Beth Moore, the prominent evangelical Bible study leader and speaker, excoriated enthusiastic Christians supporting President Trump in several tweets that went viral over the weekend. Moore voiced her concerns that some Christians seem to love the outgoing president more than God.
I do not believe these are days for mincing words. I’m 63 1/2 years old & I have never seen anything in these United States of America I found more astonishingly seductive & dangerous to the saints of God than Trumpism. This Christian nationalism is not of God. Move back from it.
— Beth Moore (@BethMooreLPM) December 13, 2020
Moore’s tweets are no surprise. They are consistent with her views on Trump since the beginning, but they do demonstrate what is perhaps an increasing divide between evangelicals who supported Trump because the alternatives seemed worse (and because they thought he could preserve conservative values through policy) and those who still support him with rabid fervor (despite losing the election) to the detriment of their Christian testimony.
Not all Christians were happy with Moore’s sentiment.
Ma’am, you’ve honest to God lost your mind. This trashy rhetoric is why America is in the place that she is. You say “move away”. I rebuke you in the name of Christ. You are NO friend to babies, Israel, religious Liberty or the nuclear family. SIT DOWN.
— Pastor Greg Locke (@pastorlocke) December 13, 2020
I wish you spoke out against abortion as loudly as you do over your petty political nonsense.
— Dana Loesch (@DLoesch) December 14, 2020
In October, Pew Research Center reported that evangelical support for Trump had slipped, though data from Pew and Gallup show that white evangelical support for Trump remained strong through the election. “The AP VoteCast survey shows that 81% of white evangelical Protestant voters went for Trump this year, compared with 18% who voted for Biden,” a post-election Gallup report reads.
Despite an obvious loss at the ballot box in November, the Trump administration has fought the election results in multiple lawsuits that failed at nearly every turn. The state of Texas went to the Supreme Court on Trump’s behalf, taking issue with “voting irregularities” and other election improprieties in several states, and the court declined to hear it.
Let’s face it: Trump lost, but many can’t seem to face it. They have dug in, and they are unable to come to grips with reality.
Michele Bachmann, the former Republican congresswoman from Minnesota for whom I worked during her first bid for office in 2006, made a video calling on God to use his “strong iron rod” to “smash the delusion” that Biden had won the election. I have always liked Bachmann on a personal level, but the rant sounds like a delusion itself.
In a recent column titled “This is your soul on Trump,” the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney describes this as an issue that has rooted deeply into the spiritual being of Trump believers. “Everyone who decided to join Team Trump chose poorly,” Carney writes. “It was perfectly possible to vote for Trump, for his judges, for his tax cuts, without becoming an obeisant loyalist. It was perfectly possible to point out the hypocrisy and dishonesty of many of Trump’s critics without pledging slavish loyalty. Yet, many signed their souls over.”
We are observing a strange attempt at a spiritual coup d’etat, doubling as a political revolution, wrapped in a feverish allegiance to “Make America Great Again.” Some evangelicals in the last four years have clearly made Trump their god and MAGA their religion. Others got so used to the promise of religious liberty and Supreme Court justices, they couldn’t fathom another path.
Either way, it’s one thing to vote for the lesser of two evils, to support a president when he accomplishes some good things for conservative ideals. It’s quite another to hold fast to the delusion that he can and must remain president, or otherwise, conservatism will fail and Christian ideals with it.
It is a mistake to intertwine Christianity with conservatism in this way. They can and often do interlock, but Trump should not be a substitute for God and MAGA for true conservatism. Trump is no god.
At the same time, a liberal president is not the undoing of America or of liberty. Biden is not the devil. To believe such is to allow the ephemeral to taint one of the core tenets of evangelism: God’s sovereignty. That’s not to say that Christians or anyone else shouldn’t fight for beliefs rooted in their faith, such as the preservation of family, protection of unborn babies, the recognition of male and female differences, and more, though when the fight becomes irrational and idolatrous, that leads to a larger problem. It represents an inability, or an unwillingness, to separate the institution of good policies from devotion to a person.
The very essence of the modern Christmas celebration for evangelicals is to usher in a new kingdom whose reach is vast and the ruler of which is humble and kind, yet powerful and just. That ruler is not Trump, and that kingdom is not America. Christians already worship a king. Evangelicals who continue to confuse these concepts do Christ and Christianity a grave disservice.
Nicole Russell (@russell_nm) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is a journalist who previously worked in Republican politics in Minnesota.
