About Eric Metaxas’ Tattooed Pilot

In a 12/20 interview with Chris Cuomo on CNN, Eric Metaxas was asked how he can support Trump given Trump’s actions. Watch:

Metaxas wants us to think Trump is just a naughty president with his bad language and womanizing. Here’s the thing; I don’t care if Trump has tattoos. I really don’t care that much that he has been married three times. It is relevant that he paid off women to keep his affairs secret but even that isn’t the main event for me.

Sticking with the pilot analogy, I want to know if the pilot get his license by bribing the person who tests pilots? Did he cheat taking the pilot’s exam? Did he lie to get it or keep it? Has he been accused of any crimes as a pilot? If so and he’s investigated, does he lie about matters related to the charges? Does he hide pertinent documents?  Does prevent witnesses from talking?

Metaxas is infuriatingly dense on this point. He portrays his opponents as legalistic prudes. This is simply dishonest.

Trump right now is keeping his staff from providing Congress with information. He is withholding documents from Congress. He lies to the public and Congress about his “perfect” call to Ukraine’s president. He lies about being exonerated by the Mueller report. If Trump is a tattooed pilot, being tattooed is the least of our concerns. He’s dangerous and needs to be grounded.

Christianity Today Calls for Trump to Be Removed from Office; Fireworks Ensue

Yesterday afternoon, Christianity Today‘s Mark Galli wrote an editorial calling for the removal of Donald Trump from office. Since then, Christianity Today has trended nearly non-stop on Twitter and Trump has rage tweeted several times with attacks on the publication. Trump’s court evangelicals are up in arms and have commented with the aim of minimizing the damage.

Mark Galli placed CT’s position in the context of the magazine’s stance on Bill Clinton when he faced impeachment. CT advocated for impeachment then and Galli and the magazine’s editorial board now believe Trump’s conduct in office, most recently during the Ukraine scandal, is of similar bad character.

Of course, Galli and his board are correct. If the Constitution means anything and the oath taken by our legislators means anything, they must convict Trump. It is refreshing to see it print in a magazine I came to respect as an undergraduate.

Immediately, the objections come. He’s done good things. He is pro-life (unless of course you ask the Kurds, Yemeni children and their families, and Ukrainian soldiers on the Russian front). The Judges. The economy.

My reaction to those objections is one name: Mike Pence.

Convicting Donald Trump does not undo the 2016 election. Mike Pence would become president. While Pence has his own issues, there is little chance he would be investigated for them prior to the 2020 election. The people who are all in for Trump must really dislike Mike Pence. Pence would be the GOP standard bearer in 2020 and continue many of the same policies appreciated by evangelicals.

Let me continue with that thought. Removing Trump from office now does not force a choice for a liberal Democrat. Some commenters have thoughtfully suggested removing Trump leaves us with a liberal Democrat as the only alternative. However, acting on principle right now does not present that choice. There is a clear choice right now: take a stand for the rule of law, separation of powers, and an executive who is not above the law or allow the executive branch to function without accountability to anyone, not just now but in future administrations.

To make it personal, the choice right now is between Donald Trump and Mike Pence.

The CT editorial calls Congress to do the right thing. It calls Christians to do the right thing and let God handle the rest. There was a time when walking by faith and not by sight was considered a good thing. Now according to the Christian leaders among us, we need a king. We need a man who decrees this:

According to Trump, CT wants someone to “guard their religion.” He has it all wrong. If Christianity needs a president or any political power to guard our religion, then it is no religion at all. Donald Trump wants us to believe that James Madison was wrong when he said “a dependence on the powers of this world” was “a contradiction to the Christian Religion itself.” Today’s evangelicals appear to believe Trump is necessary for our religion to survive. As indicated by his tweet above, Trump sure believes it.

To me, Galli’s editorial is important because he goes beyond a political opinion and lays out what is at stake by partnering with deception and immorality to attain policy goals.

 Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior. Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency. If we don’t reverse course now, will anyone take anything we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come?

Personally, I think the horse is out of the barn for many people outside of the evangelical world. However, it is never too late to do the right thing. Here’s hoping Mr. Galli’s editorial helps that happen a little more each day.

Kay Warren Shows the Boys How to Do It

This is what I have been waiting for.

I don’t know Mrs. Warren politics. She may plan to vote for Trump, but she knows the actions of a demagogue when she see them. More than that, she called Trump out on his behavior. Imagine that, a high profile evangelical leader calling out POTUS in a sharp and direct manner. No weasel words about both sides, blah, blah; she laid it out.

