If your child needed care and the best surgeon had cheated on his wife, maybe more than once, would you let him operate?
What if you are a Christian and he is not? Does that matter? Should it?
In the secular realm of everyday life in which believers and unbelievers interact, mostly without even noticing (or often having any way of knowing) the difference, those questions should answer themselves.
An adulterer can be a great surgeon. And a superbly ethical, thoroughly decent person may be a professional mediocrity--or worse. That's life.
There are innumerable examples of people who are wonderful but unaccomplished, just as there are notable examples of people with serious personal failings who have excelled as artists, scientists, parents, and politicians.
Among them: President Trump. His private failings have been made very public, prompting some Christian pundits to say that not only do those failings disqualify him from office but are so egregious as to make supporting him sinful for Christians.
That's the position of David and Nancy French, who recently wrote companion columns on the subject published on the same day, one in National Review and the other in The Washington Post. Mrs. French's column pulls double duty: it's a hagiographic depiction of Mitt Romney in which she also devotes substantial effort to defaming Governor Mike Huckabee and his daughter Sarah, the president's unflappable press secretary. Mr. French uses his to accuse Franklin Graham of a "willingness to abandon Christian principles when it's politically expedient" and who he claims "illustrates the collapsing evangelical public witness."
The same accusation is being leveled against all the other naughty Christians who support Trump.
Support for a political candidate does not mean a blanket endorsement of every aspect of that candidate's life. It is merely an endorsement of that person's policies and an assessment of his ability to perform in office. It's a practical decision that Candidate A, while imperfect, is preferable to Candidate B. And support for Candidate A, barring some breach of public trust or endorsement of public evil, does not reflect on one's public witness.
But this sort of confusion is what results when one conflates the mission of the church (public worship of God, administration of sacraments, and fellowship of believers) with secular politics. They are not the same, and Christians are permitted substantial liberty of conscience in these matters.
Why then do the Frenches insist on attacking Christians who support Trump not on a rational political basis, but on the basis that their support for Trump implicates their faith and undermines their witness?
Understand what they are saying: If a Christian acts in a way that undermines his witness for Christ, he is in sin. And in the case of the Huckabees and Franklin Graham, it would be very public sin, given their high profiles. This is a serious charge that David French does not take the time to substantiate.
He claims that Graham abandoned "Christian principles," but what principles does he claim were abandoned? He doesn't say. I suspect the Frenches don't think Donald Trump is very nice. He's loud, aggressive, and attacks his political enemies. They oppose his policies too--both are on the record as war hawks who believe in an aggressive American military posture abroad, both believe in mass immigration of the Paul Ryan variety, and both seem content to follow behind liberalism's relentless march, never objecting very much to the direction, just the pace.
But mostly it seems to be about taste: Trump is brash and politically heterodox, while the Frenches are defenders of the status quo. Why try to wrap a legitimate (if wrongheaded) personal political preference in Christianity? Perhaps they think it makes them appear stronger--more moral, less self-interested? In fact, it does just the opposite. It belies an underlying weakness. Worse, it misuses the Gospel.
A Christian and non-Christian ought to judge in the same way: what can the candidate do to protect the peace and prosperity of the nation and its citizens? Christians would add that they require political leaders that will protect the right of the Church to worship freely and its members to practice their faith in peace.
So are Christians prohibited from supporting Trump for president because of multiple divorces, apparent infidelity, or trademark braggadocio? There is no biblical support for this. If personal sin were disqualifying, who could lead? Christians in particular, for whom recognition of indwelling sin is both a predicate and a sustainer of faith, should know this.
I suspect what the Frenches really want is a prophet, a priest, and a king to rule in this secular age, a political leader in which they can invest their highest hopes. But in doing so, they are placing upon liberal politics a weight it cannot hope to carry and are headed for disappointment.
If they want a prophet, a priest, and a king, they already have one ... in Christ.
Too often American evangelicalism forsakes true religion for a moralistic therapeutic deism. The prigs and scolds replace the Gospel with idealistic rhetoric and aggressive social and political agendas. That's why the spirituality of the church must be defended. Preaching a social gospel and a political agenda denigrates the gospel of Christ even though it is often sold as a consequence of and not a replacement for the true gospel.
