Words have meanings. That’s as simple a fact as admitting that some things are so and some things are not so. In 2016, however, the definition of a “Christian” has officially become nonsensical and irrelevant in the United States. Obviously, there are always gray areas… probably hundreds of them. Yet with the inevitable rise of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee, all rules have been broken.
Quite honestly, the religious right or “moral majority” has always been hypocritical to some degree. This is due to the founder of the movement, Jerry Falwell, being largely unaware of basic theology in a way that other evangelicals like C.S. Lewis and Billy Graham never were. These cracks were evident from the 80’s. Civil rights for minorities was shunned, wars were lobbied for, and the rich were made richer and the poor were made poorer. When you have an ignorant teacher, you create ignorant students.
This long assembly line of pious stupidity helped create the America we are held witness to today. The tragedy of it all is that conservatism, and yes, even the GOP have a proud history. While the two parties did fracture ideologically in 1964, it is a fundamental truth that the “man who freed the slaves,” Abraham Lincoln, was indeed a Republican. How far they’ve gone into the Wilderness!
Even men like Ronald Reagan, someone I thought was dramatically overrated, kept the Oval Office dignified. When Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire,” it wasn’t just an insult. He was protecting something noble. He talked about us being a “City on a Hill,” a Biblical phrase his Christian audience well understood.
If Donald Trump had been president then, I honestly have little doubt that he would have engaged in MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction). And, quite frankly, I wouldn’t have blamed him for it. That’s because Donald Trump isn’t trying to protect something near and dear to him. He is trying to win… by scorched earth if he has to. When Trump says that we as Americans have to collectively lower our moral standards and torture to fight enemies like ISIS, he is saying he doesn’t care if he fights evil with evil.
The bottom line is that Donald Trump is not a Christian. While we are rightly admonished in the Gospel for talking about a speck of sawdust in a brother’s eye while we are stricken with a plank in our own, we are also called to speak out against false prophets. If Donald Trump is just a “politically incorrect” truth-teller, then I’m Donald Duck. He wants pure power.
When Trump says he’s never asked God for forgiveness, when he calls Mexicans “killers and rapists,” when he refuses to denounce the Ku Klux Klan, when he mocks our veterans, when he says that we need to ban all Muslims from America and even create a “database” to identify them, and when he says he wants to actually target the wives and children of terrorists, I have a Biblical duty to call out this monster.
I will never be a conservative. I am a liberal and proud of it. That being said, if you voted for Reagan or look up to Lincoln, and call Jesus as your savior, you cannot vote for Donald Trump. It’s better for you and Christendom that the Republican Party lose the White House than lose its soul instead.
“Hence today I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord.” -Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
“Christian love draws no distinction between one enemy and another, except that the more bitter our enemy’s hatred, the greater his need of love. Be his enmity political or religious, he has nothing to expect from a follower of Jesus but unqualified love. In such love there is no inner discord between private person and official capacity. In both we are disciples of Christ, or we are not Christians at all.” -Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
