The War of Christmas - A.D. 2019

Pride is a destructive force that can separate us from God, damage our relationship with others, and
produce devastation in our spiritual life. No wonder Peter wrote in 1st Peter 5:
(5b) Yes, all of you be submissive to one another, and be clothed with humility, for "God resists the proud, But gives grace to the humble."
6 Therefore humble yourselves under the mighty hand of God, that He may exalt you in due time,
7 casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you.
8 Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.

We can be so consumed with how others act that we are not tending to our own spiritual life.  We can become angry and lash out at those with whom we disagree; we can even become impatient with God for not fixing the person who is the object of our disdain.  As we face the new year, we can become concerned with making sure our house is in order, that we are walking before God clean and humble, and that we are not allowing ourselves to get distracted by the schemes of the enemy to get us off track.

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Spiritual pride is a dangerous entity, and we have to be so careful in being caught up in another's sinfulness that we ignore our own propensity to sin.  God does not rank sin - only one will separate us from God, and Jesus died for all of them. Luke 18 states:
10 "Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.
11 The Pharisee stood and prayed thus with himself, 'God, I thank You that I am not like other men--extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this tax collector.
12 I fast twice a week; I give tithes of all that I possess.'
13 And the tax collector, standing afar off, would not so much as raise his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me a sinner!'

You could say it was not the so-called "War on Christmas," that we hear so much about, a conflict between those who want to express our Savior's birth and those who would want to restrict that expression.  No, this year, in the final days of the second decade of the twenty-first century, the "War of Christmas," broke out, and the rhetorical shot came from a Christian publication - the target: essentially, other Christians.  The subject: their political views.

Of course, the mainstream media covered it, and at a time when we can show ourselves to be united around one Savior, the fissures in the body of Christ were in full display.

As I mentioned in my news update, The 3, on Monday's Meeting House, the outgoing editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, a venerable Christian magazine and website founded by the late Billy Graham, called for the President of the United States to be "removed," either by impeachment, which the editor, Mark Galli, feels is a slam dunk, with irrefutable evidence.  Or by being defeated in his quest for a second term.

Much has been written about the Galli editorial.  The Christian Post has been providing comprehensive coverage of the piece and response to it.  It stated:

Galli argued in the Thursday editorial that Trump has to be removed from office because he violated the Constitution and is “profoundly immoral.”

“... The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral,” Galli wrote in the piece published a day after Trump became the third president in U.S. history to be impeached by the House of Representatives.

But, he also had hard words for fellow Christians, saying: "To the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record, we might say this: Remember who you are and whom you serve. Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior."

Franklin Graham almost immediately denounced the editorial, which invoked the name of his father, saying that Billy Graham would not have agreed with it and that the elder Graham knew and voted for President Trump in 2016.  In a letter signed by close to 200 evangelical leaders, according to the Post, those who signed related:

"We are not theocrats and we recognize that our imperfect political system is a reflection of the fallen world within which we live, reliant upon the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, which is freely given to sinner and saint, alike.

“We are proud to be numbered among those in history who, like Jesus, have been pretentiously accused of having too much grace for tax collectors and sinners, and we take deeply our personal responsibility to render unto Caesar what is Caesar's — our public service."

They also denounced assertions Galli made in an essay published last year in the book Still Evangelical?, in which he derided the 76% of white self-identified evangelical voters who helped elect Trump in 2016. He described those individuals as "evangelicals [who] often haven’t finished college, and if they have jobs (and apparently most of them don’t), they are blue collar jobs or entry level work.” In the same piece, Galli referred to himself as belonging to a different group of evangelicals, the “elite” evangelicals.

Perhaps one of the most incendiary and irresponsible portions of the Galli editorial had to do with his allegations of how the Christian witness was being harmed around the world.  In a Christian Post editorial, John Grano and Richard Land wrote:

Mr. Galli asks evangelicals supporting Trump to consider how continued support for the president will impede and compromise evangelical witness for Jesus to an unbelieving world. One might well ask Mr. Galli how his obvious elitist disdain and corrosive condescension for fellow Christians with whom he disagrees, as ignorant, uneducated, “aliens in our midst” might well damage evangelical witness to an unbelieving world. Unbelievers might well conclude, “These Christian preach love for neighbor, but they certainly don’t seem to practice what they preach!”

Grano and Land are both in editorial leadership over at the Post.  Incidentially, one of their writers, Napp Nazworth, resigned upon learning that the publication was planning to publish a pro-Trump editorial.  Trinity Broadcasting also took aim at the Christianity Today editorial.

