The Making of A Great America Made in...

This is an excerpt from the chapter titled "An Unqualified Savior":

I believe many Trump followers are making the same mistake Obama followers made and that President-elect Biden followers might be making. In MGA Vol I, I wrote at length about our need to elevate our president to almost Savior status. We elect them because of a particular characteristic on the resume, whether it’s race, gender, military service, business, academic or other credentials, and then we expect them to solve the national debt, lower our taxes, halt pandemics, stop wars, etc. It’s a recipe for failure. Though we should have high expectations for the person elected to our highest office, many of our expectations exceed the ability of any single human to achieve. Our trust should always rest first in God, and then we hope that our elected leaders seek the face and wisdom of God and surround themselves with wise advisors. Here’s an excerpt from a chapter in MGA Vol 1 entitled “Give Us a King—The Search for a Champion.

…In many areas of life, we are looking for a "larger than life hero," a "god," small "g" to cheer for, rely on, save the day – this includes the arena of politics. It seems that we believe if we pick the right "champion" and put him or her in office, that it will solve all our problems.

…Most recently, in America's political history, we have searched for champions from a particular party, from a specific race, particular sex, or walk of life. The modern-day call for a political champion sounds like this: if we had a Republican President, a Democratic President, a young president, a successful businessman as president, a black president, a female president, someone outside the established political machine as president, etc.—all of our problems would be solved.

The champion premise is a faulty and idolatrous premise and is as old as the Bible. It's as old as King Saul. God established a system of Judges to rule over Israel, but the people wanted something else. They saw that other nations had a champion, a king, and demanded a king for themselves.”

…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.