The editor in chief of Christianity Today Mark Galli got plaudits from the world in the only way a regressive Christian publication can - by trashing a president who is unabashedly pro-life, an unabashed supporter of religious liberty, an unabashed nominator of pro-constitutional judges, and an unabashed supporter of Israel.
Galli, after wrapping himself in the mantle of Billy Graham, the magazine’s founder, piles on the invective: Trump’s phone conversation with the president of Ukraine was “a violation of the Constitution” and “profoundly immoral.” He has “dumbed down the idea of morality,” is “morally lost and confused,” “has abused his authority for personal gain, and betrayed his constitutional oath” in ways that reveal he is a “leader of...grossly immoral character,” with numerous “moral deficiencies” and a “bent and broken character.” “Loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments” requires us, Galli says sadly, to flatly insist that “Trump should be removed from office.”
Yikes. Remind me not to ask Mark Galli to write my obituary. You get done with Galli’s piece, you’re more likely to think of Trump as the anti-Christ rather than a flawed human being.
If you are a publication like CT, the quickest way to get an instant invitation to an appearance on national TV is by attacking a public figure supported by genuine evangelicals like Robert Jeffress, Billy Graham’s son Franklin, and Jerry Falwell, Jr. If you sell these men out you’ll get your 30 pieces of silver and your four minutes of fame.
Galli assured John Berman of CNN, the Counterfeit News Network, that CT paints with pale pastels and says nothing offensive to the people like Berman they aim to please. Galli was quick to dismiss the president’s accusation that CT is “progressive” and “far left.”
Said Galli, “We consider ourselves and most people consider us a pretty centrist magazine in the evangelical world.” Well, as someone once observed, the only things in the middle of the road are yellow stripes and dead armadillos.
CT long ago abandoned Billy Graham’s rock-ribbed allegiance to the inerrancy of Scripture and is all-in today with the social justice movement. Back in the day, it even sided with Barack Obama over James Dobson on biblical hermeneutics. It supports the George Soros-funded Evangelical Immigration Table which is nothing more than an amnesty-for-illegal-aliens lobby run by regressives masquerading as evangelicals. And the list could go on.
There are many problems with Galli’s piece, but let’s just deal with the first example he raises of Trump’s perfidy. Speaking of the Ukraine phone call, Galli writes,
“But the facts in this instance are unambiguous: 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.”
But that’s not what the president did. Trump has a legal and constitutional duty to certify that countries are dealing with internal corruption before we start shelling out $400 million of your tax dollars and mine. He had a constitutional duty to pursue this issue with the president of Ukraine, regardless of who was running for president. We cannot start giving corruption passes to people just because they are candidates for public office. The president’s call was not about a political opponent, it was about corruption and ensuring that American dollars don’t get siphoned off into an oligarch’s pockets.
Due to a treaty with Ukraine signed by Bill Clinton, Ukraine has a binding obligation to cooperate with the U.S. on corruption investigations, something I’m quite certain CT is completely clueless about.
In other words, Trump’s phone call was clearly neither a “violation of the Constitution” nor “profoundly immoral.” It would have been unconstitutional and immoral for the president not to probe the corruption issue with President Zelensky.
If CT could be this badly wrong, so far out of alignment with the truth and morality on this one issue, what else might they be wrong about in this hatchet piece? My loyalty to the “Creator of the Ten Commandments” compels me to call out CT for bearing false witness against the president.
No evangelical supporter of the president is blind to his flaws. I have referred to his past conduct with women not his wife as “reprehensible” and “sordid.” But on the other hand, we continue to support the president for the reasons even CT grudgingly acknowledges: “his Supreme Court nominees, his defense of religious liberty, and his stewardship of the economy.”
These are the reasons 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and, regardless of CT’s sniping, why they will put him back in the Oval Office in 2020.
The author may be contacted at bfischer@afa.net
