifer myself, even if I don’t necessarily agree that that sole issue should be determining our choice of president, I can understand that this could potentially add enough points to a candidate to offset their faults. Had the evangelical crowd stopped there, I doubt I would have cared much and probably wouldn’t be writing this blog.
But they took things further. Much further. Trump was elevated from simply being the correct choice for president to some avatar of God’s will on earth. Keep in mind, this is a guy who has shown zero signs of having any measure of humility, been accused of several incidents of sexual harassment and other salacious behavior, constantly lies about just about everything, among many other what I would consider to be very black and white moral failings. These aren’t interpretations of policies, which can be twisted and spun in so many ways to as to support various perspectives of whether they should be considered good or bad. These are matters of personal, moral behavior that, in my opinion, are very clearly against Biblical teachings about how we should be living our lives.
If I recall, Kirk Cameron was the first famous Christian figure that I saw praising Trump as the “Christian choice” for president. That was the first time I started to realize just how out of hand things were getting.
Yet, countless public Christian figures rushed to his defense. Kirk Cameron, Michael Tait, Jerry Falwell Jr., many televangelists like Jim Bakker, just to name a few, became his apologists and began to portray Trump as some kind of paragon of Christian virtue. Minnesota congresswoman and 2012 presidential candidate Michele Bachmann said she had “never seen a more Biblical president” and that Trump has “greater moral clarity” than any other president in her lifetime. Televangelist James Robison said Trump was the vanguard of “the greatest spiritual awakening in history.” Upon ten republican congressmen voting to impeach Trump in January 2021, Franklin Graham, son of revered evangelist Billy Graham, made a reference to “thirty pieces of silver” that Nancy Pelosi must have paid them, a clear metaphor painting Trump as the betrayed Christ. And on and on and on.
To maintain this façade, the Trumpers really went out of their way to cover for the flaws in Trump’s character like the ones I listed above. They made excuses like “this is how people from New York talk” and “I like that we have a president who speaks his mind and has no filter,” because apparently all New Yorkers in existence are that crass, the Bible makes it clear that where you’re from excuses you from some standards of sin, and being Christian means sticking to the “normal” sinful behavior that we always had and not trying to change to be more Christlike. Along the way, they exhibited obscene levels of hypocrisy, like after the 2020 election. Upon Trump’s loss to Joe Biden in November (and again in December, and then again in January), those same evangelicals who just four years prior were citing Romans 13:1 to criticize the democrats for refusing to accept Trump’s victory by perpetuating groundless conspiracy theories about Russian interference in the election process, were now decrying the results of the 2020 election on the basis of accusations of fraud that were backed by zero evidence, and consequently refusing to acknowledge Biden as the new president. Apparently, Romans 13:1 is only relevant for republican leadership.
There was perhaps no more overt and blatant an example of this hypocrisy than when some of the controversial aspects of his private behavior came to light, specifically in his treatment of women. It was during the 2016 election season that many people, including myself, learned that Trump had a litany of sexual harassment allegations directed at him including accusations of rape, violence, groping, kissing without consent, and many others, with several more surfacing after he was elected president. He also had a well-documented history of extramarital affairs, attempts to cover them up, and denials when he was confronted about them (i.e. no repentance). Perhaps most damning was a confirmed recording of a conversation in which he notoriously said that, as a celebrity, he can do anything he wants to women, even “grab ‘em by the pussy.” His attitude about and treatment of women was absolutely deplorable and not in the slightest reflective of the Christian values that he and his followers claimed to champion.
Artwork like this became very common. Sad and funny at the same time.
But, instead of condemning such abominable behavior for which Trump had never expressed any remorse or repentance, even trying to justify his conversation as “locker room talk,” something several professional athletes came forward to dispute, evangelicals instead rushed to his defense. I heard all matter of arguments from Christians about why Trump’s behavior really shouldn’t be considered that bad, often referring back to Biblical times when kings were just expected to have harems and sleep with whoever they wanted. Many argued that his behavior in his private life should have no bearing on his qualifications for the presidency, insisting they are electing a president and not a priest. One notable person to express that opinion was Franklin Graham, who had previously and publicly questioned how Bill Clinton could be trusted with running the country with integrity when he exhibited so little of it in his private life when Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky came to light.
What is a bit frightening is that this wasn’t limited to Trump. Christian republicans very publicly tried to cover for another possible act of sexual depravity during that same timeframe. In 2017, Roy Moore, chief justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, began to be accused of various incidents of sexual assault, including of minors of 14 and 15 years of age when he would have been in his early thirties. Now, let’s be clear about this: to my knowledge, he was never convicted of or even indicted for these crimes and hasn’t spent a single day in court as a defendant for them. As a firm believer of innocence until proven guilt, we have to acknowledge and make it clear that these are allegations that were never confirmed on any level whatsoever.