The final statement: "CT’s disdainful, dismissive, elitist posture toward their fellow Christians may well do far more long-term damage to American Christianity and its witness than any current prudential support for President Trump will ever cause."

There is certainly much to consider here, as we embark upon another election year.  I think of the statement that Stuart Shepard, who was once with Focus on the Family and Family Policy Alliance, formerly a regular guest on The Meeting House.  He had a very simple formula for voting; allow me to paraphrase: find the candidate whose positions best line up with your Christian values, and vote for him or her.  That holds true in 2020, as it has throughout history.  

Go back to 2016:  I remember my conversations with J.C. Derrick and others at WORLD Magazine about the election; WORLD was publishing a Christian leaders poll on a regular basis. Throughout the period leading up to the election, Marco Rubio was a favorite of these leaders.  Ted Cruz was also a popular evangelical choice, as I recall.  Trump, well, did not have a significant level of support among evangelical leaders in the primaries - but in a binary contest between Trump and Hillary Clinton, Christians saw someone who talked a good game on abortion, religious liberty, and Supreme Court justices.  They knew that Hillary Clinton's support for abortion-on-demand, as well as her views on religious freedom were non-starters.  They did not wish to sit out the election or vote for a third-party candidate.  So, they voted for Trump.  Three years of a sea of digital ink have not changed that fact.  It's not a matter of Christian witness or of endorsing sin - for all politicians, like all people, are sinners in need of a Savior - it's a matter of political practicality and participation.

Galli has a right to his own opinion, but perhaps, as the editor-in-chief of a once well-respected publication, he should be more careful with his words. So should each of us - we have to think about the consequences of what we say. Now, he has ushered in a new round of anti-Trump/anti-Trump supporter articles.  And, make no mistake, it has been alleged that there will be a concerted effort by Christian organizations to sway the 2020 election away from Trump.  But, again, evangelicals will face perhaps a similar binary choice to what they saw in 2016.

Regarding Trump, there seems to be confusion between support for policies for support for behavior. Who knows the nature that evangelical leaders have with Trump - could they have spoken to and ministered to him, especially about his personal behavior?  Does Mr. Galli possess some secret wisdom?  Some of the immoral behavior for which he has been taken to task occurred a decade ago, a point that Eric Metaxas made in a Washington Examiner piece:

"Trump's infidelities were committed at least a decade before he became president," Metaxas said. "That doesn't make the infidelity any less odious. But when you're looking for context, whether one commits the infidelities while president of the United States or in the White House itself or not seems to me significant."

How about the issue of Trump's Tweets? Is that a ground for impeachment? What are evangelical leaders who support Trump doing wrong? Are they sinning? Have they compromised? What is the sin that a Trump voter has committed?

Finally, I think that we have to be very careful when we start getting into judging degrees of morality. A recent series of editorials at The Christian Post featured a Christian author, Chris Thurman, who declared that Trump was more than just flawed, he was evil with no redeeming qualities.  He issued a somewhat tepid apology for his statements and suggested that "I am going to go to my grave convinced that Donald Trump is, objectively, a severely mentally and morally disturbed individual, unfit to hold the office of the presidency, only going to get worse over time, and that we must remove him from office by any legal means possible" - he encouraged Trump to get mental help and his supporters to expose themselves to materials that are consistent with Thurman's point of view.  Also, in his faux apology, Thurman declares that he has allowed his anger over a laundry list of Trump indiscretions, and, yes, he names quite a few of them, turn into sin.  We have to make sure that our politics and our appraisal of someone's personal character do not create anger.

And, this is a demonstration of something that is very dangerous for Christians - to get pulled in to judging someone's heart.  Apparently, in the world of Thurman and others like him, there is sinful or flawed, and then there is something beyond that. It appears Mr. Galli buys into the "degrees of sinfulness" mantra.  Eric Metaxas disputes this line of thinking in the Washington Examiner:

"When you call somebody morally repugnant or anything along those lines, the question is always: compared to what? Those of us who've subscribed to the basic theology of Scripture would say that we're all morally repugnant. So, that kind of a statement becomes meaningless for those of us who look to the Bible for our standards. So, then the question is, what is it that the president has done that makes [the necessity of Trump's removal] so clear to the folks at Christianity Today?"

We are all fallen creatures, and we have to guard against spiritual pride, which can open the door to all sorts of sin, including anger.  And, in trying to remove the speck from the eye of another, Jesus cautions against being blinded by the log in our own.