Will Trump’s Nomination Be the End of the Religious Right?
Conservative Christians have long aligned with the Republican Party. But never before has a GOP nominee so flouted evangelical beliefs.
.. The breaking point came on June 21, when Trump—ironically in an effort to appease the religious right—met with nearly a thousand evangelical leaders and announced a 25-person “evangelical advisory board” to help him reach conservative Christian voters.
.. Almost all the members of that board have histories of being right-leaning, pro-life and pro-Israel—typical for conservative Christians. But as Ruth Graham noted at Slate, the group is really a who’s-who of former evangelical leaders: Ralph Reed, former leader of the Christian Coalition; Ronnie Floyd, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention; and James Dobson, former president of Focus on the Family. It probably doesn’t come as a surprise that the board is mostly older (average age: 64), mostly male and mostly white, with only four people of color. They are a remnant, in other words, of the old guard Moral Majority-era conservative evangelicals whose political influence, on issues like same-sex marriage, contraception and school prayer, was already waning.
.. Christian blogger Fred Clark called the advisory board a “B-list of second-tier religious right figures along with a handful of peaked-long-ago relics.” The Hispanic Baptist Pastors Alliance took offense too, in a statement warning that “joining this board is not the wisest way to be salt and light” and cautioning against “jumping into a crowded office where the weed and wheat are undistinguishable.” It was essentially a call to stay out of politics—a rejection of the basic premise of the Moral Majority, that Christians ought to influence politics to see God’s Kingdom come.
.. Russell Moore—an influential leader in the Southern Baptist Convention with a history of theologically and politically conservative views—immediately denounced the board’s “heretical prosperity gospel hucksters hailed as spiritual leaders.” Presumably he was taking aim at people like televangelists Kenneth and Gloria Copeland and Paula White
.. Some evangelicals, like Southern Evangelical Seminary president Richard Land—another member of Trump’s board, though he has not officially endorsed the candidate—continue to see their calling as being “salt and light” to those in positions of power. They believe Christians have a mandate to influence politics through whatever avenue is available to them, whether they like the candidate or not.
.. One member of Trump’s advisory board, Reverend Robert Jeffress, put it more bluntly in making the case to evangelicals for supporting a Trump presidency: “I want the meanest, toughest, son-of-a-you-know-what I can find in that role, and I think that’s where many evangelicals are.
.. “There’s never been infighting among Christian leaders about whether to support a serial adulterer… who lauds the work of Planned Parenthood, mocks the disabled, inflames racial tensions and vowed to order American military personnel to commit war crimes,” says Eric Teetsel, 32, one of the most prominent leaders of evangelicalism’s “new guard,” a subgroup committed to social justice issues.
.. rather than switch his allegiance to the presumptive GOP nominee, he hopes to convince his fellow evangelicals not to vote Trump. The same day of Trump’s meeting with evangelicals, Teetsel stood outside the Marriott Marquis in New York holding a homemade sign that read, “Torture is not pro-life. Racism isnot pro-life. Misogyny is not pro-life. Murdering the children of terrorists is not pro-life.” “When influential Christian leaders give cover to a man like Donald Trump we shouldn’t be surprised when our neighbors are uninterested in the Gospel,” Teetsel told me.