Using an essay he wrote explaining that Christian political ethics have become extremely muddied during the Donald Trump years as a springboard, conservative writer David French appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” where he dropped the hammer on evangelicals who have excused the former president’s transgressions for their own pursuit of political power.
Speaking with host Willie Geist, French expanded on his essay where he wrote, “American political culture is a toxic, hyperpartisan, corrupt, and increasingly violent mess,” before adding, “The longer I live the more convinced I am that our Christian political ethic is upside down. On a bipartisan basis, the church has formed its members to be adamant about policies that are difficult and contingent and flexibleabout virtues that are clear and mandatory. ”
“In 2016 and ’17, David,” host Geist prompted. “I know you heard this, when you’d ask about Donald Trump, ‘How can you support a man who is so cruel, profane, and pays off porn stars after having affairs while his wife is pregnant?’ The laundry list is long and they say, ‘we are electing a president, not a saint, he is going to stand up for us and our way of life.’ Boy, has that been exposed in the last few years.”
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“Yeah. I always hated that saying because no one was arguing that we are electing saints. But there’s a world of difference between holding the standard of a saint and no standard at all,” the author replied.
“This is what has happened, there is now no standard at all,” he continued. “One of the things that I do in the piece is I contrast the movement that is dominating, for example, the MAGA right with the civil rights movement, which was Christian to its core. It was thoroughly Christian and confronting an injustice as grotesque as Jim Crow, and confronted it with an ethic of non-violence, with love and grace. I quote John Lewis in the piece to that effect.”
“Here, we have a MAGA movement that is proclaiming some sort of national emergency,” he elaborated. “It is nothing on the scale of Jim Crow it’s not within shouting distance of that. Yet, they have utterly abandoned, in many ways, even the most basic requirements of human decency. Again, in their interactions with each other, interactions with political opponents, in their interactions with truth. This is turning that Christian political ethic utterly upside down.”
Watch the video below or at this link.