After Christianity Today came out in support of impeachment, the evangelical publication’s editor-in-chief, Mark Galli, appeared on CNN and responded to backlash from Trump-supporting Christians, remarking that it’s “strange” other evangelicals don’t feel the same.
“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,” Galli said.
But supporting impeachment is entirely a political judgment. The standards for removing the president of the United States are laid out in the Constitution, not the Bible, and as such, they are inevitably different adjuticators. I wrote last week that though Galli is right about President Trump’s habitual immorality, he incorrectly uses it as context to support the Democrats’ very narrow, very specific charges. Trump might be an adulterer, a liar, and all sorts of other things, but that does not mean he did anything to merit being removed for “obstructing Congress.”
This isn’t to say Galli is wrong about everything. He’s right that as the head of this nation, which was undoubtedly founded on Christian values and teachings, Trump has a moral responsibility to “display a certain level of public character and public morality.”
But then Galli asks an important question that will inevitably define the 2020 election, just as it did in 2016: “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?”
Can we, as Christians, vote to elect a man so morally vacuous and allow him to represent us? We did it in 2016. Must we do it again? Should we not? The answer is — well, there is no right or easy answer. And that has just as much to do with the Democratic Party as it does with Trump. The Democratic alternatives each carry their own baggage of profound immorality. All of them are pro-abortion. Many of them would use the Oval Office to restrict religious freedom in the public square, some of them more gradually than others. Trump, at least, has done none of these things. And as weak as “but judges!” is at defending Trump, it is still an argument. It goes a long way toward explaining why it is not surprising at all that so many evangelicals back Trump and why Galli is so off-base in thinking they are “strange” for doing so. They cannot just be dismissed that way because they don’t share Galli’s political judgment.
These are our brothers and sisters in Christ, and though I agree with Galli that Christians should do more to hold Trump accountable, I also believe that support for or opposition to the president does not make or break one’s faith. Christianity existed before Trump, and it will still be there when he is dead. The faith is much more important than one president, thankfully.
Morality still matters in the White House, and Christians must be willing to say so — no matter how many anti-abortion policies Trump supports or how many conservative judges he appoints. But on the question of whether to support Trump in 2020, that is entirely between the Christian, his conscience, and God — and it should stay that way.
