The new “Evangelicals for Trump” coalition will launch Friday night in Miami, and both the liberal left and the Never Trump right are reacting as though pro-Trump Christians are a contradiction. To them, it’s like joining a free-speech group for censorship or criminals for better law enforcement. They argue that evangelicals who support President Trump are “losing their moral witness” or that Christian virtue has no place in government.
This argument presumes that standing for Trump is inherently inconsistent with a real Christian witness. That premise must be rejected fully as a “straw man” argument — an intentionally misrepresented proposition that is easier to defeat than our real argument. If we allow the redefinition of “moral witness” and basic tenets of our Christian faith, we are losing the argument before we’ve even spoken.
Tragically, our culture has eroded people’s basic understanding of Christian virtue and morality as applied to our civic duty. It is not enough to simply believe every word of the Bible. Many nonevangelicals do that too. Application and living out our faith shows what we sincerely believe. This is why our Founding Fathers specifically protected the free exercise of religion. Faith is both belief and action.
Hebrews 11 is called the “Hall of Faith,” and several translations of the Bible even include the title of the chapter as “Faith in Action.” The writer of Hebrews is showing the moral witness of believers throughout scripture who believed in a promise of God and, because of that belief, acted. That is the definition of faith.
Our culture has generally bought into the lie of “separation of church and state,” with the watered-down church refusing to take a stand on pressing social and civic issues, and liberals content with Christians disengaging in politics entirely. But our moral witness, our faith in action, in civil society requires us to stand up, stand firm, and participate in our government.
Our founders recognized this civic responsibility in our Declaration of Independence. They understood that whenever government fails to fulfill its sole legitimate mandate to preserve and protect our God-given rights, it is the right and duty of citizens to “alter or abolish” our government. In other words, engage and take action. This is why we the people are vested with the right and privilege to select and prefer our leaders and those who govern us and make law.
It is our duty and obligation to preserve genuine liberty through participation, and I would argue, for the Christian that means through our faith — belief and action. A given society’s law shows its moral witness through what it allows and what it prohibits. We can’t escape the fact that all law is inherently moral. It’s just a matter of whether the law is promoting good or allowing evil to prosper.
For America to continue to have a real moral witness, we must preserve genuine morality in our civil society. We must protect life at all stages, from conception to natural death. We must protect religious freedom. We must protect traditional marriage, the family, and parental rights. We must protect free trade and capitalism and our individual ability to self-govern through liberty. We must continue the Founders’ design of a society that was best protecting the ability to engage with each other in the marketplace of ideas and freely speak together about God and life’s most important questions. We must promote good and restrain evil. We must protect our rule of law.
Thus, our moral witness and Christian faith are best served by discharging our civic duty of engaging our government toward preserving moral liberty: faith in action.
Evangelicals for Trump are quite soundly embracing our moral witness because this November, one candidate will advocate infanticide, abortion on demand, socialism, penalizing churches, the redefinition of marriage and family, destruction of individual freedom, greater reliance on welfare, censorship, and the entire bucket list of the anti-American, anti-Constitution, anti-freedom-loving liberal agenda.
The other candidate will be Donald Trump.
Jenna Ellis (@JennaEllisEsq) is a constitutional law attorney, the senior legal adviser for the Trump 2020 campaign, and a fellow with the Falkirk Center for Faith & Liberty. She is the author of The Legal Basis for a Moral Constitution.
