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Reluctant Trump Christians, Where Is Your Confounding Love?
Consider this an exhortation. I hear things from Trump-ump David French (“calling balls and strikes,” but never tallying RBIs) and read articles from Christians anguished over the President’s ugly, New York Americanism, and I have trouble finding the Spirit in it. Rather than digging a channel to God’s ocean of mercy, it seems some Christians are trying to dispense it with a teaspoon. It’s all so pinched and joyless and, well, unfamiliar to me as “Christian.”
Donald Trump is a sinner. Christians should not be surprised by this. What is astonishing is the good he’s done and is continuing to do, which must, by necessity, originate with God, who is the source of all goodness. “Oh, but he’s not really Christian, he just mouths the right words about the preciousness of all human life as made in the image and likeness of God,” some say. The subtext of this criticism is he’s hopelessly irredeemable no matter what he says or does! Is that Christian love? Is it even recognizable as faith in God’s ability to work in and through Donald Trump’s life?
A reading from morning prayers from the book of James:
Do not speak evil of one another, brothers. Whoever speaks evil of a brother or judges his brother speaks evil of the law and judges the law. If you judge the law, you are not a doer of the law but a judge. There is one lawgiver and judge who is able to save or to destroy. Who then are you to judge your neighbor?
And from Romans:
Owe nothing to anyone, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.
“Yes, but affiliating with Donald Trump gives Christians and Christianity a bad reputation.” With whom? Are you really concerned about ingratiating yourself with the worshipers of Moloch?
Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.
In case you haven’t noticed, apologizing and making excuses to the Left is just chumming the water. Donald Trump gets this. Never apologize. You should not attempt to reconcile with evil or evil ideologies.
“But his tweets are embarrassingly juvenile and crass.” Maybe my response isn’t so much about my Christian faith and is more about my family genetics. My family of origin has ornery in its DNA. We like sassy and get a lot of laughs out of each other’s antics. I like to think of us as little lambs frolicking in the Lord’s pasture, and get the feeling He gets a good laugh, too.
It’s not that I don’t believe we’re all called to holiness, it’s just that these are minor infractions against the calling and I do believe we’ll all get there by the grace of God — eventually. And “holiness” doesn’t mean boring. Even Saint Augustine prayed, “Lord, make me holy, but not yet.” Father Michael Gaitley likes to say, “Make me a saint, but be gentle.” Our Good Shepherd is gentleness personified. Mercy Himself. We should strive to be imitators of Him.
And finally, “But Donald Trump once said he doesn’t need God’s forgiveness, even though he’s been an adulterer, a fornicator, a liar . . .” Were you born knowing you need a Savior? When did you figure it out? Have you never failed to ask for forgiveness when you should have? Have you come to know God better than you did 20 years ago? Why would all these things not also be true of Donald Trump? Whose timetable is he on anyway? Yours or God’s?
Frankly, I see a lot of ego and pride sneaking into the Christian angst over Donald Trump. And we all know where that leads. Will you be a joyful, loving, merciful disciple of Christ? Or a joyless scold, attracting no one to the faith? God gives us free will to choose.
Published in General
Saint A, because my husband has had a lot of very serious health problems and frequent hospitalizations, I’ve been away from Ricochet for a while, only popping into the Catholic group from time to time. So I’ve been away from the kind of Trump fan that disturbs me for some time. I’ve just been reintroduced to them, and it’s a reminder that it’s not just holding my nose and voting for Trump, as I was planning on doing (although he has done things I am pleased with, more than I expected), it’s holding my nose about the group-think desired by his ardent fans. People like David French and Jonah Goldberg are considered traitors. No one from the Right should criticize Trump….
No thanks. I’m not going to vote for Trump because I don’t want these kind of people empowered. They’re just the mirror image of the types on the Left. I’ll sit this one out.
Gee, Jean. I guess you’re unfriending me. Now who’s acting like a leftist?
I’m sure Bernie Sanders will be appreciative of your non-vote for Trump.
And thanks for killing my posts with your vitriol. I can’t blame anyone for not wanting to carry on this conversation.
Whatever.
Actually, Bernie can thank you and Drew.
A problem that can be resisted in some way other than not voting, I would think.
But thanks for the explanation! There are several points here we agree on.
