The editor in chief of Christianity Today, who stoked furor among evangelicals for demanding President Trump’s removal from office last month, blasted Christians who support Trump as ignorant.
“I’ve been surprised by the ethical naivete of the response I’m receiving to the editorial,” Mark Galli, 67, told the New York Times in an interview published Thursday. “There does seem to be widespread ignorance — that is the best word I can come up with — of the gravity of Trump’s moral failings. Some evangelicals will acknowledge he had a problem with adultery, but now they consider that a thing of the past.”
Galli offered the example of Israelite King David’s adultery recounted in the Old Testament, but he clarified, “[Evangelical Trump supporters] bring up King David, but the difference is King David repented! Donald Trump has not done that.”
“Some evangelicals say he is prideful, abrasive and arrogant, which are all the qualities that Christians decry, but they don’t seem to grasp how serious it is for a head of state to talk like that, and it does make me wonder what’s going on there,” Galli continued.
[Opinion: Growing number of ‘exvangelicals’ and nonreligious millennials will have dire political consequences]
Galli’s sentiments echo those expressed in his Dec. 19 editorial for Christianity Today, in which he characterized Trump’s July 25 phone call with the Ukrainian president as “profoundly immoral.” He further lambasted the president as “a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused” and called for him to be removed. Galli revealed to the New York Times that the traffic to his piece crashed the site and caused his phone to ring “all day.”
The article was met with strong rebuke not just from the president but from many prominent evangelicals, including 67-year-old evangelist Franklin Graham, whose father, Rev. Billy Graham, started the flagship Christian magazine in 1956. “Yes, my father Billy Graham founded Christianity Today,” Graham wrote, “but no, he would not agree with their opinion piece. In fact, he would be very disappointed.”
[Related: ‘Sophistry’: Evangelical Trump supporter clashes with Chris Cuomo in heated exchange]
The editor of the Christian Post resigned in protest after his publication issued a Dec. 23 editorial countering Christianity Today, in which Galli is quoted as saying, “I know hardly anyone, let alone any evangelical Christian who voted for Trump.”
Galli went on to describe “evangelicals like me” as “elite evangelicals” and described the evangelicals who support Trump as “aliens in our midst.” He added that “these other evangelicals often haven’t finished college, and if they have jobs (and apparently a lot of them don’t), they are blue-collar jobs or entry-level work … They are deeply suspicious of mainstream media. A lot of them voted for Donald Trump.”
Author and radio show host Eric Metaxas, 57, who was among the nearly 200 prominent evangelicals who signed a letter rebuking Christianity Today for Galli’s piece, told the Washington Examiner: “The cultural elite, including the cultural elites in the evangelical world, see themselves boxed out of the equation to some extent, and that is why they’re so angry. Most Americans are so fed up with political correctness, for example, that when anyone opposes it, they cheer — even if that person has what they would think of as flaws.”
Explaining what he believes is Trump’s appeal, Metaxas said, “He has understood that the elites have dramatically ceased to speak for the common man in America, whether that common man is an evangelical or not. And I think that folks like the editors of the New York Times and some of the editors at Christianity Today and others like that see themselves being pushed out of any real conversation.”
