This is an excerpt from the chapter titled "An Unqualified Savior":
With President Trump, I saw evangelicals trying to take a man who clearly wasn’t a person of faith and downplay that aspect of his character and qualifications while simultaneously touting that he was going to be God’s instrument to Make America Great Again. I think that set a dangerous precedent. I think we should always push to nominate and elect leaders that have faith in God, who demonstrate some measure of humility before God. As I have written in two previous books and in this volume, I think that bar was lowered with President Trump based in large part to our evangelical leaders’ loyalty to the Republican party and to some unmeasurable extent to the degree that they shared the same conscious and unconscious biases that President Trump does.
We love to look back on American history and boast that our Founding Fathers were men of faith. Many cringed when statues were toppled because it was pointed out that many of these heroes were former slave owners or condoned the massacres of Indians, etc. We wanted to have men of faith, character, and integrity then, but not now?
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.
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