I don’t know, Saint A – what other effective way is there to illustrate to Trump zealots that castigating those who disagree with you as traitors and Pharisees, though otherwise on your side ideologically, is not a winning formula, than to show that it’s not? I find their position so un-American: The idea that we should shut our mouths because one man is, in WC’s words, “the one guy (not David French or Jonah Goldberg) standing between us and the neo-Fascist Globalist Leftist tribe”. Mmm, there are, and have been, many good conservatives fighting the good fight – it’s not “one guy”. That Trump, and only Trump, should be immune from criticism from the Right while all other Republicans and conservatives are fair game smacks of a sort of king-worship, which is or should be anathema to Americans. Our presidents are not kings, and rational criticism (here I dismiss most or all of criticism coming from the Left) should never be considered treasonous. If that’s the position that Trump supporters want from me, forget it. My loyalty is to the Constitution and the vision of the Founding Fathers, not to some guy who will be occupying the Oval Office for (hopefully!) eight years.
The double-standards appear to be the only ones remaining. As long as it’s “our guy”, it doesn’t matter what we’ve criticized past presidents for.
Yeah, we’re now on post #156. What a post-killer am I.
Is winning the only appeal goodness can have to us? Is showing that something loses the only way to oppose it?
Right. We shouldn’t shut our mouths on those grounds.
Right. And the likes of French and Goldberg were fighting the good fight decades ago.
I dig.
That’s an excellent and thought-provoking question, Saint A., one worthy of serious thought. Unfortunately I think the answer, at least in this application, is prescribed (and reduced) by the audience in question – Trump supporters of the stripe I’m objecting to seem to place “winning” above all other values. So my response is in reaction to that concept.
If you think losing is all they’ll listen to but losing is harmful to the country, why even bother trying to get them to listen?
Another very good question…….it is tempting to say that there’s no point at all in trying, and in practical terms that might be the case. But the optimist in me hopes that by pointing out how un-American these positions are, and by giving myself as an example of someone who is really, really turned off by their extremist approach, they might temper their views and apply more principle. I’m not hopeful.
It’s not that I think any disagreement with French and Jonah is out of bounds. I don’t. It would be hypocritical of me to think so. In this thread there have been a number of posters who have laid out their objections to French and Jonah, and have done so in a reasonable manner without resorting to personal attacks. Kudos to them! It’s the crazy “traitor” language, the “he’s a joyless scold with bad judgement who no longer deserves to be listened to by Christian conservatives or any other serious friend of liberty” that goes beyond the pale. To me this is destructive, and frankly I don’t know of any other way of opposing it other than to demonstrate, in a very real way (my vote) that it is not acceptable.
Sounds good to me!
I just don’t see the use of adding a no-vote for five confirmed originalists on the Supreme Court to that approach.
Right on, right on.
I also wanted to mention another aspect of this David French thing: He’s an Evangelical, I’m not. I’m Catholic. I am completely unaware of the norms that might govern a person such as David French in writing his articles. I grant it as perfectly possible that French’s exhortations are perfectly in line with Evangelical norms. Maybe what WC and I might perceive as arrogance or self-righteousness is not considered so in Evangelical circles.
I’m not aware of a shred of difference between us Evangelicals and you Catholics in this area.
I’m not on Facebook or Twitter, so I don’t know how I am “unfriending” you. Since I can’t “unfriend” you because I wouldn’t know how to “friend” or “unfriend” anyone anywhere, explain to me how I am acting like a Leftist for doing something I haven’t done – and have no idea how to do.
Now I’m not voting for Trump because some of his supporters are icky.
Petulance much ?
Yup. I’ll own that.
Morning Saint Aug,
Do you recall, Evangelicals or Catholics discussing whether Romney’s Mormon faith was making voting for him difficult. I recall observations that Romney would be the first Mormon, but not much more than that. This is a little unusual in that many Evangelicals and some Catholics think Mormonism is a cult or in other words a false religion. I don’t recall any religious leader either Evangelical or Catholic suggesting that Christians should not vote for Romney for religious reasons.
Yeah, it’s not orthodox Christianity. I recall no discussion of not voting on those grounds.
Morning again Saint Aug,
If one is concerned about how your support for Trump may taint your Christian witness, then one could have had the same concern about voting for Romney. Certainly endorsing man who believes in a false religion is as conflicted as endorsing a leader who is a sinner. What were French’s opinions on Romney, I do not remember.
Politics in a secular (I would argue pagan) country is not going to be a Kingdom of God thing. It is a kingdom of man thing. The best we can do, is vote fore the person who is going to give us the kind of gov we want to live under.
We are not in Kansas anymore. Meaning , the public no longer honors the Christian plumb line for the culture. The battle for that is with the people we rub shoulders with, not in gov. Being a scold will not win the day.
