Philip Yancey wants to know: How can evangelicals support someone who “stands against everything that Christianity believes”?
Carol Kuruvilla
Associate Religion Editor
Huffington Post
Award-winning Christian author Philip Yancey is dumbfounded by the way that many members of his faith have rallied around Donald Trump.
Yancey expressed his doubts about the Republican presidential candidate and his Christian supporters during an interview with website Evangelical Focus.
“I am staggered that so many conservative or evangelical Christians would see a man who is a bully, who made his money by casinos, who has had several wives and several affairs, that they would somehow paint him as a hero, as someone that we could stand behind,” Yancey said.
“To choose a person who stands against everything that Christianity believes as the hero, the representative, one that we get behind enthusiastically is not something that I understand at all,” he added.
It's really not that difficult, Philip. American Christians, and many Canadian Christians too, believe what they hear on Fox TV. Fox TV, and the Republican Party have demonized Democrats to the degree that even Donald Trump looks good. This hyper-polarization of the political scene in the USA is completely undermining democracy and will destroy the country in very short order.
The day will soon come when the Whitehouse will either dissolve Congress and the Senate, or completely ignore them. If the Democrats are in power when it happens, 'patriots' will take up arms and there will be bloodshed like we haven't seen since Lincoln. If the Republicans are in power, there will be bloodshed like we haven't seen since Lincoln - not as in a civil war, but as in ethnic cleansing. And, they will do it in the Name of God, which will lower Christianity to the level of Islam.
In either event, America is finished.
To choose a person who stands against everything that Christianity believes as the hero ... is not something that I understand at all.
Philip Yancey
Yancey, a respected author and columnist whose books about Christianity have sold millions of copies, is just the latest evangelical heavyweight to speak out against Trump. A number of high profile evangelical Christians have parked themselves in the “Never Trump” camp, pointing out that the candidate’s policies and actions don’t reflect Christian values.
And yet, rank and file white evangelical Christians don’t seem to mind ― or at least, are willing to forgive. The group, which counts for one-fifth of all registered voters in the U.S. and roughly one-third of all voters with Republican leanings, has been rallying strongly around Trump. According to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in June, 78 percent of white evangelical voters said they would vote for Trump.
In private meetings with evangelical pastors supportive of his campaign, the nominee promised to cherish and defend America’s “Christian heritage,” which has struck a chord with Christians who feel that they are losing the culture wars.
But Yancey believes that tying the church and politics together in this way isn’t good for American Christianity in the long run.
“There are countries in Europe where the church is set back for decades and decades, because they have been stained by how they sold their soul for power, I would say.”
Decades? More like centuries. But Yancey's point is that Christians in America are becoming more and more indistinguishable from the rest of society. As I have been writing for some time, we have become consumed by politics. We call ourselves Christians, yet Christ never had anything to do with politics, nor did any of His disciples, and neither should we. We should be completely consumed with spiritual matters, but in reality, we are not spiritual at all.
The American evangelical church is currently in a state of apostasy!
So why do we think that God will restore the USA to it's former glory? That was always the message of the false prophets of the Old Testament.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.
Trump has not pledged to ban all Muslims, he pledged to ban them until they could be properly vetted. Considering what is happening in Europe, it would be idiotic to do otherwise.
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