It’s ironic and hypocritical that many on the Left have been so desperate to criticize President Donald Trump in his quest to make America great again. For example, in his handling of the COVID-19 crisis, the criticisms were wide and varied: Trump didn’t close the borders soon enough; he closed them too soon. He didn’t speak up enough; he spoke up too much. He took the advice of the wrong people; he didn’t listen to enough people.
Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, liberals criticized President Trump for everything from his lifestyle—although before he ran for president as a Republican, they saw nothing wrong with his past and he seemed to be the darling of the liberal media—to his beliefs. Has he done and said things that don’t reflect the teachings of the Bible? Yes. He’s imperfect, but according to some, that makes him a great leader.
In the same way, some Christians overlook the good Trump has done and focus on all the mistakes he’s made and the perceived weaknesses he still struggles with. The question we must ask ourselves, though, is, what is the fruit? Donald Trump has probably been one of the staunchest defenders of religious liberties and freedoms we have seen. He also makes it no secret that he has an evangelical council that meets with him periodically, ministers to him, advises him, and at times even lays hands on and prays over him.
“As Christians we have created artificial standards for our leaders that God doesn’t have for His leaders in the Bible,” historian David Barton told me for God, Trump, and the 2020 Election. “I have flaws, Trump has flaws, and we can point them out in a self-righteous manner. Or we can look at Hebrews 11 and see that all these great leaders had serious flaws, but God definitely still used them.”
Barton said conservative Christians should “look at what the president has done for the economy, but especially standing for religious liberty, appointing righteous judges, protecting unborn life and supporting Israel—so many of the things the Bible specifically talks about. No president in our lifetime has gotten done as many biblically correct things as he has.”
Because of this, Barton said Christians must be willing to support Trump and not allow the Left to undermine his conservative agenda any longer. He points out that we don’t have to win every American to our way of thinking—we just need to win more than we have now.
Author Lance Wallnau has made the same point. “Figures like Churchill, Lincoln and George S. Patton don’t step out of cathedrals onto the stage of history, yet we canonize them later as instruments God raised up to meet a singular crisis,” he said. None of these men were conventional Christians, and they had many detractors in the clergy, yet each played a pivotal role in history. They stood strong against the enemies of freedom and helped safeguard our way of life and Christian heritage.
That’s what I see in Donald Trump and why people support him despite all the criticisms thrown at him. In that respect Trump resembles the indefatigable British prime minister, who often went against convention, decorum and his own party. Churchill was viciously attacked by the media in his day. Today, Donald Trump invites the same kinds of bitterness and resentment by raising alarms about the unraveling of American society at a time when our political elites, buttressed by the media, are denying that anything is wrong. Like Churchill, Trump is the target of opposition forces seeking to silence him for his bluntness and to stop him from speaking from the heart about problems the political establishment has been sweeping under the carpet for generations.
But many strong Christian leaders, including James Robison, host of Life Today, and Jack Graham, pastor of the nearly 45,000-member Prestonwood Baptist Church based in Plano, Texas, who know Trump personally, are supportive of him because he cares about the concerns of conservative, Bible-believing Christians and wants to know what they think.
“And not only him,” Graham told Robison in an interview for The Stream, “but the people he has put into place. Vice President [Mike] Pence is a great Christian. Eight or nine of his Cabinet members, the people closest to him, are Christians, and they are having Bible study and prayer together.”
I believe that, like Churchill, Trump was raised up by God for such a time as this, and we must stand with him in the midst of the challenges he faces.
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