SALT LAKE CITY — An evangelical magazine’s editorial calling for Christians to abandon President Donald Trump certainly got people talking, but will it change how anyone votes?
It’s pretty unlikely, according to Christian leaders and even the author of the piece, since the president’s most steadfast evangelical supporters stopped engaging with the magazine long ago.
“We speak for moderate, center-right and center-left evangelicals. The far right — they don’t read us. They don’t care what we think,” said Mark Galli, Christianity Today’s editor-in-chief, to The Atlantic soon after the editorial was published Thursday night.
Many of the religious and political leaders frustrated by the editorial echoed this assessment in their responses, describing Galli’s work as inconsequential and misguided.
“It’s obvious that Christianity Today has moved to the left and is representing the elitist liberal wing of evangelicalism,” wrote Franklin Graham, who is the son of the magazine’s founder, Billy Graham, in a lengthy Facebook post.
President Donald Trump called Christianity Today a “far left magazine” in a tweet Friday morning.
Galli told The Atlantic that the point of the editorial wasn’t to convince all evangelical Christians to see the president the same way he does. Instead, it was to highlight what’s at stake in the impeachment process and the next election.
“It’s not my responsibility to heal the breach among evangelicals. It’s not my responsibility to bring peace to the world. My responsibility, given the position I have, whatever it might be, is to speak the truth,” Galli told The Atlantic.
In the editorial, Galli criticized evangelicals who are willing to overlook the president’s moral indiscretions in order to secure stronger religious freedom protections and conservative Supreme Court judges. He said this political bargaining undermines the Christian community’s witness to nonbelievers.
“To the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record, we might say this: Remember who you are and whom you serve. Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior,” Galli wrote.
The magazine spoke out against Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon when the full scope of their misdeeds became clear, and Galli said he felt it was important to do the same this year.
“Yes, (Trump’s) done some good that I am grateful for. But the moral scales no longer balance. It’s time for him to get out of the house, so to speak,” Galli said to The Atlantic, comparing the president to an abusive husband who is also a great father to his kids.
More than three-quarters (77%) of white evangelicals approve of Trump’s job performance, compared to 54% of white mainline Protestants, 48% of white Catholics, 28% of Hispanic Catholics and fewer than 15% of black Protestants, according to an October survey from Public Religion Research Institute. There were not enough Latter-day Saint respondents to register in the survey findings.
The Christianity Today editorial went viral Thursday evening and Christianity Today trended on Twitter. But even supporters of Galli’s piece worried that it would accomplish little more than adding fuel to existing disagreements.
“Trump and his white evangelical allies are basically correct in their rips at Christianity Today: That editorial won’t matter. CT is irrelevant in the political calculations of white evangelicals. They missed their shot,” tweeted David Gibson, who directs Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture.
Regardless of how the editorial affects evangelicals’ votes, it’s a good thing for more people to be aware of the diversity of political opinions within the Christian community, other religious leaders said.
“CT’s statement is unlikely to change anyone’s mind on core issues, but what it can do is help rebuild the church’s public witness, give courage to beleaguered Christians (and) illustrate the heterogeneity of ‘evangelicals,’” tweeted the Rev. Duke Kwon, who leads Grace Meridian Hill, a church in Washington, D.C.