A few months ago, I wrote a column about how weak-willed Christian leadership has led America to fail. The void left by this failure has been filled by Kansas City Chiefs star kicker Harrison Butker, who has done more this year to promote biblical ethics in the culture than most of the churches combined. He continues to criticize it, which brings us to Donald Trump and the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week.
There has been legitimate criticism from my fellow believers about the selection of some speakers, like former stripper Amber Rose, who started something called “Slutwalk,” that has expanded into a broader assertion that this party was once founded on Christian beliefs but has now suddenly been pushed to rock bottom by Trump and his “New York values.”
Churches have systematically fled the culture wars of the last generation and built megachurches in the suburbs.
That’s not true.
The truth is, the party had betrayed its evangelical base countless times, long before Trump came along, and it was Trump and his “New York values” that ultimately recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s rightful capital. Roe v. Wade It wasn’t the reborn good guy George W. Bush who was overturned. It was Trump who brought unprecedented stability to the Middle East and led us away from the Muslim sectarian infighting that a more dignified forever-war Republican Party kept embroiled us in.
That’s not to say I haven’t criticized Trump — and I’ve not shyly aired that here and on my airwaves — but evangelicals who pretend the Republican Party was an extension of the Council of Nicaea before Trump took office seem just as out of touch with reality as the Republican corporators who failed to realize they were the driving force behind Trump’s rise almost a decade ago.
Just as the globalist corporatists merged with the Democrats to form a one-party system and create a market that many believe Trump to be a disruptor, the sheer lethargy of Christian leadership has created a need for someone to step into the Charlemagne-like vacuum and become the protector of the kingdom.
Because when it comes to America’s escalating culture wars, salt becomes stale, useless, and gets trampled underfoot. Churches have systematically fled this battle in the last generation to build megachurches in the suburbs. When they did get into the fight, their priority was not to win the fight but to make sure it was a gentlemanly fight.
We pursued our objectives by abandoning one of our main objectives.
When I was campaigning for Ted Cruz against Trump in 2016, I made the analogy about Trump’s popularity among evangelicals, because we were trying to be the evangelical candidate and I didn’t understand why this New York celebrity with the tabloid bestsellers was more popular among Southern Baptists than our Southern Baptist candidate.
I gave the example of Clint Eastwood’s “Man with No Name” anti-hero in the Spaghetti Western. People liked the nice guy sheriff, like Gary Cooper, who would rid the town of bandits. Someone you could look up to. Someone you wanted to marry your daughter to. Someone you wanted to name your son after. But that nice guy sheriff never showed up to fight, and the town continued to be taken over by bandits. Sooner or later, you have to survive.
So when you’re backed into a corner and out of options, you turn to the Pale Rider, the High Plains Drifter, the Anti-Hero. You know that teaming up with the Anti-Hero will cause a lot of collateral damage; a few townsfolk might get caught in the crossfire. You know that he has flaws that you don’t want, that you can’t repent of, that are irredeemable. But you also know that it’s either him or the end of the town.
Despite Trump’s flaws and all that has puzzled and frustrated me about him and his methods, the truth is that Trump has done more to combat the darkness that has infiltrated and threatened to engulf this culture since he stepped off the escalator in 2015 than the church has collectively done so far this century.
There’s a reason the dark forces are targeting Donald Trump and not the church: the biggest problem facing America is that most pastors don’t deserve to be shot.
