“Those who try to give warnings to the Christian church are never very popular.” — Dr. Aiden Wilson (A.W.) Tozer
Pastor and blogger John Pavlovitz is proudly living up to Tozer’s words of caution. The tagline of his self-titled blog is “Stuff that needs to be said,” and he does just that in a Feb. 2 post titled, “It’s Time We Stopped Calling Donald Trump a Christian.”
In the post, Pavlovitz summarizes the process by which “high-profile evangelists” miraculously conferred Christian status upon Trump:
For someone who has served as a pastor for twenty years, the transformation was astounding and disheartening to witness. Millions of fundamentalists who’d previously spent their days parsing out Bible verses to condemn the LGBTQ community, Muslims, entertainers, Atheists, Democrats, suddenly became a people of Grace. They got really liberal with the Scriptures. They lectured those of us who questioned it all ‘not to judge lest we be judged,’ and heaped shame upon us for bringing up example after example of the man’s hypocrisy, because ‘God looks at the heart’ and how dare we assess another’s professed faith.”
He rightly questions Trump’s “fruit” (the evidence of one becoming Christlike) and the cost of continuing the charade:
Christians need to stop insisting that Donald Trump is a Christian if they really care at all about people coming to know Christ. If that is the greatest burden on their hearts, using this man is tantamount to spiritual treason. It is a perversion of the Gospels that provides such a dissonance to the bystander, as to make Christ all but invisible. Until he says or does anything that remotely resembles him, we need to stop using him and Jesus in the same breath because it distorts Jesus by association.”
Amen, brother.
[Trump] may have bamboozled scores of Christians already dying to believe [he’s a Christian] so they could make peace with their vote — but he is not a man following Jesus.”
Read the entire post here. If you think this is just more media bashing poor old Donald Trump, who just needs to be given a chance, you are missing the point … entirely.
If Trump — as anyone anywhere — wants to claim to be a follower of Christ, he must start acting like it. The fact that he’s not is the central issue here. The fact that high-profile evangelists eagerly duped themselves and their congregations into believing that Trump is a Christian is a monumental and exacerbating problem as well, but that’s a topic for another day.
Admittedly, virtually all U.S Presidents have claimed to be Christians with some having acted far more like it than others. But since the late 1970s and the rise of the Religious Right, a public profession of faith — regardless of authenticity — by Republican candidates has become a prerequisite to receiving the endorsement of influential religious leaders, and by extension, the coveted Christian voting bloc they claim to represent.
Thirty-plus years of that ruinous arrangement has produced no legislative victories worth the price of the Gospel message becoming a footstool for the Republican Party’s agenda.
Trump is now making the pain of that pact more acute than his Republican predecessors. Those of us who stand against permitting the holy name of Jesus Christ and His church from continuing to be used as pawns in the relentless churn of secular politics are declaring an unpopular warning.
I’m comforted by the fact that Jesus was not attempting to win a popularity contest with the rulers of His day. Believers hold up Christ as the perfect example while failing to see that he didn’t change the world through man-centered politics, but through God-centered living.
Christians are to pray for our leaders and those in positions of authority (1 Timothy 2:1-2). We are also directed to identify and denounce fake believers and false prophets (e.g., Ephesians 5:11, Romans 16:17-18, Colossians 2:8) because they oppose God. Those things aren’t incompatible, but the object of both could be the same individual(s), in this case, Trump.
Those proclaiming a disingenuous faith are attacking the kingdom of God as wolves in sheep’s clothing (Matthew 7:15-20). Many believers in the Christian community would be wise to wake up to that reality by removing the wool from their own eyes and stepping back from the fray of partisan politics. Christians are charged with proactively rejecting false believers — whether they are attempting to run our churches, our school boards, or our state and federal governments.
The posers are easy to find … just follow the smell of rotting fruit.
Informing the Faithful 
I agree that there are many things in Trump’s past that are decidedly not consistent with Christianity. I did not vote for him due to his treatment and comments about women among other things. I also agree that we need to call out false prophets and preachers who are leading the sheep astray ie word of faith teachers, but I don’t think it is ever our job to say what is in someone’s heart. Their actions can give us a pretty strong indication but to declare someone is not a believer is a very dangerous and not wise thing to do, in my opinion.
LikeLike
Thanks for your comment. I’m not saying “I know what is in Trump’s heart,” rather, I’m saying that based on Trump’s words and actions – his fruit – he is not a Christian. As such, believers need to immediately reject Trump’s false claims of faith for the good of Christianity. Going forward, evangelical leaders need to stop extracting false professions of faith from candidates and then endorsing them. In the past eight years, Christians gladly asserted that Obama was not a Christian, and worse, that he is a Muslim. I heard no one expressing any concern about knowing what was in Obama’s heart. When Christians opening condemn and malign one as a non-believer and then wed ourselves to another non-believer – regardless of his fruit – we earn the vitriol we receive.
LikeLike
Thanks for your reply Bruce. You make a lot of good points. Speaking for myself, I was careful that I didn’t say that Obama wasn’t a Christian although his words and deeds, ie his “fruit” certainly would suggest that. For example he spoke in glowing soaring rhetoric about Islam and spoke very disdainfully about Christianity and the Bible. Also, his support for positions that are decidedly unbiblical such as gay marriage and abortion. So, perhaps the answer (at least in the political sphere) is to simply be intellectually honest and call out specific deeds and policies instead of saying who and who isn’t a Christian. One of my big pet peeves is when conservatives are critical of something Obama or another democrat does but if a Republican does it, it’s okay. Drives me nuts! Always enjoy your blog. Thanks for getting us to think!
LikeLiked by 1 person
You make a lot of good points as well. I completely share your pet peeve about people letting party affiliation drive their perspective of right and wrong — that’s textbook hypocrisy and certainly not limited to Christians. Much of Obama’s fruit indicated to me, too, that he was not a true believer, though he claimed to be one (which is an interesting, unspoken “rule” for getting elected to high office in America). But unlike Obama, Trump received the endorsement of evangelical leaders. That “stamp of approval” ties Trump to the doctrines of Christianity much more than Obama. And, it ties the church to Trump’s failures, especially those viewed as being unChristian (determined, ironically, by non-Christians). When I look at Matthew 18:15-17, which speaks to dealing with the sin (biblical failings) of our Christian brother and sisters, it doesn’t map well to political leaders who are far removed from our communities and our ability to foster personal relationships with them. That makes knowing their hearts difficult. That is why, as you suggested, we need to be biblically precise in both our criticisms and praises of anyone in office. If not, we risk falling into partisan politics, which are rooted in power brokering not truth telling. Thank you for your readership and support!
LikeLike