Pro-Trump evangelicals 'personae non gratae'

I hope these leaders will distinguish between support in the Republican primary and the General Election. When leaders like Falwell Jr. and others supported Trump in the Republican primary, I felt strongly that they showed incredibly poor discernment. Most politicians have skeletons in their closets, but Trump’s were out in the living room for all to see. It wasn’t that all of the policy positions he proposed were bad, but he was too flawed a candidate to be the champion of those policies.

I have pointed out previously on SI how Trump’s path to win the primary was only possible by his cobbling together a small portion of evangelical support, plus an appeal to a populist-Libertarian sort of voters, along with some Democrats who crossed over and voted on the GOP ballot (in states where that is possible). But even this coalition could only get him, on average, about one-third of the overall GOP vote in first 30+ states. The incredibly large field of candidates (Cruz, Rubio, Kasich, Carson, and Bush, along with Huckabee, Chrstie, Paul, and others who dropped out early on) together garnered more votes than Trump almost 2-1 until the process reached the final 15 or so states. But because Trump alone had a larger slice of the pie compared to any of the other individual candidates, he won the nomination.

Once he won that nomination, the choices were Clinton or Trump. If Bock and others holding this meeting berate evangelicals for voting Trump in the general election having opposed him in the primary, then this meeting is entirely wrongheaded. Clinton, by far, was more corrupt than Trump. Her skeletons of corruption were even greater in number, and her time as Secretary of State put on full display her incompetence to lead the country.

…..the cause of Christ would be better served if prominent pastors and theologians stuck to their knitting instead of coming together at conferences to hack away at the other side of contentious issues. Let’s be real here; the church has survived being on the wrong side of a lot of issues, but fratricide and despair is not the way to fix our problems.

(I’m no huge fan of Trump—Darrell summarizes my position well—but my goodness, you’d think that someone had found evidence to disprove one of the fundamentals from all the wailing and gnashing of teeth that’s going on….)