Beth Moore commented on her tweet. I did not see any other high profile evangelicals. Now I realize that not everybody has to comment on every issue on Twitter and I also know that Trump has an outrage an hour so it is easy to miss some.

I will say that Warren modeled what evangelicals could do if they just would. Even those who end up voting for Trump should call out his bad behavior and risk a disapproving tweet from him. Evangelicals are most of his support right now. If they rose up and said enough, they would have some clout. Instead, most of the leaders (Jeffress, Metaxas, Graham, Morris, etc.) seem to resonate with Trump as demagogue.

If you have a Twitter account, consider showing Kay a little love today…

David Barton Features Anti-Vax Speaker at Legislators Conference

Yesteday, I wrote about David Barton’s pitch to Republican lawmakers to avoid low income, young, and uneducated people in voter registration efforts.  Today, I want to point out that Barton promoted anti-vaccine ideology to the assembled legislators by having Theresa Deisher as a featured speaker for the event.

Deisher has a PhD in microbiology from Stanford and was, at one time, a mainstream scientist. However, she converted to anti-vax ideology several years ago and has promoted the theory that vaccines cause autism via the introduction of fetal DNA. Her theories have been thoroughly examined and lack support.

One of the more recent empirical tests comes from friend of the blog Morten Frisch. Frisch and colleagues examined the population of children in Denmark and found no relationship between the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine and autism. Deisher asserts autism cases are related to use of this vaccine. Here is the summary:

Participants: 657,461 children born in Denmark from 1999 through 31 December 2010, with follow-up from 1 year of age and through 31 August 2013.

Results: During 5,025,754 person-years of follow-up, 6517 children were diagnosed with autism (incidence rate, 129.7 per 100 000 person-years). Comparing MMR-vaccinated with MMR-unvaccinated children yielded a fully adjusted autism hazard ratio of 0.93 (95% CI, 0.85 to 1.02). Similarly, no increased risk for autism after MMR vaccination was consistently observed in subgroups of children defined according to sibling history of autism, autism risk factors (based on a disease risk score) or other childhood vaccinations, or during specified time periods after vaccination.

David Barton’s Project Blitz has caught on with religious right lawmakers. I would really hate to see anti-vax ideology become a part of the religious right dogma. Putting Deisher in front of legislators as an expert is troubling even if she didn’t talk about vaccines.

This is getting more serious as time goes on. Misguided parents listening to anti-vax crusaders put their children at risk. See below:

Constituents of legislators who want to expand exceptions to vaccination should be prepared to ask their legislators where they are getting their information about vaccines.

GOP Lawmakers Encouraged to Avoid Registering Poor, Young, Irreligious Voters and to Take Dominion Over Government

David Barton regularly hosts a strategy conference for state and federal legislators. For the version held this year in November, Barton posted photos which revealed some interesting details of the far right battle plan. I am surprised he posted this one:

Take note of the slide being used by George Barna. I assume this is from a talk on election strategy, Barna’s slide encourages selective voter registration. The audience is encouraged not to register young, uneducated, lower income, and irreligious people. Barna told the audience that those groups gravitate toward socialism.

In addition to the rather undemocratic tone of this advice, I don’t think he is correct. While it was true at one time that college-educated voters on average went for the GOP, now the trend has reversed. College-educated voters now are more likely to vote for a Democratic candidate.

Wallnau Climbs His 7 Mountains

Another revealing photo from the conference gallery is this one of Lance Wallnau teaching lawmakers about 7 mountains dominionism. Simply put, this view of Christian involvement in culture mandates a takeover of seven aspects of society: Religion, Family,Education, Government, Media, Arts & Entertainment and Business.

Wallnau is clearly teaching the legislators about the seven mountains mandate. Since these Christian legislators are considered government level apostles, their job is to take dominion in the mountain of government. This is the objective of Project Blitz which is supported by Barton via financing by his Wallbuilders organization. Project Blitz seeks to pass legislation which privileges Christianity in Congress and in state legislatures.

Barton and his group of Christian nationalist lawmakers aren’t interested in pluralism. They want to empower Christian Republican voters to enact a legal structure that privileges conservative Christians. Even though this is their right to pursue, in my view their aims are contrary to the vision of the framers who crafted a framework for pluralism and freedom of conscience for all.