The Witness of the Men of the Church and the 2016 Presidential Race in America

Men of God, there are some of you who are likely to be angry at me for disrupting your political thought process with what I am about to say.  I am sorry.  I am sorry that the American church has let you down by allowing political ideologies which are actually contrary to the Gospel to be preached out of pulpits that ought to be reserved for the Gospel itself, set apart from the corruption of human bias. I am sorry that in our nation political ideology has become so intertwined with religious ideology that many of us cannot tell them apart anymore. I know this may be hard to accept, but our founding fathers were fallen men. They are not your moral authority.  Only God is righteous enough to for that.

I am concerned by the cavalier attitude that many men in the church are taking toward Mr. Trump’s run for presidency just because they are so consumed with fear of a Hillary Clinton presidency. That is not the way of Christ. As my mentor says to me, the Spirit leads, but the enemy drives. Fear of anything other than the Lord (in reverence) is of the enemy. And I believe fear is driving many of our political ideologies today. Many Christian leaders are fixated on referring to what is at stake in this election, but they are worried about what is at stake for the political climate of America at the expense of what is at stake for the spiritual climate of America. What could matter more than the Church's witness of God's love and righteousness to the lost world? There are leaders I have had profound respect for up to this point in my life who I believe are even more profoundly missing the mark on this particular point.   They are missing it so much so that if I didn't know about the good fruit that many of them have born over the years I might even be inclined to label them false prophets. I do not think they are--I think they are merely missing the mark.  I thank God we live in a day when we don't have to stone a prophet for prophesying falsely, but that does not mean we shouldn't listen to what the Spirit whispers to us through God's Word over their unbiblical fear mongering screams and identify their missing the mark as exactly that. If we know something to be contrary to the heart of God is coming out of the church we need be quick to say so in reverence for the Lord, regardless of what other men might think of us. 

We find it very easy, on the right side of the aisle, to address leftist morality issues while ignoring the gross immorality on the right.  If we think one form of immorality is not as bad as the other, we are sorely mistaken. It is the spirit of the Pharisee who would want us to think like that, and we know how harshly Jesus rebuked the Pharisees time and time again. May we keep our hearts ever before the Lord that we would not become whitewashed tombs.  People are talking about Hillary Clinton’s actions versus Trump’s words. Of course Hillary Clinton's actions should absolutely make her unelectable, but have some of you forgotten in Donald Trump's case that from the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks? They are more than words, they are a prevailing attitude that sexual misconduct is no big deal or that if it is a big deal it is just a concession we have to make to get someone on the right into office.  I want you to know what women who have been sexually assaulted are hearing if you are openly endorsing a Trump presidency.  We are hearing that the violence committed against us, some of us many times over, is just the price we have to pay for the good of the Republican party. That is not the voice of Christ, and the voice of Christ is exactly what you are called to be. You are called to be the ones preparing the way for the Lord.  The problem is that survivors can’t just decide to get over it and move on with their lives.  It isn’t merely their choice. Only Christ can heal these wounds, and even then He does it in His own perfect timing through whatever process He chooses. And what about the ones who don't know Christ and will never know the hope available to them if you are not His voice in this world? 1 out of every 4 females in your church and in your world (the statistics are the same in and out of the church) is carrying around this life history (along the same lines as mine), except to many of them mine actually looks and sounds like a walk in the park or child’s play.  Take a moment to ponder that. (To hear my story see the previous blog entry entitled To My Christian Brothers in Arms: While the Men of God Aren't Watching)

