Trump Doesn’t Understand the Bible: Why Do Evangelicals Love Him?
Jerry Falwell Jr., son of the Moral Majority founder and heir to his father’s evangelical Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, on Tuesday endorsed the non-evangelical, marginally religious Donald Trump for president, less than a week before the Iowa caucuses.
For months, Trump’s appeal to evangelicals has been a head-scratcher for Beltway insiders and even many evangelicals. After all, the twice-divorced, one-time supporter of abortion rights who appears to have barely a Cliffs Notes grasp of the Bible hardly epitomizes the moralizing ideologue or the pious family man — both presidential prototypes for the Christian right.
But there’s a simple explanation for the evangelical embrace of Trump: Having not succeeded in making America Christian, evangelicals coalescing around Trump have decided to settle for making it great (or “great,” as the case may be).
It’s all there in Falwell’s own words about Trump, whom he describes as “a successful executive and entrepreneur, a wonderful father and a man who I believe can lead our country to greatness again.” Note that Trump is not described as a wonderful husband, often a crucial criterion for evangelical voters, or as a revivalist who will save the Christian nation, or even as the guardian of crucial Supreme Court appointments who could oversee making abortion illegal in all 50 states.
For Falwell, Trump is a strongman who can save America where the Christian right has failed to do so. Falwell’s endorsement is a tacit admission that his father’s mission to rescue America from the supposed scourges of feminism, the “homosexual agenda” and secularism is now a defunct fundamentalist dream. Falwell, who leads evangelicalism’s flagship university — which claims to “encourage a commitment to the Christian life, one of personal integrity, sensitivity to the needs of others, social responsibility and active communication of the Christian faith” — seems to have conceded that those virtues are insufficient for America’s greatness.
In 1980, the late elder Falwell, who died in 2007, lamented that “[o]ur movies, television programs, magazines, and entertainment in general are morally bankrupt and spiritually corrupt,” and called on Christians to engage in the political process to save America. Thirty-six years later, his son is actively promoting the one Republican candidate who hails from that morally bankrupt world of television and entertainment.
But Trump has other qualities that many evangelicals admit they admire: wealth and success and — don’t let this surprise you — ruthlessness. Trump first addressed a Liberty University audience in September 2012, after his failed presidential bid. In his remarks, he suggested to students that they need to “get even” with adversaries in order to succeed, prompting an outcry over whether this advice was compatible with Christian values.