Two interesting takes on evangelicals, the Bible and Donald Trump, appeared on successive days last week in the Church Times.
Last Wednesday, an article entitled ‘White US Evangelicals stay loyal to Trump, research finds’ revealed the results of a new survey of 3589 US adults, conducted by the Pew Research Center.
Of those polled, some 14% were white evangelicals, of whom 72% said they approved of the way in which Donald Trump was leading the country as President and 57% said that they trusted him more than they had trusted his predecessors.
White evangelicals have largely supported the Trump presidency, and 81% backed him at the last election. So, while that supprot remains largely in place, it may be weakening slightly.
Among other Christian groupings, his support was less secure and more divided. The article reports that among white non-evangelical Protestants and white Catholics, only some 51% said they approved of his work, while a majority of black Protestants and Hispanic Catholics said they disapproved of his presidency so far.
Read the article here.
But the following day an article appeared, by Canon Emeritus of Christ Church Oxford, Angela Tilby, which pointed to the illogicality of the white evangelicals’ stance. As we know, evangelicals hold the Bible in high esteem. But Angela Tilby’s article identified how Donald Trump was associated with a message of greed, which the Bible clearly decries.
“What I find most disturbing in the President’s MAGA rhetoric”, she writes, “is the naked appeal to avarice…. While the Bible occasionally refers to wealth as a blessing, avarice is condemned constantly in Christian writing and preaching.” She explains that many evangelicals have “sanitised the desire for riches in the so-called ‘prosperity gospel’”, the notion that prosperity is a sign of God’s blessing.
The Bible on the other hand is very clear what it thinks of greed. Proverbs 30:15 is a case in point. “The leech (ie the greedy person) has two daughters: ‘Give’ and ‘Give’.” And Jesus was very clear what he thought: “Take care, and be on your guard against all covetousness (ie greed), for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions,” (Luke 12:15).
“Of course,” concludes Angela Tilby, “in the end, greed makes him vulnerable. In her 2021 book ‘Putin’s People’, the former Financial Times Moscow correspondent Catherine Belton demonstrated how, from the 1970s onwards, Mr Trump was supported financially in his lucrative property ventures by Russian officials linked to the KGB”.
Read Angela’s article here.