It is what J. Gresham Machen, a theologian at Princeton and then Westminster Theological Seminaries in the early 20th century, called "the type of religion which rejoices in the pious sound of traditional phrases."
The Frenches and others wrap themselves in just such Christianist rhetorical flourishes and scriptural references. But by conflating the role of the secular and the sacred, they misrepresent orthodox Christian teaching about the role of Church and the practice of secular politics to the detriment of both.
Instead of demonstrating that only those with the highest personal ethics can lead, the Bible is full of examples of craven, ruthless, merciless sinners successfully leading their nations. Yet God chose to use them.
Was David disqualified from leading Israel because he murdered Uriah in order to take Bathsheba as his wife? Certainly not. In the Psalms, he is called the apple of God's eye.
Did Joseph undermine his public witness as a prophet of God by serving Pharaoh even as he held the Israelites in captivity? What about Daniel, who served the fantastically pagan Nebuchadnezzar? Or Esther, who married the murderous libertine emperor Xerxes? No.
Are Trump's sins greater than any of these? Without resorting to Clinton references, shall we recall George H. W. Bush's or Lyndon Johnson's or FDR's reported adultery? How about John F. Kennedy's serial adulteries in the White House? Warren Harding's love child?
Nor does Mr. French apply his apparent standard evenly or to anyone other than Trump supporters. He long used a portrait of John Calvin, the great theologian of the Reformation, as his Twitter profile picture. But Calvin dedicated his largest and most influential theological work, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, to King Francis I of France whom he calls "His Most Christian Majesty" in accordance with the custom of the day.
Unsurprisingly, Francis, like many monarchs, had a casual relationship with the Seventh Commandment (or the Sixth, according to the Roman Catholic numbering) and kept a series of mistresses. (One was apparently Mary Boleyn, future mistress of Henry VIII and sister of Anne Boleyn.)
Why would Calvin dedicate his masterwork to an adulterer? Is his theological work now tainted? It would take a peculiarly scolding fundamentalist theology to think so. But if Calvin, like David, Joseph, Daniel, Esther, and so on, are not tainted, then why is Franklin Graham and every other Trump supporter that French accuses by implication?
Nancy French apparently shares her husband's conviction that not only is Orange Man Bad, so are the Orange Man's supporters--and especially the Christians.
In her column, she refers to Isaiah 5:20, declaring, "If evangelical leaders really demanded Christian values in their president, they'd stop calling evil good and good evil." When she refers to evangelicals (Catholics, I guess, are off the hook) demanding Christian values in the president, she says she believes Christians should vote for the person they believe the candidate is, rather than for what he will do. Her piece also suggests that she tilts the scales heavily in favor of a particular standard of personal decorum and heavily against sexual sin.
Why sexual sin should be weighted more heavily than, say, failure to keep the Sabbath or idolatry is unexplained. And voters have a right and an affirmative obligation to prioritize public virtue. That's exactly the calculation that Christian Trump voters made in 2016 and are almost certain to make again in 2020.
What's worse is that taking that single verse out of its redemptive historical context and dragooning it into secular political service misses the depth, the beauty, and the unmerited grace about which Isaiah was writing. Using gratuitous, out-of-context quotes from the Bible to support one's preferred political program is an abuse of scripture.
What evangelical leaders and millions of other Americans have called good about Donald Trump are his public policies, not his private failings. Instead, the Frenches would insist on someone who appears personally gracious but whose public policies many people believe have failed and harmed the nation.
Is pursuing policies that protect and promote the interests of the American people good or evil? If it is good, then the question is should Christians--any voters, really--prioritize public goods or the private sins when choosing leaders? Most people probably would give the common-sense answer that the private sin would have to be particularly egregious to disqualify someone from public life if they believed he would otherwise do good for them and the nation.
We would do well not to invest too much hope for secular, let alone spiritual, salvation in political leaders. Some, once in a great while, are truly great, but even those we esteem fall short. Both spiritual and political maturity recognizes this and adjusts expectations accordingly. Expecting too much from political leaders who are themselves weak vessels will lead to bad decisions, disillusionment, and then disaster.
Editorial on 05/19/2019