Trump: Has Evangelical Christianity Lost Its Cloak Morality? -By Bright Ogundare

The US presidential elections held on November 3 featured some interesting religious wrangling in the run-up to it. The support of Trump by evangelical Christians and preachers left many wondering what has befallen the faith.

Evangelical Christians painted the election as a battle between the forces of god represented by Trump with Republican Party and the antichrist forces led by Joe Biden and the Democratic Party. This conversion of election into a supernatural religious battle has many people left in dismay. The last time evangelical Christians came under a spotlight like this in the 21st century was during the war in Iraq when prominent evangelical Christian preachers lined up in support of a senseless and needless military action that led to hundreds of thousands losing their lives and instability in the Middle East that persists till today.

Although, it can be argued that the moral standard of evangelical Christianity has fallen in recent times, the support of a character like Trump with well documented and proven history of divorce, cheating, lying, racism, child abuse and what evangelical Christians will tag sexual immorality is baffling. It is ruffling that the same characters that hounded and denigrated Bill Clinton for being immoral are giving their massive support to a Trump. According to a pew research data, 63 percent of white evangelicals believes it is important to have a president that lives a moral and ethical live, however just 15% believes ‘moral upstanding’ describes Trump well while just 25% thinks Trump is honest. All these then make their support for him baffling.

Bright Ogundare

Trying to question the support for Trump wondering what happened to the morality of white evangelicals is itself product naivety, an assumption that white evangelicals have always had a moral upstanding which in reality they never had. The white evangelical church has a widely documented history of support for slavery, segregation and apartheid rule so their support for a racist and divisive character like Trump is understandable. For example, the Southern Baptist convention was created in defense of slavery and in 1945 refused to support the ‘Charter of Race Relations’ that supported desegregation efforts. As the Christian coalition activist puts it in 1996, “evangelicals were among the fieriest champions of slavery and segregation, all the while invoking god’s name and quoting the bible to justify their misdeeds”. The KKK also has a burning cross as symbol demonstrating white Christian supremacy while many white evangelicals openly criticized the civil rights movement.

These explains why colored people particularly Afro-Americans are not moved by the whole Christian values argument of opposition to LGBTQ rights and abortion pushed by white evangelicals, an argument that is quite popular amongst African Christians particularly Nigerians. Nigerian Christians have had a kind of romantic relationship with white evangelicals; all they do is pick up a book by an evangelical or watch clips of their teachings and then form fairytale images of these men in their heads. African-Americans meanwhile have seen white evangelical Christianity in its most evil and virulent form. So while Nigerian Christians can jump on the Christian value bandwagon of the evangelicals to support a racist and divisive president, African-Americans don’t have that luxury, they know if things go south, it will blow up in their face and white evangelicals will return to default settings.

While evangelicals continue to support Trump in undermining the American democracy, it has become clear that they are not committed to the racial reconciliation they’ve been preaching since the end of segregation and apartheid and when the dust settles, they will find it hard to gain the level of trust they’ve lost during the election on their commitment to the racism question.

Bright Ogundare is a social analyst and humanist. He can be contacted via brightogundare@gmail.com