The editors at Christianity Today have hopped aboard the mea culpa train with many other conservative, Republican, evangelical news outlets.
However, I don’t know whether to say, “Better late than never,” or “Too little too late.”
On second thought, I think I’ll go with option two. Because it’s all way too little and much too late.
It’s too late because the inevitability of violence, fueled by Right-Wing lies about the election of Joe Biden, was as clear as the nose on your face for anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear.
Trump eagerly and persistently fomented it over and over again, every time he opened his foul mouth.
Right-Wing radio and television, a category which includes ostensibly “Christian” broadcasting networks as well, only intensified the already high levels of anger and resentment among Trump’s base over the president’s mythical conspiracy stories.
Yet, I never saw nor heard a single, Christian conservative fact-checker offer even minimal push-back against the bogus election fraud charges cooked up by the Trump-Guliani-Sekulow-Powell-Mitchell cabal of greedy, power-hungry, “legal” opportunists.
Not one.
Yet, now the editorial staff and talking heads at such bastions of Trump- mania as Fox, Newsmax, the Trinity Broadcasting and the Christian Broadcasting Networks (check here, here, and here) have all joined hands to sing kumbaya and condemn the violent assault on our nation’s capitol.
An assault that their reporting had helped to stir up and create.
Christianity Today has now joined this circle of lame repentance at the evangelical campfire.
Yet, it is far too little. In fact, it is grossly inadequate.
Remember, as far back as October 2016, candidate Trump insisted that Hillary Clinton was going to rig the election. He insisted that she could only win if she “stole the election” from him.
Where was this newly discovered evangelical moral fiber then? Trump’s long-term plans were obvious then and there. Why wasn’t he called on it?
Early on in this more recent presidential campaign, Trump was replaying the same old tune warning that “the only way he could lose was if the election was rigged.”
The remarks below were made in August.
Trump was clearly previewing his strategy for contesting the outcome of the election should he lose.
Figuring this out was not rocket science.
So, where was the Christian wisdom and warning about these obvious presidential shenanigans last fall, when it might have made a difference?
Where were the serious Christian warnings about the dangers of conspiracy theories, and the irrational behavior they can cause, when Trump first initiated his ultimate conspiracy theory that is now tearing the country apart?
I don’t have time to run through the litany of impeachable offenses committed by this president over the past four years, but they began in the first week he sat down in the Oval Office when he refused to divest himself of his business interests.
Where were the evangelical voices then, ready to condemn his refusal to abide by the Constitution?
Trump’s habitual violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clauses were only the beginning of his presidential criminality. And, believe it or not, we see that it his theft has never stopped as his staff now steals — yes, steals — historical artifacts from the White House (see below)!
Where was this evangelical moral concern in January of 2017?
Or. how about the Muller Report’s thoroughly documents claims that Trump had committed obstruction of justice at least 10-12 times in the aftermath of his phone call with the Ukrainian president?
Where was the evangelical worry about telling the truth then? Who was calling out William Barr’s lies for Trump then?
No, “humoring” this president is THE LAST thing his conservative, Republican, evangelical base has been doing.
Rather, they have been enablers, sycophants, co-conspirators, and mindless cheerleaders for the most incompetent, criminal, and psychologically dangerous president in American history.
So, finally I get to it. Below is Christianity Today’s wholly inadequate editorial. It’s facile references to the Bible offer only a veneer of seriousness to an otherwise shallow attempt at self-criticism:
The administration officials and members of Congress who enabled President Trump’s attempts to delegitimize the presidential election did not truly believe he won. They chose to coddle the president’s deception (and, I suspect, self-deception) because they thought it would endear them to his most loyal voters, and they assumed no one would get hurt.
“What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” an unnamed senior Republican official told The Washington Post in November. “He went golfing this weekend. It’s not like he’s plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. He’s tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then he’ll tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then he’ll leave.”
I think Trump will indeed leave, as he finally said he would in a brief video Thursday. But that doesn’t mean there was no downside. It doesn’t mean no one got hurt. In Washington on Wednesday, we witnessed a “failed insurrection,” to use the phrase of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, in which pro-Trump demonstrators, some armed with guns, stormed the Capitol and rioted inside. The chaos claimed multiple lives as it made credible all but the direst warnings about what Trump’s elevation to the highest office in our country could bring.
Humoring him was not harmless.
For Christians, this should be no surprise. Scripture warns us that small patterns and habits grow to shape our lives in large ways. This is true of both faithfulness and sin, virtue and vice. “Don’t you know that a little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough?” Paul asked the Corinthian church, incredulous at their acceptance of open, incestuous adultery in their congregation (1 Cor. 5:6). . .
. . . What we saw in Washington last Wednesday is what happens when the president insists he won an election he lost and, instead of telling him and the American people the truth, his allies go along with it. It is what happens when they file lawsuit after lawsuit without a whit of merit, pushing legal claims so bad they are dismissed in court after court, by judge after judge—including judges nominated by Trump himself.
It is what happens when they prioritize power over honesty and cosset mass delusion, even in Jesus’ name. It is what happens after two months of the president and his associates telling millions of disappointed, frightened, angry people that they were cheated, that the foundation of our representative government was undermined, that they really ought to do something about it, that maybe that something should be violent, and that they should “never concede.”
Well, some of them did do something. This is what the dough looks like leavened. This is where dishonesty in the little things leads.
In the immediate aftermath of Wednesday’s events, I’ve seen defensiveness over assignment of responsibility to white evangelicals because of our unusually high support for Trump at the ballot box. Is it fair, some have asked, to blame all evangelicals for actions (storming the Capitol) many would never condone, or for the election of a president many backed for policy reasons if at all?
