Spiritual compromise by supporting Donald Trump

The election of Donald Trump to the presidency last month — well, perhaps more accurately, the 81 percent of white evangelicals according to exit polls who supported him — will resort in more than just disappointment with a candidate who has basically thumbed his nose at Christian conventions when he doesn’t fulfill the vague promises he made that got them to support him.

I’m convinced that much of evangelicalism as we know it today has as a result signed its own death warrant.

Reason? Essentially, they sold out God for the promise of cultural and political power. In practice, they were guilty of idolatry, which particularly ticks Him off.

Consider that Trump has engaged in shady business practices, abused women, ran around on two wives and had been cited for racial discrimination, things that had a Democrat done them Christians would have spoken out loudly and often. But, in this case, we either saw silence or heard such excuses as “we need to shake up the system” and just because he “converted” to an anti-abortion position during the campaign and said to evangelicals, “I will protect you!”

That, especially, is galling. (As if just one person had the power to “protect Christians.”) Somehow, I don’t think that “religious freedom” (read: privilege) is a core Biblical value.

I could respect people who really believed that Trump was the best candidate and voted for him on those terms, and I could even do so for people who “held their noses” as they did. But to believe that he was “called of God” solely because they wanted to put Him in an ideological box of their making demonstrated to me just how deluded some Christians are.

Yes, I said it — deluded.

R. Albert Mohler, the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, had it right when he said, “If I were to support, much less endorse, Donald Trump for president, I would actually have to go back and apologize to former President Bill Clinton,” who did apologize for his transgressions but was rejected by some of these same people for being a Democrat. In other words, they had bigger fish to fry.

Too bad. Because they’ve lost the moral high ground.