Let's look at the facts. Just to name a couple of big ticket unsavory things about Hillary, her actions (which she then attempted to cover up) got American soldiers and diplomats killed abroad, and if Planned Parenthood remains funded then there could be countless more unborn lives. Perhaps Congress could put a stop to the Planned Parenthood issue apart from her, but we cannot know for sure.  I understand your predicament. I think we have to stop worrying that acknowledging the severity of Mr. Trumps actions and refusing to vote for him because of them somehow suggests that Mrs. Clinton's actions have been any less severe. I hear people saying, “please do not waste your vote on a third party candidate, that is like giving a vote to the other party”.  That is poor logic.  That would only be true under the assumption that if we were not going to vote for a third party we would obviously instead be voting for Mr. Trump.  I love Mr. Trump as the lost man he is (as evidenced by his current fruit on this campaign trail and previous fruit in years past), who is desperately in need of the forgiveness of God which is available to all who will humble themselves and confess their need, but we should not find Mr. Trump's actions any less reprehensible than Mrs. Clinton's, and because of that a person should not consider a third party vote any more wasted on one candidate than the other. To be clear, I am not saying you should overlook the severe moral dilemma that a Hillary Clinton presidency would create for our nation.  What I am asking is why, in God’s eyes, it would be any more okay to overlook the severe moral dilemma that a Trump presidency would create for our nation? If we cannot see that moral dilemma then the god of this age has blinded our eyes. Beyond the typical run of the mill sexual abuse in my own story, what about the numbers of girls who are being trafficked today because of the prevailing attitude of perversity which Trump’s words promote?  How can we condemn their exploitation in one breath and then defend words that support the same attitude which creates it in the next (is that not what God’s Word addresses in the passage about the log and the speck of dust) or how can we remain silent when it is in our power to do good instead—is that not sin for us?  How can we call out and reject leftist immorality while endorsing a candidate who brought the first strip club within a casino to Vegas? Will a kingdom divided against itself not fall? Are you aware that studies indicate that American’s are responsible for 25% of the demand for all sex slavery purchases in the world, that men in the church are about just as likely to use pornography as the secular world, and that the adult entertainment industry (whether strip clubs or pornography) is a breeding ground for sexual exploitation?  And some among us are still calling America a Christian nation?  We are deceiving ourselves if we believe we are a Christian nation or that God’s agenda is on the political right. He is grieved by the immorality on both sides, and the Bible which Christian Americans claim to cherish the freedom to read does not indicate that He finds one form of immorality more palatable than another. They should open it up and check for themselves. God condemns it all.

As Christians many of us were outraged by a story that made news a little while ago when a prominent college athlete was caught raping a girl behind a dumpster and was only sentenced to 6 months (of which he only served 3) for, in his father’s words, “a few minutes of action”. Here we are a short time later and it behooves some of our political agendas to make light of speech that merely reinforces that which originally outraged us. This is hypocrisy the church cannot afford to overlook for the sake of its witness to the world. We must consider the spiritual principle of seed, time and harvest from Genesis, and what Paul said in 1 Corinthians 3 about one planting and another watering. How can we think that just because Trump is the one who planted it, when we water it by downplaying it or when we refuse to uproot it by ignoring it and voting for him anyway, that we are not somehow equally responsible for bad seed being allowed to yield bad fruit among us?

I believe many Christian leaders have accidentally taken scriptures out of context in light of this election under the influence of others who have intentionally twisted scriptures in favor of whatever form of immorality their personal political preferences do not find as unsavory as the other. This is spiritual abuse and manipulation which is certainly not the way God shepherds His people. In the Old Testament God brought outsiders in to rule over His people not to save them, but as a judgment against them for their sin, and then, when His people’s time of exile had been fulfilled as a form of discipline, his people would repent of having trusted in idols, and the pagan leaders would come to see God as the one true God because of His people’s repentance and obedience even in spite of their pagan leadership.  They sought God’s favor rather than the pagan leader’s favor, and through His favor pagan leaders were converted.  We are misapplying scripture and incorrectly dividing the Word of Truth if we believe that Trump is a foretold deliverer who will rescue us by our compromising the holiness to which God has called us. Remember that God Himself was always against His people having a human figurehead at all because it would be a stumbling block to their ability to see Him as their ultimate authority and provider. In short, they would put their hope in the figurehead instead of Him. Could that not be exactly what is happening here and now? I look at 2 Chronicles 16 which accounts of King Asa's last years.  We are told leading up to that chapter that he was a good, godly king and that God had shown him favor when he was under attack early in his reign and brought about completely miraculous victory for him. He enjoyed many years of peace and prosperity, but later in his reign a foreign king came against him and rather than crying out to God for help in humility, he got the idea that he would make a treaty with a pagan king. God sent a prophet to warn him of the coming consequences for trusting in a pagan outsider to deliver him rather than trusting in God Himself.  In 2 Chronicles 16:9-10 we hear the end of the prophet's word to Asa and the results that followed:" "For the eyes of the Lord range throughout the earth to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him. You have done a foolish thing, and from now on you will be at war." Asa was angry with the seer because of this; he was so enraged that he put him in prison. At the same time Asa brutally oppressed some of the people." Asa tried to make the treaty to preserve his own peace in his own way.  But you cannot have peace without the only true Source of peace. In cutting God out of the equation, he sealed his own fate to live out his days in insecurity and he further fertilized the attitude of sin that had already begun to grow in the garden of his heart--a king who started as a good king became oppressive to his own people. All too often we are like Asa, and I think it is likely that we are acting as he did now. Sometimes we would rather hear lies than the truth.  Sometimes we dislike the truth tellers in our lives because they won't tickle our ears like we want them to. And sometimes we even martyr them socially or otherwise because of it. Instead we look for false prophets to prophesy security in a particular matter when the Spirit of God has said no such thing. How long will we be a stiff-necked people?

