Christianity Today Editor-in-Chief Mark Galli responded to backlash generated by the publication’s recent editorial calling for President Trump’s removal from office, saying it’s “strange” other evangelicals don’t feel the same.
Galli appeared on Sunday’s Face the Nation to address an editorial the outlet published last week, which referred to the president as “profoundly immoral” and declared he “should be removed from office.” The move was met with criticism from Trump himself and from evangelist Franklin Graham, whose father founded the magazine.
“I’m not making a political judgment about him, because that’s not our expertise at Christianity Today. I am making a moral judgment that he is morally unfit, or even more precisely, it’s his public morality that makes him unfit,” he explained.
“A president has certain responsibilities as a public figure to display a certain level of public character and public morality,” he continued. “And the point of my argument is not to judge him as a person in the eyes of God — that’s not my job — but to judge his public moral character and to ask, has he gone so far that the evangelical constituency that we represent — can we in good conscience do the trade-off anymore?”
Galli added, “He gives us what we need on ‘pro-life,’ but you’ve got this bad character. And the fundamental argument I’m making is, we crossed a line somewhere in the impeachment hearings, at least in my mind, that that balance no longer works.”
CBS Host Margaret Brennan then pointed out that “79% of white evangelicals say President Trump is doing a good job as president.”
“I have no animus against them, but it strikes me as strange for a people who take the teachings of Jesus Christ seriously, the teachings of the Ten Commandments seriously, that we can’t at least say, publicly and out loud in front of God and everybody, that this man’s character is deeply, deeply concerning to us and, in my judgment, has crossed a line, and I no longer think he’s fit to lead the United States of America,” Gall responded.
Christianity Today‘s public rebuke of Trump came as a surprise to many, as the president won 81% of the evangelical vote during the 2016 election, according to the Pew Research Center.
