I have mixed feelings about Mark Galli’s editorial in Christianity Today, which calls for Trump’s removal from office.
On the one hand, obviously, I agree: Trump should, as the headline states with admirable clarity, be removed from office. And I agree with a good chunk of Galli’s reasoning:
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.
The reason many are not shocked about this is that this president has dumbed down the idea of morality in his administration. He has hired and fired a number of people who are now convicted criminals. He himself has admitted to immoral actions in business and his relationship with women, about which he remains proud. His Twitter feed alone—with its habitual string of mischaracterizations, lies, and slanders—is a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.
I’ll have something to say about that last phrase in a moment, but aside from that: Amen, brother!
I also appreciate that there is at least an attempt to be consistent with earlier positions. While many white evangelicals seem to have forgotten the standards of “character” they demanded of Bill Clinton, Galli quotes an earlier CT article laying out a similar position regarding Clinton:
Unsavory dealings and immoral acts by the President [i.e., Clinton] and those close to him have rendered this administration morally unable to lead.
So… Yay, consistency?
Sort of.
Galli still pussyfoots around crucial, central issues. I get the rhetorical strategy of seeking common ground with the people you’re trying to convince, but I reject the things he uses to create that common ground:
First, he wants to “grant” that the Democrats “have had it out for [Trump] from day one,” which has led to a “cloud of partisan suspicion” of both motives and facts in the impeachment hearings.
Sure, Democrats have opposed Trump from the beginning. But putting it that way makes it sound purely partisan, as if there weren’t good reasons for opposition. It buries Trump’s role in the whole birther movement (someone on Twitter has collected all his birther tweets, if there’s any doubt). It buries a life-time of seedy business dealings (Trump University, anyone?). It buries the Access Hollywood tape. The list goes on.
Just as important, Republicans shared that day-one opposition. Trump simply kicked their asses into line, one after another. An example, submitted for your consideration:
Do Republicans doubt Democrats’ motives? I’m sure they do. They certainly talk about it enough; it’s one of the spurious “defenses” they’ve fielded during the impeachment hearings. But this suspicion strikes me as projection. Republicans’ willingness to lump facts into the things they’re “suspicious of” (read: things they reject out of hand) is at best motivated reasoning or, at worst, a cynical strategy for burying the truth. (I lean toward the latter.) As Galli notes, the facts are “unambiguous.” It takes significant effort to be suspicious of unambiguous facts.
Second, Galli wants to “grant” that Trump “did not have a serious opportunity to offer his side of the story in the House hearings on impeachment.” That’s rich, given that the White House (to the extent such a thing even exists — the metonymy broke!) rebuffed, or made it clear that it would rebuff, every invitation to testify.
I understand Galli’s situation. If he doesn’t want to find himself preaching only to the choir, he has to concede some ground — and in a way consistent with CT’s mission (to be “above the fray,” to apply “patient charity,” to “welcome Christians from across the political spectrum”). So he hedges against his more direct claims of “moral deficiency,” or “grossly immoral character,” or (more important to him) “what an unbelieving world will say,” by criticizing Democrats for their supposedly blind opposition to a president who is — as stated in the quote above, which I said I’d come back to — “morally lost and confused.”
But Trump is not morally lost or confused. His moral code is crystal clear: it’s transactional and Trump-centered. Period. Almost everything he does can be explained by this. It’s why the Ukraine call was “‘perfect,” and why he’s so angry at CT — both of which are summed up nicely in this pair of tweets:
[Cue Stephen Colbert: dot dot, dot dot dot — dot dot dot dot.)
“No president has done more for the Evangelical community” — so of course, by Trump’s moral calculus, CT (which has been doing poorly!) should rally ’round and support him. And, as payback for their insolence, Trump will never again read ET (Entertainment Tonight?)! (As if he’d even heard of Christianity Today before the editorial came out….)
But all that — granting things that really shouldn’t be granted — just sets up a larger problem.
In his editorial, Galli selectively quotes from CT‘s previous editorial — the one showing “concern for the character” of Bill Clinton. That makes sense; the quotes are in line with Galli’s argument, both in content and tone. And it’s a reasonably effective way to show that CT has been consistent — See? We’re calling out Trump, just like we did Clinton. That’s an important point to make, given the common — and, in many cases, reasonable — accusations of hypocrisy leveled at white evangelicals.
But this selective quoting also obscures a telling difference. For while the quotes Galli chooses are focused and direct — in line with his own argument — the rest of the article simply drips with disdain for Clinton:
- Clinton had a “perennial penchant for taking his cues from the crowd”; he was “eager to give the people what they want.”
- He “seemed to need constant affirmation.”
- In his “televised non-apology” for the Lewinsky affair, he “gave the people what he thought they wanted — so he could get what he wanted.”
- “Clintonian compassion was hollow: … it was clear he had no feelings for anyone but Bill.”
- Subsequent apologies “looked more like sandbagging operations to shore up crumbling support than like the fruit of personal reflection.”
And so on.
Hardly “above the fray,” as Galli would have us believe.
More important, that earlier editorial really was about Clinton — in a personal, ad hominem, even nasty way. There was no call to action. Indeed, I’m not even sure what its purpose was, other than to resist arguments from other Christians, who were arguing that it was time to forgive and move on.
In contrast, Galli’s piece isn’t really about Trump. Yes, the title states that Trump should be removed from office. Yes, Galli lists — with impressive conciseness — a sampling of objections to support that claim. And yes, he states it explicitly in the editorial itself: “That he should be removed, we believe, is not a matter of partisan loyalties but loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments.”
But, in fact, Galli’s real concern is the with the damage that evangelicals’ support for Trump is having on their “witness”: “Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency,” he writes. “If we don’t reverse course now, will anyone take anything we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come?”
I understand that concern. As I wrote in an earlier post, I am starting to feel embarrassed as a former evangelical, and I have witnessed the dismay that many of my evangelical (or evangelical-adjacent) friends and family wrestle with daily. It’s exhausting to watch; I can’t imagine how exhausting it is to live.
And I’ll concede that this is probably the right message, given CT‘s audience — though Galli himself doesn’t expect that his piece will change anyone’s minds, since evangelicals on the far right don’t read his magazine.
But… it’s awfully late, don’t you think?
We have reserved judgment on Mr. Trump for years now. Some have criticized us for our reserve. But when it comes to condemning the behavior of another, patient charity must come first. So we have done our best to give evangelical Trump supporters their due, to try to understand their point of view, to see the prudential nature of so many political decisions they have made regarding Mr. Trump.
“Patient charity” — nice! But patient charity for whom? How many people have been harmed, “for years now,” by Trump and the incompetent or corrupt people he empowers and emboldens?
The idea, as Galli told CNN, that Trump only now, with the impeachment hearings, “[rose] to the level where he’s no longer fit to serve office” is absurd by CT‘s own standards.
And that’s the difference I’ve been talking about — the difference between the editorials. If CT applied the same character standards to Trump as they did to Clinton — if they’d written a piece that once again argued (as they did about Clinton) that lying “rips at the fabric of the nation”… Well, that editorial could have been written about Trump before he even took office.
And it could have been written again every day since he’s been in office. The lies started in the first press conference, when he sent Sean Spicer out to present patently ridiculous claims about the size of the inaugural crowd, and they haven’t stopped since: The Washington Post counted 492 false or misleading claims in his first 100 days; that number has now broken the 15,000 mark.
So, yeah, mixed feelings. It’s nice to see a prominent, centrist, evangelical publication take a stand. But I’m not impressed that impeachment was the line that needed to be crossed before finally they finally mustered the energy to speak up.