I understand if, when you add the sum total of issues together, your conscience insists that you vote for Trump, and I even understand if your conscience insists that you promote Trump to those you know. But please do not promote him as a morally correct choice--he is not. Say that the issues you care most about are fill in the blank and fill in the blank, and that he is the best candidate on those particular issues if you must. Beware that in doing so you are also communicating that it is not as important to you that he has made the notion of sexual assault into some joking matter to sexual assault or sexual exploitation victims by terming it as "just locker room talk", and to those victims it comes across as not caring as much about their violation as you care about some other hot issues.  But do not, just in order to keep Hillary out of office, align yourself with the devil himself by outright minimizing the evidence that Trump finds sexually assaulting women laughable (among many other godless behaviors dating right up to the present time) by saying to yourselves "that's just locker room talk", justifying what is clearly immorality in the name of calling him the moral choice. Don’t refuse to look at it and leave it in darkness, but instead expose it to the light of Christ.  It is no small thing nor is it laughable.  I have been terribly grieved to hear many men who we American Christians would consider spiritual leaders identifying Trump as a Christian.  I cannot nor would I want to stand as his or anyone’s judge.  But I do know that Christ told us we would know a tree by its fruit, and that Paul told us to expel the immoral brother.  While he claims to have changed in one breath, in the following one he continues to make many more derogatory and sexist remarks toward women on this campaign trail, and while I speak as a woman who has experienced the sexual violence of our culture, women are not the only ones he is demeaning in a similar manner.  When asked at a Christian summit a few months ago if he had ever asked for forgiveness for his sins, he responded that he has not asked for forgiveness because he does not need forgiveness because if he is incorrect then he corrects his behavior on his own and does not do it again. You tell me if that sounds like the Gospel of grace through salvation and sanctification? Why would we who have our own eyes and ears take his word for it when we have seen and heard for ourselves something contrary to what he claims. We know he does it again because we have seen the same behaviors arise time and time again dating right up to recently, so either he does not correct his wrong behavior or he does not actually believe it is wrong in the first place. Either way there is a problem. And even if he had never repeated those behaviors, we who know Christ know it is if we confess our sins that He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.  If he lacks the humility to ask for forgiveness at all then we can be sure he has not received God’s forgiveness.  God, in Christ, has offered forgiveness to all of us, but we may only receive it by humility in confessing our need of it, for we know that God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble. All that said, I believe any Christian should have great reservations about voting for him or promoting him because the world is watching—they are watching for hypocrisy and a vote for him based upon the premise of moral superiority is absolutely hypocritical. That type of hypocrisy is to the complete discredit of the witness of the church. It's up to each Christian to decide what he or she is going to do about it, but that decision ought to be made with a deep reverence for the Lord and the way it represents (or could misrepresent) Him.

I want to leave you with this thought.  Early in Trump’s campaign he was endorsed by the leader of the most highly known racial supremacy group in our nation, and he refused to denounce that group due to its widely known stances, claiming he needed to do some more research before responding. Many of us winced and shook our heads, thankful because we were so sure at that point his bid for the ticket would never last.  “Who on earth would vote for him after that?”, many of us thought to ourselves. Here we are months later, many campaigning for him in the name of Christ, refusing to denounce him over his stances which we know are completely contrary to the heart of God, blaming it on him being the lesser of two evils.  But isn't all evil evil, and shouldn't all evil be identified and treated as such?  Psalm 115:4-8 reads:

But their idols are silver and gold,

    made by human hands.

They have mouths, but cannot speak,

    eyes, but cannot see.

They have ears, but cannot hear,

    noses, but cannot smell.

They have hands, but cannot feel,

    feet, but cannot walk,

    nor can they utter a sound with their throats.

Those who make them will be like them,

    and so will all who trust in them.

Can you see the parallel here that perhaps Trump has become an idol, and that those who are trusting in him have become like him? Can you see that perhaps those who have put their trust in him as the right candidate have become like him, morally paralyzed, and just as he was incapable of denouncing a racial supremacy group, they are incapable of truly denouncing (not with mere words or tongue, but with actions and in truth) that which they should know is abhorrent to God? When we give an account to God one day will we have a clear conscience when we defend a choice for having supported him by saying that at least we chose the lesser of the two evils?  Is it not possible that we will still give an account for having chosen evil at all?