Back in the 80’s the Moral Majority failed spectacularly (I was part of that) . Remember when Bob Dole, or was it pappy Bush, ran on family values . Boy did Bill Clinton turn that around. We were ridiculed all the way into defeat .
I would say all the decent men I voted for were hypocrites. Meaning they knew how to behave in public. However, were they selling out my interests behind closed doors? Looking back at the way unfair trade deals were struck, open boarders for the chamber of commerce, funding of planned parenthood and other evil things when we have all three houses of power . I could go on, but you get the picture.
White washed sepulchers full of dead men’s bones.
This is all we have to choose from when the kingdom of man is the issue.
One thing you can say about Trump. He is no hypocrite, what you see is what you get. Is he trying to give me the gov I want to live under ?
Yes, more than any President in my life time.
So, if you wish to own petulance, don’t be surprised if your not taken seriously.
Absurd. Ridiculous. That supposed shield from criticism is riddled with 50 caliber holes. When is it enough? When is it even slightly productive? What is the aim of criticizing a man who is accused of Nazism (#Resist)? It would seem only to maintain your precious credibility with people who would destroy you — us. We know Donald Trump can be an ass! Enough already! I am not reading criticisms of his policies in recently mentioned articles. I’m reading criticisms of who he is and his past transgressions.
We already agree on Donald Trump’s boorishness. We agree the incivility we’ve come to isn’t good. Where we disagree is the threat-level from the Left, I suspect. And the damage more conventional Republicans have allowed to occur to our people and our communities by being supine before the leftist steamrolling of our institutions. It’s unfortunate, but we don’t get to have an aggressive jerk fighting on our side who doesn’t also occasionally act like an aggressive jerk against his internal opponents.
But, Donald Trump isn’t responsible for the degradation of America. He’s the result. And he could very well be the chemo that treats our cancer. I prefer to be grateful for the reprieve from our slide leftward to our doom and I will continue to criticize those on our side who find it necessary to harangue the “only man” in a position to pause it. Jonah and David have become extraneous in the fight, at best, and obstacles to victory at worst. I’m criticizing their insufferable, fruitless lectures because I am an American patriot!
To paraphrase Paul Krugman, a first-pass answer is both. I hope I’m as wrong as Krugman was.
And we’re all hypocrites. Not one of us is worthy. Not one.
What really matters is the friends we made along the way.
Not being taken seriously by Trump zealots is nothing to be concerned about. At any rate, Kevin, I don’t need to be convinced of what you’re saying about Trump. I was quite prepared to vote for him. It’s his fans that I find to be un-American – not a movement I want to join.
I have said this before, but David French is playing a game, much like Jon Stewart did when people accused him of being a pundit when he would come back with “it’s just a comedy show.” You can’t die on the “moral case against Trump” hill and say that you don’t choose to make the moral case for the other candidate who can win.
Sure, you *could* vote for the staggering milquetoast charisma of Ben Sasse, but he can’t win. Even if all of your friends and their friends wrote him in, and to shame people for voting in their self interest vs. adoring hero worship is another line French often crosses. It’s a technicality argument, technically you’re being intellectually honest, pragmatically, it’s friendly fire.
If you want to say “we need to criticize executive overreach too” I’m fine with that provided 1) anyone admits Obama used executive overreach and 2) there are levels to overreach. It’s like saying we need to give Obama credit for the economy vis-à-vis the economy post-Trump. It’s equivocation on a technicality.
This is why your position is illogical.
If David Duke , Natzi’s and White supremacists support and vote for Trump.
Does that mean I join their movement?
That premise is absurd.
If the Clan votes democrat does that mean every Democrat joins their movement ? Of course not.
When I am driving on a 3 lane highway and I am in the center lane. The people left and right of me have an interest that coincides with mine. Stay in your lane. We have a shared interest. They can be reprobates. However, our interest coincides.
Politics is like that. Not everyone that considers themselves conservative would I want to invite to dinner or trust to watch my children or even want to associate with .
Because we vote the same, we may be incompatible. This is irrelevant for two or more people wanting the same good government.
Even Putin see’s the need for the church in his country. Jean, you see this Too. Does this make you simpatico with Putin while he is plotting his next political hit ? No.
I am also representative of Trump voters. Whatever you think of WC and Drew, I’m a nice guy. I’m not all in on Trump, but neither do I think he is the anti-christ. Join my ranks in voting against socialism. Please. We need you.
Agreed. Trump will be gone in a year or 5 years. The policies that any of the Democrats will put in place will last much longer.