EMERGENCY POD: Christianity Today vs. Trump Evangelicals
We've lived through Paris Hilton vs. Kim K, TSwift's bad blood with Katy Perry, and Drake's beef with everyone. But now we are here to take you through the hottest beef of 2019: Christianity Today vs. Trump Evangelicals! We talk ramifications, the Letter, the response to the response, and much more.
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AXIS MUNDY AXIS MUNDY Hello and welcome to Straight White American Jesus.
I am Dan Miller, Associate Professor of Religion and Social Thought at Landmark College.
And I'll introduce my co-host who's always with me here in a minute, but this is sort of a spur-of-the-moment podcast because in the midst of talking about all the kinds of things we've been talking about really for the last two seasons, but the stuff about the religious left and fragmentation and, you know, in-groups and out-groups within evangelicalism and all of that with the overlay of support for Trump,
Uh, this like kinda crazy, like, internecine battle within evangelicalism has broken out over this in just the last couple days, so...
I'm going to let, I'm going to throw it over to my co-host, let him introduce himself.
And he's going to sort of like walk us up to what we'll be talking about today.
So I am Brad Onishi, associate professor of religious studies at Skidmore College.
And, uh, today we want to like, this is an emergency pod as Dan said, and we want to get into the letter, um, from Christianity Today, editor Mark Galley, basically calling for Trump's removal.
Um, since that letter, There's been a counter letter sent by over now 200 signatories of evangelical leaders basically decrying Christianity Today and its stance on Trump.
And then there's been a response to the response.
So Mark Galley wrote another letter and not Mark, but there's been a response from the Christianity Today.
What we have on our hands basically is a full on feud.
I mean, I was telling Dan before we started recording that, you know, if we did a pop culture podcast and we got news that Kanye and Kim Kardashian were getting divorced, we'd have to rush to our mics and, you know, talk about it.
Well, this is kind of that moment for us in some minor sense.
You know, this is a this is a big thing that broke the other day.
It was Thursday.
People were kind of shocked.
So let me, Dan, read an excerpt or two from the letter from Christianity Today's Mark Galley.
And then we'll kind of get into what it means and we'll go over the response and the response to the response.
So here's what he says in the initial letter.
Here's some excerpts.
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.
So we see there a kind of speaking to the fact that the impeachment inquiry really has Led Christian today and Mark Galley to believe that he's done something that is an abuse of power when it comes to the presidency.
It's also somehow immoral.
He goes on to say this.
This damages the institution of the presidency, damages the reputation of our country, and damages both the spirit and the future of our people.
None of the president's positives can balance the moral and political danger we face under a leader of such grossly immoral character.
Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump's immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency.
If we don't reverse course now, will anyone take anything we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come?
A lot to say there, Dan, but you kind of had, just as this broke, you kind of had several exchanges that kind of highlighted a lot of What seemed to be the important elements in this?
So, you want to tell us about those?
Yeah, I mean, so a few thoughts.
First, we should just let people know, right?
And you'll see this if you read media accounts of this.
They'll often describe Christianity Today as a flagship evangelical publication.
And it has been.
A lot of them will point out, and this becomes relevant to the discussion, that Billy Graham was one of the founders of Christianity Today.
And so it has for a long time been sort of at the edge of a kind of evangelical intellectualism and evangelical culture or pop culture for a long, you know, for a long time.
It doesn't have a huge readership, but it has had within evangelicalism a sort of outsized influence.
So all of that to say people like saw this and they were like, oh my God, look, Christianity Today is like coming out against Trump and you had everything like reactions from The wall is cracking.
Evangelical support for Trump is cracking, too.
This means nothing to, you know, dismissals of Christianity today, which you're going to talk about here in a minute, Brad.
But it's just been the it was like this kind of seismic wave that went through.
And I think everybody was kind of waiting to see how this would play out.
Right.
Would Trump respond?
You assume he will, because he does.
He can't not respond to stuff.
But the more important question, right, was how will other evangelicals respond to this?
Both, I think, rank-and-file evangelicals, but probably more importantly, or maybe more culturally visibly, the kind of evangelical intelligentsia or evangelical elite, right?
The people who read Christianity Today, the people who pastor churches, the people who run parachurch organizations.
How would they respond?
Right?
And that was the kind of question.
And my initial response was, they are going to decry this.
I think there were some who still really truly believe, and we'll talk more about this as we go along, really truly believe that there is this kind of silent, suffering, you know, mass of evangelicals within the body of American evangelicalism.
That are just kind of waiting for this opportunity to come out in opposition to Trump, right?
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