Is there a biblical case for Trump? (Part I of III)
January 23, 2024 – Following wins in the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries, Donald Trump again secured his status as the likely republican nominee for president.
I have to admit my frustration at learning that republicans – a party dominated by professing Christians – would still support Trump after everything we know about him. I understand many feel conflicted about our political choices, but I can’t find any Biblical justification for this support.
We’re so familiar with his unsavory words and actions that they’ve been normalized, but we should acknowledge that Donald Trump is a wolf in wolf’s clothing. Cataloguing his indiscretions could take a lifetime, so I won’t bother doing so here. But I would remind my brothers and sisters in Christ that Trump resembles Jesus in no way except one: his claims. He claims (1) he doesn’t need forgiveness (Interview #1, Interview #2) and (2) “He alone” can fix everything (speech). This, of course, is blasphemous and makes a liar out of God (1 John 1:10).
Yet, many Christians are convinced the other side is so evil (read: their sin is worse than ours) they feel the need to achieve political power in the most irreverent way to bring democrats into submission. But we are misguided if our aim is to change the behavior of sinners through legal or political means. It is not the Church’s role to wield the power of government to compel non-Christians into Biblical morality. Christians are called to address morality within the church, not outside it (1 Cor 5:12-13). In this way, Christians have forgotten that Jesus made clear His kingdom was not of this world (John 18:36).
At some point, Christians began comingling their identities in Christ with secular patriotism, conflating the need to identify and resist sin in culture with demanding the same from others through political power. The church now seems to resemble the nation of Israel when they were unsatisfied with God’s leadership and demanded from Him an earthly king to fight for them. Recall God gave them over to these desires at their peril (I Samuel 8). Christians are called to something radically different – to make disciples by sharing the Gospel and demonstrating it through the way we live (Matt. 28:18-20).
If Christians are looking for a politician to carry the banner of faith (which they shouldn’t), Donald Trump is the least qualified candidate. We simply can’t bemoan the moral downfall of culture by supporting someone who is void of morality himself. And not just sinful (we all are) but brazenly sinful, continuing without remorse.
As a Christian conservative, there’s simply no scenario in which I would vote for Trump. The country can survive bad policy for four years, but it’s not at all certain the country can endure bad leadership that coddles division and undermines trust in our institutions. We got a good flavor of this on January 6, 2021. The presidency is much more about leadership than it is policy, and there’s no policy so great that it should cause us to discard the very values we claim motivate us to vote (more on this in Parts II and III).