A former editor at the Christian Post, who resigned after the outlet published an editorial supporting President Trump, attacked his former colleagues in a recent interview.
Napp Nazworth’s decision to quit comes amid a divide among evangelical publications concerning the president. Nazworth, who had been at the outlet for more than eight years, announced his resignation on Twitter Monday night. The Christian Post’s editorial, titled “Christianity Today and the problem with ‘Christian Elitism,’” was a blistering rebuke of Christianity Today’s editorial calling for Trump’s removal from office.
Nazworth appeared on CNN’s New Day on Thursday morning and shared criticisms of his former outlet’s editorial. He was specifically asked about one line in the piece, in which John Grano and Richard Land accused the government of “illegally manipulating the nation’s national security and law enforcement apparatus behind the scenes, to depose a duly-elected sitting president.”
“Yeah, it’s some odd sort of conspiratorial thinking,” Nazworth explained. “They sound sort of like Breitbart in that. We’ve never sounded like that before. That’s not the types of positions we’ve taken in the past. Previously, when we wrote editorials, it was all the editors involved. One person would write the first draft, but we would all be involved in working on it together.”
He added, “The first time actually when we ever did that was we wrote an editorial in 2016 under the headline ‘Donald Trump is a scam.’ This was before he became the nominee. We all agreed back then. We understood who Donald Trump was. I didn’t change my mind about Donald Trump, but some of the other editors did.”
After being asked what made them change their minds, Nazworth continued, “I’m trying to make sense of that myself. You know, once he became the nominee, then it just seemed to happen sort of slowly that they became much more Trumpish, some of them much more Trumpish over time. I don’t understand it. I’m trying to make sense of it myself.”
He also shared that he didn’t want to leave the publication but felt he “had no other choice.”
“I warned them. I said, ‘If you go down this road and join team Trump, then that will destroy the reputation of the Christian Post,'” Nazworth said, adding, “We had reached the impasse, and I really had no other choice but to leave.”
The Christianity Today editorial has been defended by the publication’s editor-in-chief, Mark Galli, despite facing backlash from Franklin Graham, the son of the late religious leader who started the publication, as well as the Christian Post.
[Read more: Christianity Today editor says it’s ‘strange’ that not all evangelicals agree Trump is unfit for office]
