Pivoting from the book, he asked me about a recent flare-up in the evangelical world. Now, on the TV set, I was doing a similar dance. I had attempted, ever so delicately, to make these points in my book. Something was happening in the country-something was happening in the Church-that we had never seen before. Something more profound was taking place. They had to some extent been seduced by the cult of Trumpism, yet to composite all of these people into a caricature was misleading. Most of the Christians I knew fell somewhere in the middle. At the opposite end were the Christians who had jettisoned their credibility-people who embraced the charge of being reactionary hypocrites, still fuming about Bill Clinton’s character as they jumped at the chance to go slumming with a playboy turned president.įrom the April 2018 issue: Michael Gerson on Trump and the evangelical temptation At one end were the Christians who maintained their dignity while voting for Trump-people who were clear-eyed in understanding that backing a candidate, pragmatically and prudentially, need not lead to unconditionally promoting, empowering, and apologizing for that candidate. They were best understood as points plotted across a spectrum. The truth is, I knew lots of Christians who, to varying degrees, supported the president, and there was no way to summarily describe their diverse attitudes, motivations, and behaviors. Jessup had the same question as millions of other Americans: Why?Īs a believer in Jesus Christ-and as the son of an evangelical minister, raised in a conservative church in a conservative community-I had long struggled with how to answer this question. Polling showed that born-again Christian conservatives, once the president’s softest backers, were now his most unflinching advocates. Yet that statistic was just a surface-level indicator of the foundational shifts taking place inside the Church. Despite being a lecherous, impenitent scoundrel-the 2016 campaign was marked by his mocking of a disabled man, his xenophobic slander of immigrants, his casual calls to violence against political opponents-Trump had won a historic 81 percent of white evangelical voters. He was keen to know, given his audience, what I had learned about the president’s alliance with America’s white evangelicals. Camera rolling, Jessup skipped past the small talk. View MoreĪll in a blur, the producers took my cellphone, mic’d me up, and shoved me onto the set with the news anchor John Jessup. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
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