But that makes the religious right’s reaction to this all the more baffling, as they could have said exactly that. “There has been no evidence, and so long as there is no substantiation of these allegations, I will continue to support him.” Cool! Perfectly understandable and reasonable reaction. Maybe even, “Even if he did do those things, he was much younger and very foolish. He’s a changed man now and I don’t believe he’s like that anymore, if he ever was.” Wouldn’t fly in a court of law, but as Christians, we have to acknowledge the transforming power of the gospel and believe that a person can indeed completely turn their life around in that way and deserves another chance in life. So from the Christian perspective, that might have been an acceptable excuse. Hell, how about even, “If those allegations are true, then his behavior is absolutely deplorable, but he is committed to promoting certain issues that are more important than past moral failings. So, while I don’t approve of his behavior, I will still have to support him.” Okay, kinda sucky that it would have to come to that, but when dealing with a field of politicians that likely all have some kind of blood on their hands, it can be an understandable perspective.
… and another one.
But did the right wing media say any of these things? Nope. Instead, as with Trump, I saw minimization and justification. I saw right wing news pundits, many of whom were Christian, try to downplay how serious these allegations were. I even saw a couple of people talk about how people used to get married in their early teens back in Jesus’ day, so it shouldn’t be considered a big deal that Moore might have messed around with kids of that age. Let me say that again. They said that it wasn’t a big deal that Moore might have fooled around with kids of that age because that was the age of marriage back in Jesus’ day. They tried to use the Bible to justify extramarital sex and statutory rape. These were the lengths the religious right will go to protect the image of Christian morality in their representatives.
Well, 2020 rolls around and the election season heats up. Joe Biden is the presumed winner of the democratic primaries and is ramping up to run against Trump in the general elections. Suddenly, stories of his own impropriety with women start to arise, raising concerns about his moral values, or lack thereof, which the republicans then argued disqualified him from the presidency. They who gave Trump a pass on moving on women like a bitch and grabbing them by the pussy were suddenly worried about a man with a less than pristine record with women becoming president, and the internet sensation of “Sniffing Joe” is born. People like Franklin Graham who took on a “we’re electing a president, not a priest” perspective were suddenly critical of how not a priest Biden was. So, not only were they being hypocrites in regards to their dedication to their own Christian morals, but now they were being hypocrites in their own track record of applying those morals, picking and choosing when they were relevant. It was absurd. There will always be hypocrisy and flip flopping in politics, but to me, it seemed like they reached all new echelons of absurdity in the evangelical support of Trump.
I’ve read a number of different articles and studies that looked into what might have caused what could be thought of as mass religious hysteria, all of them quite speculative and none of them really all that satisfactory. My personal take is that there was a lot of overcorrecting going on. For decades, the republicans have claimed a monopoly on Christian integrity, on the strength of their position on abortion and gay marriage, the other key political issue for evangelicals. Every candidate they forwarded was (presumably) a man of God and integrity, a major selling point always being their supposed devotion to God, a record that would make the best Boy Scout look like Charlie Sheen or a really touching redemption story to explain a checkered past, impeccable dedication to family values, and the like. This allowed them to capitalize on their popularity among evangelical voters, which had already been established by their aforementioned opposition to abortion and gay marriage.
Vulgar, but this basically sums up American conservative Christianity of the past 5 years.
But in 2016, seemingly out of absolutely nowhere came Trump. He represented everything that the party of Christian values stood against, yet somehow he began to captivate their base. The establishment republicans were rendered more and more helpless but to watch him rise through their ranks in all his pussy-grabbing glory, and they panicked. I think they knew that, if he became the face and future of the party as he was landsliding his way to becoming, they would lose all credibility as the party of Christian morals.
To compensate for this, I think they began to really overplay their hand. There’s a common trope in American comedy where an unattractive person’s pleasant personality is overemphasized. For example, a person will try to set up two of their friends on a date, one of whom is very unattractive by American pop culture standards. When playing up this person to the other friend, they will often open with “He/she has a wonderful personality,” and will heavily emphasize that personality, hoping it will make up for the perceived physical unattractiveness. It’s a common cliché that has been found in one form or another in every generation of American television. I believe that kind of overcompensation in the hopes that, for the evangelicals, the reports of his distinctly unChristian behavior will be drowned out by the loud praises of his character supposedly reflected in the Christian positions of his party’s platform, is exactly what was going on. And sadly, it worked. Again, I’ve never seen evangelicals so faithful to any politician in my lifetime.
Perhaps the saddest part of all for me personally has been their response when I bring things like this up. Other than the aforementioned excuses and justifications, almost invariably at one point they begin to point out that the democrats are just as bad; praising their leadership’s character in the hopes that their constituents will forget about the scandals that are equally rampant in their party. While I have no doubt that the democrats are equally rife with flaws that are being covered up, there are two key problems with this argument. One is that, unlike the republicans, the democrats are not using God to justify their leadership. There may be pockets of liberals here and there that believe their leaders are God’s elect, but we don’t see the kind of wholesale mass groupthink of evangelical worship of their candidates that we see among the conservatives. If anything, the opposite has been true, where the democrats have more and more appealed to the rising demographic of atheists. The second problem is that, with this argument, they are basically reducing Christian morality to the level of “he started it.” Christianity has never been and should never be about being no worse than the others. It has always been and should always be about being holy and set apart, living by a standard that is above the world and its “sinners,” which is how the evangelicals view liberals. Yet, now being just as bad as the other guys is apparently enough to be considered holy and Godly.
