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Ivan G Thompson
a rough-cut book bubble about
The Making of A Great America Made in the Image of TRUMP
Religion & Spirituality
Author Insight
Republicans & Christians: Hoax enablers?
We are living in previously unimaginable times in terms of the history of American democracy. A sitting U.S. president has refused to concede after losing every court challenge and being told by his hand-picked attorney general that his claims are baseless. Moreover, the president has used the power of the Oval Office and the fringe elements of his base to try to coerce elected officials in several states to throw out ballots, refuse to certify election results, and redesignate electoral ballots. Fear of retribution of an outgoing president and his base has led Republican leaders at all levels to forfeit their integrity and side with the president in his ever-expanding lie that the election was stolen. This pattern of compromise with the president started when he was allowed to label Russian interference in the 2016 elections a hoax. It emboldened him to label the impeachment based on his admitted wrongdoing in Ukraine a hoax. Then the Coronavirus became a hoax to harm the president, even though he was recorded as admitting to its potential severity. So, it is a big stretch for him to call his election loss a hoax? I am at a loss for words for the conduct of Republican leaders, but as a Christian, I am more disturbed by the enablement of the Church.
Book Excerpt
The Making of A Great America Made in the Image of TRUMP
An excerpt from the chapter entitled: "An Unqualified Savior"
I don’t have as a great a problem with my evangelical leaders support of candidate Trump in 2016 as I do with their support in 2020. If we didn’t know who he was in 2016 we certainly did in 2020. I think I could even reconcile evangelical support for the president in 2020 if there had been a balanced accounting of his character flaws and integrity lapses. I heard negative things about President Obama from the pulpit and from evangelists on national television. But with President Trump there was a lot of reluctance to do so from the one entity powerful enough to rebuke him and still support him after he corrected course. Even the church let him achieve champion status to the point that he was allowed to run unchecked, doing, saying, and tweeting things unbecoming to the Office of the President of the United States.
I am reminded of the Lord’s rebuke of the prophet Samuel in 1 Sam 16:1. It might sound harsh, but I think the shoe fits for some of our prophets today:
“The LORD said to Samuel, ‘How long will you mourn for Saul, since I have rejected him as king over Israel? Fill your horn with oil and be on your way; I am sending you to Jesse of Bethlehem. I have chosen one of his sons to be king.’ ”
It’s hard to describe the denial and even mourning that I have seen by high profile evangelicals and “prophets” after the president lost his re-election bid. They allowed him to remain elevated to such an extent that he became the greatest threat to America’s constitutional democracy since her independence. Even after it was clear that millions of fraudulent ballots had not been cast in multiple states, the president was allowed to proceed with his baseless and disruptive claims against the integrity of the greatest democracy on earth, largely unchecked by evangelical leaders.
Where was the uproar from the president and even the evangelical community when it was clear from the vantage point of the highest levels of our national security and intelligence officials that the Russians had intervened in our election process to aid candidate Trump? Did God need the help of the Russians to put Donald Trump in office?
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