David Barton (left); Eric Metaxas (right)
Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, Eric Metaxas was allowed to opine on what he called “The Christian Case for Trump.” In essence, he argued that Trump’s failings don’t matter as long as Trump opposes abortion and supports religious liberty for Christians. I argue in response that there is no distinctly Christian reason to favor one president over another when it comes to applying the law. Assuming for a minute that we can determine what Christian public policy is, a president who holds those policies still must abide by the law or face the consequences.
Metaxas begins by faulting the editorial of Christianity Today’s Mark Galli which called for impeachment of removal of Trump from office. Galli called the president “profoundly immoral” and stipulated to his guilt in the Ukraine affair. Metaxas objected that Galli misapplied Christian doctrine:
But these subjective pronouncements promote a perversion of Christian doctrine, which holds that all are depraved and equally in need of God’s grace. For Christianity Today to advance this misunderstanding is shocking. It isn’t what one does that makes one a Christian, but faith in what Jesus has done.
I believe it is Metaxas who confuses the matter. Galli does not make a judgment about Trump’s salvation, but rather Trump’s fitness for office. Trump may or may not be a Christian but that isn’t at issue when it comes to conviction on the articles of impeachment. If we take Metaxas seriously, then no law breaking office holder could be held accountable — after all we are all sinners so who should throw stones?
Metaxas dismisses Galli’s proper comparison of Trump to Clinton. In Galli’s editorial, he noted that Clinton’s sins led many evangelicals to call for his ouster. However, many evangelicals now look the other way with Trump and excuse his actions. Metaxas’ justification for this is political:
In the 1990s some Democrats were antiabortion. Neither party could exclusively claim the high ground on this deepest of moral issues. Mr. Clinton spoke of making abortion “safe, legal, and rare.” No longer. Despite ultrasounds and 4-D imaging, Democrats endorse abortion with near unanimity, often beyond viability and until birth. If slavery was rightly considered wicked—and both a moral and political issue—how can this macabre practice be anything else? How can Christians pretend this isn’t the principal moral issue of our time, as slavery was in 1860? Can’t these issues of historic significance outweigh whatever the president’s moral failings might be?
The last question is really the heart of Metaxas’ argument. For good measure, he paints the Democrats as favoring open borders, socialist and Christian hating. So for Metaxas, Trump’s problems are better than the only alternative he considers which is a Democratic-socialist takeover.
Metaxas’ analysis is misleading on a key point
There are several fact based problems with Metaxas analysis. I will take just his key point. Abortion was just as divisive in the early 1990s as it is now. I am old enough to remember the absolute Republican hatred of the Clintons and the belief by pro-life advocates that Hillary was evil. I was much more involved in pro-life and Republican circles in the 1990s and I can tell you the divide is the same.
In his short op-ed, Metaxas drops fact challenged hints (refers to “socialists,” the FBI’s “J.Edgar Hoovers”) that the Democratic deep state alternative universe would be so bad that Trump is a far better alternative no matter what impeachable offense he has committed. In short, Metaxas plays the role of a demagogue, mongering fear to move people away from their critical sense.
Walk by Sight Not by Faith
Another serious problem with this kind of reasoning is that fear mongering causes people to walk by sight and not by faith. Metaxas tells Christians that they need Trump. Their world will fall apart if Trump isn’t president. Abortion will be worse, you won’t be able to pray in public, the worst will happen, the sky is falling. God will not be on His Throne.
In fact, if Trump is convicted, Mike Pence will become president. This is right now the choice. Then Christians of that persuasion can vote for Pence next November. The fear based choice offered by Metaxas is a false one. Metaxas and the president’s court evangelicals aren’t acting from faith or principle, they are reciting talking points.
The only real issue for the Christian or any citizen right now is Trump’s guilt on the articles of impeachment. Christians don’t have a political team. The Christian position on impeachment and conviction is for senators now to do impartial justice as the Senate oath specifies. To argue otherwise is to make a case against the Constitution and rule of law.
No so O/T: The MAGA Church
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoglNFN5-Js
By The Lincoln Project
via https://friendlyatheist.patheos.com/2020/01/09/this-brilliant-new-ad-highlights-the-hypocrisy-of-trump-loving-evangelicals/
A moral issue so deep that that Jesus never mentioned it, it receives no explicit mention in the Ten Commandments, and nor even any explicit mention of it in the Bible at all (let alone explicit prohibition, or explicit equation with murder).
Metaxas’ diatribe is not “The Christian Case for Trump”, it is rather the Evangelical case for Trump, the Two Commandments of his and his fellow travelers’ Evangelical religion being:
1) No abortions.
2) No gays.
(With the implicit permission to ignore anything that darn socialist Jesus had to say about the poor and downtrodden and so forth.)
