The president and the porn star

Of late an adult-film actress and stripper named Stephanie Gregory Clifford, professionally known as Stormy Daniels, has said that she had an affair with President Donald Trump about a dozen years ago and that he has tried to buy her silence, per a recent interview on CBS’s “60 Minutes.” As I understand it, part of the controversy is that the $130,000 figure thrown out may have been paid out of campaign funds, which would be illegal.

Several female Trump supporters who I believe to be evangelical Christians have said in response, “You’re trying to impeach our president.”

That’s rich.

Here’s the problem: Would they say the same thing about a Democrat in this kind of pickle? I think you know the answer to that.

What I’ve believed for nearly 30 years is that Christians have maintained an obvious double standard when it comes to sexually immoral activity. When a conservative “messes up” that transgression is often covered, but when a liberal does it they want him removed. (I don’t recall any of these same believers calling for now-former Rep. Tim Murphy’s head after his mistress revealed that he had asked her to get an abortion. Murphy, who formerly represented a district here in southwestern Pennsylvania, resigned on his own.)

Anyway, other believers have referred to Trump as a “baby Christian” and for that reason alone don’t hold anything he does against him. The truth be told, I haven’t seen any concrete evidence that he’s changed his ways, and he certainly hasn’t said about this situation, “What I did was wrong.”

And I think I know why. Their goal was never really the propagation of the authentic Christian faith — it was always about maintaining conservative Christian hegemony. In such a case, however, the two are mutually exclusive because Godly standards don’t change.

This might be one of the reasons younger people are leaving churches. Christians who wink at sin for the sake of political power end up selling out God at the end. And thus we sabotage our own efforts to share the Christian faith — doing so comes off as inauthentic, let alone hypocritical.

It’s one thing for a Republican president who ran “the most secular campaign in [recent] history” not to trust God. It’s something else entirely when His own people don’t, either.

What's in a name?: Why we just can't 'forget' about slavery

A couple of weeks ago I saw a meme on Facebook saying that, because no one living today is or owned a slave, we should simply stop talking about chattel slavery of African-Americans before the Civil War. Here’s one reason we can’t and in fact better not: Our surnames.

Did you notice that the vast majority of African-Americans’ last names are European? Indeed, to be exact, mostly from the British Isles (mine is Irish) but also in some cases Dutch and French, and we ended up with those names because our cultural heritage is unknown to us. Not for no reason did Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X, né Little, reject his “slave name” when he got started.  And he created quite a bit of consternation in the process.

Plus, we also recall that white masters often sexually abused female slaves, indeed in many cases getting them pregnant, so not only do we have those names but a large number of us also have DNA. Occasionally you’ll see some blacks with blond hair or blue eyes — guess how that came about?

Well, can’t we just change our names to those of more African orientation today? Well, we don’t know what they’d be and, as we all know, names give a sense of self and belonging. And our nation has always had issues with cultural identity anyway when it doesn’t fit the “American” norm — for example, studies have demonstrated that African-Americans with more “African”-sounding names, in this case primarily first names, on their résumés get fewer calls for job interviews.

Now, I’m not speaking of maintaining resentment toward folks, and few are actually encouraging such. But before we can heal we need to recognize what is and has been — one reason we study history in the first place is to understand how we got to where we are today.

“Forget?” Not on your life.

Children’s Crusade, version 2.0

Since the Valentine’s Day shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., student anti-gun activism has risen, most notably with a massive walkout that took place exactly one month later. And some who are criticizing their goal of reducing the number of guns available to cause such carnage are also complaining that they’re being manipulated by others — liberal groups, the media etc.

There’s actually historical perspective here — the 1963 Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Ala., during which children and teens cut class to protest segregation. On the surface it may have appeared to be a cynical ploy as was charged, but the kids themselves took to it as ducks took to water. Martin Luther King Jr., the spiritual leader of the movement, wrote that for the first time they were able to put into practice the Gandhian maxim “Fill up the jails.” (It got to the point that police couldn’t even arrest most of the students, thus forcing the politicians to negotiate with demonstrators to address segregation.)

It seems to me that many of the critics of the student activists really don’t want their voices heard at all if they differ from their own; it isn’t new, of course, because academia has been under attack for decades for similar reasons. And in fact, many movements — the anti-Vietnam-War movement most notably — started on college campuses; students had the energy and the passion to get their message across.

I found it amazing that many of their opponents who actually are politicians said publicly, in effect, “We know better.” Oh, really? The kids are the ones who are having their schools shot up, so they’re the ones actually living the nightmare. Why don’t the people in power actually listen to them? Oh, that’s right — they don’t want their pet agendas challenged.

Some have said that the Second Amendment encourages an unfettered right to firearms, which, as some courts have ruled, is a gross overstatement. Or that it would keep people safe from a “tyrannical” government, never mind the tanks, bombs and assault weapons at its disposal. Being armed to the teeth doesn’t keep the peace; it can in fact turn into war, and students are living that reality today. So perhaps their critics need to quit blaming outside groups for publicizing and helping the students out — and perhaps learn something in the process.

Dr. King quoted one Birmingham teen demonstrator as telling his parents that he wanted freedom for them too, “and I want it to come before you die.” He understood the stakes, and thus so do these students. Ignore them at your peril.

The beloved community, threatened

A story in today’s New York Times shed light on one of my biggest fears with the evangelical church: Unless it dealt with the differing perceptions of race among its members, the steps it’s taken toward reconciliation over the past couple of decades, becoming what Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as the “beloved community,” would be sabotaged.

The article focused on one African-American woman in Fort Worth, Texas, who left her largely-white church after the 2016 general election. You can almost guess why: Its members’ support, albeit more muted, of Donald Trump for president for “spiritual” reasons. Not helping matters, of course, was its previous unwillingness to address shootings of African-American men in some high-profile situations.

I’ve seen this up-close and personal. Last week a musician friend who is African-American walked out of a service because the preacher supported Trump. And at my church, a number of white members left because, during our missions emphasis month in 2016, we adopted the slogan “Welcome the Stranger” and they believed it to be a shot at Trump because of his pronouncements against illegal immigration.

But make no mistake — this isn’t simply about “differing views.” This is about commitment to an ideological worldview more than the LORD or members of His Body who may actually feel pain because of it. In such an atmosphere fighting against legal abortion and for religious liberty trumps — no pun intended — loving people were they are, which I would submit is a form of idolatry.

Some of these same people wanted, wrongly, to blame President Obama for exploiting the racial divide — it’s wrong to do so because he fully intended to heal the breach. You can’t heal a breach if you don’t accept that it exists and that it might be your fault that it does in the first place.

And that may be one reason people, especially in their 20s, are leaving evangelical churches — having lived with diversity as a fact of life, they won’t deal with an institution that doesn’t respect those not like themselves.

Of course we lost evangelist Billy Graham a few weeks ago. Perhaps most people don’t know that he was an early integrationist when he started out, demanding that his crusades, even in his native South, be integrated; inviting a black man to be part of his staff at a time when that would have been unheard of and Dr. King to pray at a New York City crusade; and denouncing apartheid in South Africa.

I fear the progress we’ve made is being undone because of our unwillingness to consider others and make room for them.