For the primary time in history, a former (and possibly future) president of the United States is now a convicted felon. A jury found that Donald Trump falsified business records to cover up a hush money payment to a porn star, with whom he had an affair, with a purpose to keep the story from hurting his 2016 presidential campaign. If only President Trump could have seen the response from many white evangelicals to his sexual crimes and misdemeanors, he could have saved some money.
Pundits are probably right that this conviction—like all of the revelations of the past almost-decade—may have little effect on the actual election. At this point, people know who they’re supporting or opposing—and it’s hard to assume many who didn’t know all along. The implications, though, are moral, not only legal or political, and on that ground, we should always ask whether probably the most politicized evangelicals should actually love Donald Trump more.
One might reasonably ask how white evangelicals could possibly love Trump more. The most visible evangelical supporters of the previous president have been willing, since at the very least 2016, to wave away criticisms of his character, from the Access Hollywood tapes onward. Many of those voices defended the previous president as fit for public leadership, even after a jury found him responsible for doing just what he bragged about in those tapes of yesteryear: groping a girl’s genitals against her will. And now this. But all of that’s precisely what I mean by asking about love.
The query has been on my mind since I read the galleys of a superb book on former president Richard Nixon, coming out this August, by Christianity Today journalist Daniel Silliman, which you’ll be able to read more about within the soon-to-be-published July/August issue.
Most individuals who follow religion and politics learn about Billy Graham’s oft-articulated regrets about how close he became to Richard Nixon. Many also learn about Nixon’s aide—and later Watergate felon, and still later repentant born-again Christian and revered evangelical leader—Charles “Chuck” Colson, and the way evangelical ministers typically were so awed by the Oval Office that they’d lose the flexibility to say rather more than “Yes sir, Mr. President” after they were there. Silliman, though, demonstrates that this was not the entire story.
There was at the very least one evangelical pastor who spoke hard truths to Nixon. John Huffman, a Presbyterian pastor in Florida, who had revered Nixon since his days as a young Republican at Wheaton College, preached to the president as he sat within the pews of his church within the midst of Watergate, calling each publicly and privately for Nixon to admit the reality. What’s most surprising to me just isn’t that there was at the very least one courageous voice of integrity—I’m sure there have been others too—but the rationale that Huffman gave to Silliman for why he didn’t sidestep the query of guilt with Nixon: “I actually loved the person.”
This, Silliman argues, is what made the difference. This pastor didn’t see Nixon as a transactional figure for whom one should trade unquestioning loyalty for a set of policy positions—much less the proverbial seat on the table. He saw him as a human being—an individual loved by God, and a one who would ultimately stand, as all of us will, before the judgment seat.
Put aside, for a moment, the query of whether a former president needs to be prosecuted. That’s one other query. Put aside the politics of red state versus blue state. What concerning the query of morality? What would our relationship to Trump appear like if it were informed by our belief that hell exists?
The former president’s defenders are too smart to imagine what a few of them imply—that Trump never really knew Stormy Daniels and that he was paying her six figures of hush money to maintain her from talking about something that never happened. So what message does it send when—like every other political constituency—we discover ways to attenuate that by suggesting that the cultural and political stakes are too high to fret about such minor matters as keeping one’s vows or telling the reality?
That’s especially when a figure is held as much as the remainder of the country as a champion of restoring the country to Christian values—to when “girls were girls and men were men,” because the old sitcom characters Archie and Edith Bunker would sing it. And that’s very true when Christian leaders hail Trump as a “baby Christian” and he licenses his name to Bibles. For many Americans, the word evangelical now could be shorthand for “Trump supporter.” How can we blame them when, in so many arenas of American Christian life, individuals who deny the Trinity are embraced as Christians, but those that don’t support Trump are ostracized as apostates?
Many will discuss how God uses flawed and imperfect people; that’s true, after all. This just isn’t, though, a Chuck Colson repenting of his sin, taking responsibility for it and pleading for God’s mercy. This is someone who as a substitute now says that he’ll take revenge on his critics and enemies the moment he’s back in office.
What does that say to those that are watching, learning from Trump’s “never admit, never apologize” strategy? It says policy is more vital than character. Achievement is more vital than integrity. The implication from religious leaders reputedly bearing witness to the God for whom they speak is that this: A person is justified by winning alone.
You know that a few of us, resembling this author, have very strong views about this figure’s being fit for public leadership, what he’s doing to the witness of the church, the degradation of girls and the glorification of political violence, and so forth.
Some of us imagine strongly within the separation of church and Trump. But perhaps the issue just isn’t primarily that so many evangelicals love Trump but that they love him so little that they’re willing to say to those that follow his direction, This is fantastic, as long as you give us what we would like.
Is it really love to make use of someone to attain one’s goals—never even asking what the transaction is doing to that person? And then to simply pretend that every one of it never happened, and, if it did, everybody does it so it’s okay? One might even say that’s how an immoral man wrongly would treat a porn star, not the way in which a Christian people rightly would treat a frontrunner who claims to represent them.
God loves Donald Trump. God loves those that will wreck their lives following his moral example. That’s not unsure. The query is—will we?
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
