Many of the rebuttals to the CT editorial share a tacit assumption that there are no persuadable Americans any more, only two irreconcilable sides in a civil war, so any problem for Christian witness created by Christian support for Trump either doesn't exist or is irrelevant.
Maybe this is true. Certainly "costs to witness" is hard to measure in a way that "judges confirmed" is not. Young people drifting away from churches might have drifted away anyway, etc.
I've been wrong (so far) about some of the worst cases I feared with Trump; maybe I'll be wrong about this period's long-term effects on Christian preaching and retention. Hopefully.
But I think responses to CT - e.g. the Leithart piece below - that depict Trump as a "ruler" who need not be decent to be effective, underestimate the way democracy makes presidents embodiments of their factions, w/an identification in the public mind.
firstthings.com/web-exclusives…
firstthings.com/web-exclusives…
Trump is not just a prince whom evangelicals are asked to obey; he is the chosen leader of their cultural coalition, and to many people its face and most prominent embodiment. What does that mean for witness? It means something, in a way that just obeying a potentate does not.
Like this point from @ToryAnarchist is 1) describing a pre-democratic culture and 2) the witness of the great-libertine popes helped break Christendom!
@ToryAnarchist Trump is not a pope, happily. But he is also not merely some "great prince" who inherited his throne. He is a democratically-chosen leader, a religious faction's leader and thus face, with obvious influence on how that religious faction conducts itself.
@ToryAnarchist The ppl getting dinged as evangelical "elites" might equally be described as evangelicals who are engaged with non-Christians + Christians who don't share all conservative priors. Their fear of what Trump means for witness may be skewed. But it isn't being sufficiently answered.
