What I want my evangelical Christian friends to know about Trump | Opinion

In the eyes of a significant number of white evangelical Christians, loyalty to Donald Trump is more important than following Jesus.

Trump is their Savior now.

It’s not hyperbole. It’s a sad reality in which we find ourselves, why the country hasn’t been able to move on from one of the most destructive political forces of the modern era.

I didn’t need media intelligence firm Zignal Labs and The Associated Press to tell me. They conducted an analysis of online and social media content earlier this year and found “tens of thousands of mentions calling Trump a martyr” when Trump faced his first indictment in New York during the Christian Holy Week. That number doubled when Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene compared Trump’s arrest to the literal persecution of Christ.

“Trump is joining some of the most incredible people in history being arrested today,” the congresswoman told Right Side Broadcasting. “Nelson Mandela was arrested, served time in prison. Jesus — Jesus was arrested and murdered by the Roman government.”

I was at the New York courthouse in the days and hours leading up to Trump’s first arraigned. It was more circus and spectacle than crucifixion or execution.

Neither did I need Russell Moore, a former top official in the Southern Baptist Convention and current editor-in-chief of Christianity Today magazine, to tell me. Because I saw the beginnings of it during the end of my 17-year-long membership in a mostly-white Evangelical church in Conway, S.C. Because I noticed the shift in my daily interactions with people I once prayed with long before Moore recently told NPR that he believes Christianity is in crisis.

“It was the result of having multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching — ‘turn the other cheek’ — [and] to have someone come up after to say, ‘Where did you get those liberal talking points?’ Moore told Scott Detrow of NPR. “And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, ‘I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ,’ the response would not be, ‘I apologize.’ The response would be, ‘Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.’ And when we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we’re in a crisis.”

They’ve told pastors Jesus is weak, or at least his message, and that Trump is strong. They seem to believe following Trump instead of Jesus will get them to a promised land of glory and power quicker.

Or maybe they think, like that Zignal Labs analysis suggests, Trump is Jesus or a Jesus-like figure, though not the version who was born in a manger, hung out with the unclean, and washed other people’s feet to model humility and the importance of “the least of these.” Maybe in their minds, Trump is the Jesus of Revelation. He’s the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords with a sword in his mouth who has come back to judge the righteous and unrighteous, to wage war.

“I Am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end,” Jesus declared in Revelation, the final book of the New Testament.

During the 2016 Republican National Convention, Trump declared: “I have joined the political arena so that the powerful can no longer beat up on people who cannot defend themselves. Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”

Two thousand years ago, Jesus voluntarily became a sacrificial lamb, giving his life to save us from our sins. Trump voluntarily relinquished a billionaire’s lap of luxury — and even his salary as president — to save the country from its sins, they’ve argued while praising him. (Never mind the hundreds of millions of dollars from foreign actors his family made while he was in the White House, and since.)

Like Jesus, despite all Trump has had to endure — such as supposedly having an election stolen from him — the former president is still standing, still fighting evil on their behalf. In their view, Christians who oppose Trump are blind and don’t realize he was sent for a time like this to fight powers and principalities, not to improve the short-term political fortunes of the elite.

A return to the White House would be like Jesus’; his garment will be stained with his enemies’ blood.

The horror that was Jan. 6, 2021 likely emboldened them rather than shocked their conscience. It’s why they view every Trump indictment not as democracy working as intended, upholding the principle that no man is above the law, but as akin to a lash from a Roman soldier’s whip on Jesus’ back.

I wish it weren’t true. But it is.

It’s a mindset similar to the one that convinced Edgar Maddison Welch to drive from North Carolina to a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor, convinced he had to save children from an imaginary satanic child sex ring funded and operated by Democrats.

He was armed with an AR-15 rifle and a pistol, and fired a shot inside Comet Ping Pong, only to realize too late he had been taken in by a hoax. He was sentenced to four years in prison.

I hope those who’ve come to believe Trump is here to save us wake up before it’s too late for us all.

Issac Bailey is a member of the McClatchy Opinion team in North and South Carolina.