“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.