“Let me be clear. This is revolting. The Bible is not a prop. A church is not a photo op. Religion is not a political tool. God is not your plaything.” - James Martin, SJ
On the other hand, let’s consider the example of Nathan, a prophet in the court of king David. David is generally considered to be one of Israel’s greatest kings, an exemplar of faith and devotion to God, even being called a man after God’s own heart. Personally, I think this view of him really needs revision, but that’s another story for another time. Anyway, the Bible makes it clear that David and his line hold a special place in the story and development of Israel, but he was undoubtedly a heavily flawed man. Like many kings, he had a harem. This is something that his son and successor, Solomon, is often singled out for criticism, but actually this was a common practice in the ancient world, something probably every king of Israel did, and David was no exception. As such, like Trump, he had a less than pristine track record with women by Biblical standards, most infamously in his lust for a woman named Bathsheba, which culminated in his responsibility for the death of her husband, Uriah the Hittite, just so that he can have her. Like Trump, David had loyalists who seemingly carried out these orders with no questions and probably had loyalists who tried to justify and minimize the atrociousness of his actions, probably offsetting them by citing all the good that he had done for Israel.
But Nathan the prophet was not one of these. In his role as prophet and the authority as the voice of God that came with that position, he confronted David and reprimanded him for his heinous actions. It’s worth noting that, though he’s most famous for this part of David’s story, he actually shows up several times throughout the book of 2 Samuel, and not once does he ever question God’s judgment in putting David on the throne. Not once does he rebel against David’s royal authority. Not once does he do anything that would put into question his loyalty to God and/or His chosen king in Israel. Quite the opposite; he repeatedly acknowledges the authority that God had conveyed to David and affirms that the Lord is with him. Nonetheless, he knew sin when he saw it. He did not let the divine favor of David cover his sinful behavior and instead vocally and publicly reprimanded him for it. The example of Nathan shows that a person can be patriotically loyal to the leadership of their nation and even recognize the divine authority that it represents if you believe in that sort of thing while still recognizing and condemning that leader’s sins instead of making excuses for it. The two are not mutually exclusive as the religious right seems to believe.
Nathan rebuking David. Nathan is one of my favorite people in the Bible.
For my part, I have no doubt that all politicians are corrupt on some level, and that includes Joe Biden. Even Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders, the only two candidates that I think I would have been willing to support and whose loyal followings have been built in part on their reputations as being largely scandal-free, I have no doubt are probably involved in something, and had they won their primaries, it would have just been a matter of time before whatever it is they’re caught up in would have come to light. Stripping all the corruption out of politics would require an overhaul of the entire system, and until such circumstances become available, the unfortunate reality will always be that we will need to work with what we have and make the best of it, corruption and all.
If, within that understanding, you voted for Donald Trump, acknowledging but being willing to overlook his moral failings because his platform includes key issues that are more important to you than the morality of the person representing them, that is perfectly understandable. It is true that we are electing a president and not a priest, and most elections will come down to a lesser of two evils. Again, as a stalwart prolifer myself, I understand the perspective that that will always be the republican, even if I don’t entirely agree.
But, in the pursuit of getting him elected and accepted and convincing those around you that he’s a worthwhile candidate, you started playing up his supposed Christian credentials by giving him a pass and/or making excuses for his distinctly unChristian behavior and characteristics, know that you have betrayed and spat on the very Christian principles that you claim to uphold and thought you were promoting. You have sacrificed them at the altar of political victory just to get a politician in office that will promote your agenda.
As the account of Nathan shows us, it is possible to recognize and support the leadership of elected authority without giving a pass to their sins. We can be patriotic and even loyal to a particular “side” or ideology while still condemning the lack of integrity and decency in its ranks. In a political world that will unfortunately always be flawed and full of corruption, let us be Nathans, being honest about the failings of even those that are our anointed sovereigns, demanding a standard of morality, integrity, and ethics among our fellow Christians that transcends political agendas and the machinations of man, and looking to Scripture and Christ as the only measure of morality and integrity.
On a final note, for those of y’all who are worried about Biden’s presidency leading to a socialist state: they said the same about Obama and Clinton. Others said that George W. Bush’s presidency would lead to the Christian version of Sharia law and that Trump’s presidency would lead to the end of democracy and the rise of fascism. None of that came true. America survived Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump, and you will survive Biden. So quit your whining and support your new president just as you had expected everyone else to support Trump.