CBN News posted the following headline today:
“’This Is an Attempt to Intimidate Certain Voices’: Group Says Meetings Between Trump, Faith Leaders a Violation of Law”
The story concerns a letter (fully documenting its assertions) sent by Americans United for the Separation of Church and State asserting that president Trump’s so-called Evangelical Advisory Board is violating federal law. Below is the substance of their complaint. I have highlighted the essential clauses:
“…the Advisory Board is subject to, but has failed to comply with, the Federal
Advisory Committee Act, 5 U.S.C. app. 2. It is clear that the President’s Evangelical Advisory Board is doing substantive work with the Trump Administration behind closed doors—without any sunlight for the public to understand how and why decisions are being made. We respectfully request that the Advisory Board cease meeting and providing advice to the President unless and until it fully complies with FACA, and that you produce to us certain documents relating to the Advisory Board.
“FACA applies to ‘any committee, board, commission, council, conference, panel, task force, or other similar group, or any subcommittee or other subgroup thereof . . . which is . . . established or utilized by the President . . . in the interest of obtaining advice or recommendations for the President or one or more agencies or officers of the Federal Government.’ The Evangelical Advisory Board’s activities are well within FACA’s scope.”
The gist of CBN’s reporting, particularly in its online interview with Advisory Board spokesman, Johnnie Moore, blatantly misrepresents the
AUSCS letter. Describing it as one more secularist attempt to “intimidate” evangelical voices in government, both CBN and Johnnie Moore distort the real complaint beyond recognition.
As anyone who reads the letter can see, the problem is not that Trump hangs out with evangelicals – although given the cataclysmic demise of evangelical integrity these days, they certainly can’t be anything but a corrosive influence on a president in dire need of both spiritual and practical advice. (I would warn the president about the dangers of associating with “backsliders,” but I don’t think he is familiar with the term.)
The problem is not that Trump converses with evangelicals but that he hangs out with them in lonely back alleys, in the dead of night, where they talk in low whispers, without anyone taking notes or keeping a record of their conversations. Such behavior would be unremarkable if these paragons of Christian virtue were swearing fealty to The Donald in the crushed velvet, over-stuffed chairs of Trump Towers. Politically aware followers of Jesus have come to expect such treachery from the mammon-loving leaders of their mega-churches and other televised “ministries” lusting for more TBN airtime.
But the president is a public servant, at least in theory, not merely the crime boss he was before winning the election.
The American people have every right to know, as a matter of public record,
with whom the president is meeting, from whom he is taking advice, and whether that advice is affecting the rest of us who pay the president’s salary.
American’s United is simply asking the president and his evangelical bed-fellows to obey the law. That’s it.
Didn’t the Attorney General, Jeff Sessions, cite Romans 13 not very long ago as an ominous reminder of just how law-abiding all Americans were supposed to be? True evangelicals ought to be jumping at the chance fully “to comply with, the Federal Advisory Committee Act, 5 U.S.C. app. 2.”
Of course, good ‘ole boy Johnnie (any grown man who insists on being called Johnnie has got to be a good ‘ole boy) insists that there is no such thing as an Evangelical Advisory Council. CBN reports,
“’From the very beginning we’ve made it clear that there is no evangelical advisory council at the White House…I don’t know how many times I’ve said that. I think everybody just needs to recognize that this is an attempt to intimidate certain voices, and voices that will not be intimidated,’ said Moore.
While there is no doubt that Sessions was trying to “intimidate certain
voices” with his immigration policy of separating immigrant children from their parents, under the aegis of Romans 13 no less, I confess that the intimidation factor in the American’s United letter escapes me completely.
Johnnie’s bald-faced insistence that there is no such thing as an Evangelical Advisory Council reminds me of the Monty Python “Dead Parrot sketch.” After his recently purchased parrot dies, the disgruntled customer tries to return his now dead parrot to the pet shop, only to be faced with the recalcitrant owner who insists – contrary to all the evidence – that the bird is not dead, only resting. Classic Monty Python.
Well, Johnnie Moore. Monty Python disbanded long ago. Your attempts to resurrect the group with a new Evangelical Council sketch won’t work. It’s not funny.
After all, there is a stable collection of “evangelical” church leaders who periodically gather collectively with the president in Washington D.C., providing him with counsel about issues dear to their hearts, urging him to adopt policies favorable to their concerns. The recent White House dinner for evangelicals was a gathering of the usual suspects.
Johnnie Moore’s denial and complaint is only the latest example of evangelicalism’s pathetic sense of entitlement and bogus victimization.
You, first, demand special treatment – why do we have to make a public record of our meetings with the president? It’s not fair! – and then you cry the crocodile tears of “religious discrimination” when a public service organization calls you out for trying to play by your own rules.
Why can’t evangelical leaders willingly abide by the same standards applied to every other lobbying group? Why the skulduggery, followed by another “stop picking on me” burst of tears? It’s pathetic.
Sadly, this story, which is paradigmatic of the many reprehensible ills afflicting evangelicalism today, is one layer of dishonesty on top of another, and another, and another…
If you will, allow me to paraphrase the apostle Paul’s lament over mortality as I close. Paul says, “Oh, my God, who will deliver me from this body-politic of death?” (Romans 7:24).