Not if the Bible is the basis for your morality its not. The Bible has no problems with slavery, and even lays down rules for it, including differentiated treatment of Jewish and non-Jewish slaves, that bears some resemblance to the differentiation in antebellum US of indentured servitude (for Europeans) versus chattel slavery (for non-Europeans).
On this basis, I’d suggest that “Biblical morality” is an oxymoron.
A moral issue so deep that that Jesus never mentioned it, it receives no explicit mention in the Ten Commandments, and nor even any explicit mention of it in the Bible at all (let alone explicit prohibition, or explicit equation with murder).
Metaxas’ diatribe is not “The Christian Case for Trump”, it is rather the Evangelical case for Trump, the Two Commandments of his and his fellow travelers’ Evangelical religion being:
1) No abortions.
2) No gays.
(With the implicit permission to ignore anything that darn socialist Jesus had to say about the poor and downtrodden and so forth.)
Not if the Bible is the basis for your morality its not. The Bible has no problems with slavery, and even lays down rules for it, including differentiated treatment of Jewish and non-Jewish slaves, that bears some resemblance to the differentiation in antebellum US of indentured servitude (for Europeans) versus chattel slavery (for non-Europeans).
On this basis, I’d suggest that “Biblical morality” is an oxymoron.
“Biblical morality” can indeed be molded to just about anything, if you proof text it enough. A Christ-centered morality is another thing entirely. The more I think about it, the crazier it is – evangelicals claim the divinity of Christ as foundational to their faith, and yet draw their morality from just about any and every source *except* His example.
What seems to be missing from Metaxas’s piece is any acknowledgement that if Trump is guilty of what he’s been alleged, he should indeed by removed. That what he is accused of is wrong and despite agreeing with his polices the rule of law is important. Instead, what we get is essentially fear-mongering that because the Democrats are so much worse because of “issues of historic significance”, that Evangelicals should give him a pass.
To me, this sounds like how you end up with terrible government. If Metaxas’s opinion prevails, then what you have is a sizable portion of the population that essentially says that it’s ok to lie, cheat, steal, abuse your power, be staggeringly ignorant, incompetent, and subvert the democratic process as long as you deliver on a handful of issues and one’s political enemies be painted in a bad enough light.
Which, of course, they always can. One thing demagogues have never run out of is boogiemen and boogie-issues. And then, if people will let them do it, you can be sure some amoral individuals will rise to power and take advantage of that.
Indeed, given that this fight is of “historic importance”, what action can’t he excuse? One imagines if there even is a line.
All they’ve become are Trump zombies.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6Ejga4kJUts
I usually vote for the Democrat candidates, though I consider myself an independent.
I do not endorse abortion. As far as I know, there are many Democrats who do not endorse abortion.
What I do endorse, is that the decision should be made by the woman and her doctor. Eric Metaxas should not be dictating what decision is to be made.
Quite simply, Metaxas is bearing false witness. He is telling malicious lies about Democrats for purposes of favoring his own political view.
Sadly, this is the truth of things for the modern Republican Party. Bill Clinton had barely been sworn in before the Republicans set about driving him from office. George H.W. Bush, a Yankee Brahmin of a variety I know fairly well, believed himself that Clinton, being some yahoo from Darkest Arkansas, was an illegitimate president. (This, of course, changed after Clinton completed his two terms and the two of them actually became friends.) And thanks to amazingly vague and bad reporting by Jeff Geth in the New York Times concerning a failed venture called Whitewater, they thought they had a hook. That there was no evidence of Clinton wrongdoing (by either Bill or Hillary) mattered not a whit. Republicans simply made stuff up. (This is not to say Clinton did not do wrong regarding Monica Lewinski, just that there was no legitimate reason for the Whitewater investigation to even have a phone number by the time that came to light – they had found nothing to justify their investigation into Whitewater, or Travelgate, or Filegate, or Vince Foster’s suicide, and they knew it long before the Lewinsky allegations came to light. They just didn’t tell anyone, lest the investigation be shuttered.)
It has become obvious that Republicans worship power and have nothing but disdain for the Constitution. They don’t believe in the Constitution, especially when it frustrates their drive for power. And opportunists like Metaxas are clutching Trump’s coattails to expand their own power. If he actually cared about the Constitution, he would recognize that Trump is precisely the sort of president the Framers feared, and for whom they crafted the power of impeachment. Can anyone say with a straight face that if a Democrat been caught trying to bribe a foreign power in exchange for personal political gain that the Republicans would be responding the way they are responding to Trump?
When Trump is gone, we may or may not have a country left. When Trump is gone, people like Metaxas will have some questions to answer. They will not be shielded by the people, because Trump thinks of himself as a strongman, and regimes run by strongmen almost never survive the loss of that strongman. After Richard Nixon left office, it was hard to figure out how he had ever won in the first place, because no one admitted to voting for him. It will be the same with Trump.
Opportunists like Metaxas are the flies on the elephant’s hide of authoritarianism.