As
the political clamor caused by a top Christian magazine’s call to
remove President Donald Trump from office continues to reverberate, more
than 100 conservative evangelicals closed ranks further around Trump on
Sunday.
In a
letter to the president of Christianity Today magazine, the group of
evangelicals chided Editor-in-Chief Mark Galli for penning an anti-Trump
editorial, published Thursday, that they portrayed as a dig at their characters as well as the president’s.
“Your
editorial offensively questioned the spiritual integrity and Christian
witness of tens-of-millions of believers who take seriously their civic
and moral obligations,” the evangelicals wrote to the magazine’s
president, Timothy Dalrymple.
The
new offensive from the group of prominent evangelicals, including
multiple members of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, signals a
lingering awareness by the president’s backers that any meaningful crack
in his longtime support from that segment of the Christian community
could prove perilous for his reelection hopes. Though no groundswell of
new anti-Trump sentiment emerged among evangelicals in the wake of
Christianity Today’s editorial, the president fired off scathing tweets
Friday accusing the establishment magazine – founded by the late Rev.
Billy Graham in 1956 -- of becoming a captive of the left.
The
letter to the magazine’s president sent on Sunday also included a
veiled warning that Christianity Today could lose readership or
advertising revenue as a result of the editorial, which cites Trump’s
impeachment last week.
Citing
Galli’s past characterization of himself as an “elite” evangelical, the
letter’s authors told Dalrymple that “it’s up to your publication to
decide whether or not your magazine intends to be a voice of
evangelicals like those represented by the signatories below, and it is
up to us and those Evangelicals like us to decide if we should subscribe
to, advertise in and read your publication online and in print, but
historically, we have been your readers.”
Among
the signatories of the letter are George Wood, chairman of the World
Assemblies of God Fellowship; Rev. Tim Hill of the Church of God; former
Arkansas governor and GOP presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee; and
former Minnesota GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann.
Galli
told CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday that he views the chances of
Trump leaving office, either through a reelection loss or
post-impeachment conviction by the Senate, as “probably fairly slim at
this point.” The editor-in-chief defended his editorial as less of a
“political judgment” than a call for fellow evangelicals to examine
their tolerance of Trump’s “moral character” in exchange for his embrace
of conservative policies high on their agenda.
“We’re
not looking for saints. We do have private sins, ongoing patterns of
behavior that reveal themselves in our private life that we’re all
trying to work on,” Galli said Sunday. “But a president has certain
responsibilities as a public figure to display a certain level of public
character and public morality.”
Galli referred comment on Sunday’s evangelical letter to Dalrymple, who on Sunday published his own strongly worded defense of the magazine’s anti-Trump commentary.
Countering
Trump’s suggestion that the magazine had shifted to favor liberals,
Dalrymple wrote that the publication is in fact “theologically
conservative” and “does not endorse candidates.”
“Out
of love for Jesus and his church, not for political partisanship or
intellectual elitism, this is why we feel compelled to say that the
alliance of American evangelicalism with this presidency has wrought
enormous damage to Christian witness,” Dalrymple wrote.
Asked
about the editorial’s indictment of Trump by “Fox News Sunday,” Marc
Short – chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, himself a prominent
evangelical Christian – cited some of the policy positions that have
helped endear the president to many in that voting bloc.
“For
a lot of us who are celebrating the birth of our Savior this week, the
way that we look at it is that this president has helped to save
thousands of similar unplanned pregnancies,” Short said Sunday, adding
that “no president has been a greater ally to Israel than this
president.”
Roughly
8 in 10 white evangelical Protestants say they approve of the way Trump
is handling his job, according to a December poll from The AP-NORC
Center.
The Trump campaign is planning a Jan. 3 event in Miami called “Evangelicals for Trump.”
___
Associated
Press religion coverage receives support from the Lilly Endowment
through the Religion News Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for
this content.
__
This
story has been corrected by deleting a reference to Samuel Rodriguez as
among those who signed a letter Sunday, which he was not.
No comments:
Post a Comment