Rev. Rob Schenck, a prominent evangelical minister and founding president of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Institute, said Tuesday that evangelical Christians “sold” their principles in supporting President Trump and called for a return to the message of the Gospel.
“The justification for support of Trump is he is seen as Cyrus, a megalomaniac mass murderer, so I guess that qualifies,” said Schenck at a luncheon in Washington, D.C., for his new book Costly Grace. “It’s the ends justifying the means. We support this ungodly character with massive flaws so we can get what he’s giving us. We did a deal with Donald Trump. We sold our principles if not our souls to get a laundry list of promises.”
In his book, Schenck discusses his 1970s conversion from nominal Judaism to Christianity and his subsequent 1980s political activism as a “leader of the most extreme wing of the anti-abortion movement.”
In the preface to Costly Grace, Schenck writes about rediscovering the life and writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an evangelical German pastor and spy who was hanged in an extermination camp near the end of World War II because of his opposition to Adolf Hitler. Schenck writes that he felt Bonhoeffer’s time reflects our own.
“My thesis was simple: For American evangelicals, the lines between theology and politics have become blurred, eroding the boundaries that distinguish the spiritual from the temporal, generating confusion among many believers about their Christian and political identities, exposing them to the temptation of political idolatry,” he said. “What had happened to the German Christians was happening to us.”
Schenck now leads the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Institute, a nonprofit institution that seeks to apply Bonhoeffer’s theological and ethical insights to the social concerns of modern times, through lectures, discussions, and published material. Since his discovery of Bonhoeffer, he now tries to “liberate the evangelical community from a politicized gospel and to urge partisan conservatives to move beyond social battles and forsake the politics of hate, fear, and violence,” according to his book. Describing his current political views during the meeting, he said, “I have far more in common with my mainline brothers and the Episcopal bishop of Washington.”
Schenck was interviewed by theologian and former U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Suzan Cook. She affirmed his statements and acknowledged how many evangelical circles have distanced themselves from him for criticizing the president.
Schenck said he sees progress now that the Southern Baptist Convention has elected their youngest president in a long time, but that there still remains a deep moral crisis.
On many issues, Schenck said that Trump is distracting Christians from truly advocating for themselves in the realm of politics and said it’s time to speak prophetically.
“I do know some good people in this administration that are acting on conscience,” he said, adding that “the ethical nature of the culture makes this a very difficult place to work.”
Schenck also spoke out against American evangelicals’ “embrace of the popular gun culture.” To illustrate his point, he pulled out a Bible that doubled as a gun holster, as gasps erupted from the crowd.
“How did we go for our reverence for the Second Commandment and replace that with reverence for the Second Amendment?” Schenck said.
Citing several different progressive Christian organizations such as Evangelicals for Social Action and Parish Collective, he said he sees hope for movement against the distortion of the Bible.
“Evangelicals don’t seem to be as important to the president as they have been in the past, and he probably doesn’t want to be asked about it or harp on it,” he said.
