Mr. Trump and Character

photo by Keith Davenport / flickr

I am told that 80% of Evangelicals support Mr. Trump. I find this very strange. How in the world can you possibly ignore the utter cruelty and chaos that we hear day after day?

The Bible which Evangelicals purport to believe and preach say: There are only two commandments. Love God and love your neighbor. There are no exceptions—or “mulligans” to these words of Jesus. If we are honest we would have to confess that like the old confession goes: "We have not loved you with our whole hearts…we have not loved our neighbors as ourselves.” But we keep praying the words hoping, hoping that maybe, just maybe we might love God more and we might turn toward those that often we ignore or dislike. Shamefully we all have our lists. But putting those lists down beside “love God…love your neighbor” our lists look pathetic and unchristian.

I saw The Faith of Donald Trump in a bookstore the other day. Hmm. I stood there in shock for a few minutes. I thought: “What faith?” I know—I know unless we are careful we can find ourselves doing to him what he has done to so very many. But—you really can tell the tree by its fruit.

I do not have to footnote that very long list of what I consider totally unchristian traits. We have heard them and witnessed many of these on TV. The way he treats people…the lies on top of lies. The cruel things he says about so many. His failure to move outside “his base” and understand that the President of this country is supposed to try to bring everyone into the circle.  All those Dreamers and so many others that he cares nothing about. 

I fear that Mr. Trump has opened up a Pandora’s box that will be hard to close. Some of the candidates running for seats in House and Senate for 2018 are already beginning to mimic hateful language, insensitivity to those different than they are. 

The President of the United States does not have to be a saint. History footnotes that we have a list of people who have served us that had all kinds of character defects. But none as glaring as those of Mr.Trump. Most of us would not want our children to behave this way. We would not want our Pastors to behave this way. We would not want someone teaching our children to behave this way. And we certainly wouldn’t want to live next door to someone that behaves like this.

Someone asked a prominent Pastor what was the essential quality for calling a Pastor if he could only name one thing. He said, “Character.” This is what every Pastor needs. And what we need from our leaders are people of character. 

Bill Coffin said once that “Hardly anyone in the world believes territorial discrimination to be as evil as racial or religious discrimination. But it is. Nationalism, at the expense of another nation, is just as wicked as racism at the expense of another race. In other words, good patriots are not nationalists. A nationalist is a bad patriot.”

--Roger Lovette / rogerlovette.blogspot.com