Conservative evangelicals have been widely criticized for their support of President Donald Trump. Yet, many evangelical leaders have not been afraid to speak out against some actions Trump and his administration have taken since winning the 2016 election.
As the Public Religion Research Institute found in its recent annual American Values Survey, about 42 percent of white evangelicals say they are only “weak” supporters of president Donald Trump and only three in 10 white evangelicals say there is nothing Trump can do to lose their support.
This suggests that a majority of white evangelicals still have some hesitation to claim full-throated support for the president. The Christian Post recently looked at “7 Trump Accomplishments That Evangelicals Like.” Now, let’s take a look at seven Trump actions that have raised concern among evangelicals.
1. Charlottesville response
Trump was criticized by many Americans in August for his response to the Unite the Right white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia that saw at least one counter-demonstrator killed in a vehicle ramming attack carried out by a man linked to a white supremacist organization.
Many felt that Trump’s original statement on the Charlottesville violence did not do enough to specifically call out the ideology of white supremacists and white nationalists. Although Trump later condemned racist ideologies and white supremacy, he would again stir the pot, stating in an exchange with reporters in New York City that there were “very fine people” on “both sides” in Charlottesville and there were “two sides to the story.”
A coalition of evangelical leaders that included Southern Baptist ethicist Russell Moore, Bishop T.D. Jakes, Tony Evans, and Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Leadership Conference, signed a statement calling on Trump to directly condemn the alt-right movement.
“We believe it is important for this movement to be addressed, for at its core it is a white identity movement and the majority of its members are white nationalists or white supremacists,” the letter states. “This movement gained public prominence during your candidacy for President of the United States. Supporters of the movement have claimed that you share their vision for our country. These same supporters have sought to use the political and cultural concerns of people of goodwill for their prejudiced political agendas. It concerned many of us when three people associated with the alt-right movement were given jobs in the White House.”
In a blog post, Denny Burk, a professor of biblical studies at Boyce College, the undergraduate school of the the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, criticized the president for failing to show “moral clarity” in his response to Charlottesville.
“Today, President Trump addressed the nation in a press conference in which he said that the white supremacist protestors were ‘very fine people,'” Burk posted in an update on Aug. 15. “His full remarks were more than disappointing. They were morally bankrupt and completely unacceptable. People who protest while chanting Nazi slogans are not ‘very fine people.'”
The Christian Post editors also posted an editorial calling for Trump to condemn white supremacy.
2. Deportation of Christians
Trump also received criticism from evangelicals when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents began detaining and threatening with deportation hundreds of Christian immigrants.
The U.S. government detained not only Christians who crossed the border from Mexico but also began detaining Christian refugees from places where the level of persecution is high, such as Iraq and Indonesia.
In July, it was reported that members of Trump’s informal evangelical advisory council directly expressed their concern when it was reported that the Trump administration was going to deport 100 Iraqi Christians back to a nation that has seen its Christian population dwindle to near extinction because of persecution in the last 15 years.
A couple of evangelical leaders involved in a briefing of about 30 faith leaders with White House staffers in July told The Christian Post that they sent legal memos to the administration voicing their concern about the issue.
“We were all involved and I was there in that moment and yes, we reached an agreement that was what we were doing,” former Southern Baptist Convention President Ronnie Floyd, the pastor of Cross Church in northwest Arkansas, told CP.
Johnnie Moore, a religious freedom advocate and evangelical communications executive, told CP that the “memos were sound legal arguments, rooted in genocide declarations passed by both houses of Congress to show a legal justification for treating these particular individuals differently.”
Earlier this year, Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Leadership Conference, expressed concern with the high amount of law-abiding Latino immigrants being targeted by the Trump administration for deportation, including some Christian pastors, even though Trump promised to target criminals for deportation.
“We are looking at, for example, a mom whose kids were born here and whose kids don’t even speak Spanish. The mom who came here legally with a visa and the visa expired and she never got a deportation order was deported,” Rodriguez said at the time. “These kind of egregious stories are the stories taking place. That is why I oppose it. I really want our president to fulfill his entire promise.”
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SOURCE: Samuel Smith
Christian Post
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