The evangelical movement has lost its identity and its principles by hitching its wagon to President Donald Trump, evangelical conservative and former George W. Bush administration official Peter Wehner wrote for The Atlantic on Friday.
Wehner has been a common and frequent critic both of the Trump administration and of how the religious right in America has sought to curry favor with it.
Nothing emphasizes this better, Wehner wrote, than what happened at Trump's inaugural address.
"He recalled the assassination attempt he survived last year: 'I was saved by God to make America great again.' Just a few minutes earlier, a beaming Franklin Graham — minister, Trump acolyte, and sometimes Vladimir Putin admirer — had driven home the same point during his prayer. 'Father, when Donald Trump’s enemies thought he was down and out, you and you alone saved his life and raised him up with strength and power by your mighty hand.'"
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"The movement that for the past half century was loudest in warning about the dangers of cultural decadence is most responsible for electing a president who personifies cultural decadence," said Wehner, noting Trump captured 80 percent of the white evangelical vote last year. "Although white evangelicals have been firmly in his corner since 2016, the nature of their support has changed. If you talked with many evangelical supporters of Trump then, they expressed a certain queasiness about backing him. They didn’t approve of his immoral conduct, they were quick to say. The reason they rallied behind him was that his policies, particularly on abortion, aligned with their values."
On the other hand, now, "Trump has a cultlike hold on great swaths of the evangelical movement. They will stick with him regardless of what he does. Initially, they reconciled themselves to what he said. Then to how he acted. And now they have made their peace with policies and appointments that would have once caused a revolt" — even backing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for Health and Human Services secretary despite his permissive personal beliefs on abortion.
In short, he said, the evangelical movement no longer has its own real identity; it's just "an essential part of a much larger, and largely destructive, political and cultural movement."
"Hitching the evangelical wagon to Donald Trump has meant unhitching it from the life and teachings of Jesus," Wehner concluded. "It’s a bad trade."
