Those who don’t fault with Trump’s actual POLICIES focus instead point to his ‘unpresidential’ words — and tweets — of which no Christian should approve.
His words become the measurement of why we must not continue to support him as president.
So, let’s take a look at those words, and see how they stack up against Biblical standards.
What are the key objections? They can be broken into a few broad categories.
Trump (depending on how harshly you judge him) regularly uses some combination of lies and exaggerations. He uses harsh words to criticize people with whom he disagrees. And he has a nasty habit of using plain language to scandalize and upset ‘polite society’ with ideas that are offensive to the mainstream and the powerful.
Let’s take these three, one by one.
To put the first objection in absolute terms, Jesus did not lie… but that puts him squarely in a category of ONE. The rest of us can hardly help lying to ourselves, let alone others.
But what about hyperbole? Is Jesus cool with rhetorical devices that aren’t exactly descriptions of life as it is?
What do you think? When Jesus said “If your eye causes you to stumble, pluck it out and throw it from you. It is better for you to enter life with one eye, than to have two eyes and be cast into the fiery hell.” did he mean for half-blind followers to follow after him? Or what about the time he said Pharisees would strain out a gnat, but swallow a camel?
So, rhetorical devices are not a problem.
What about Trump speaking badly of people, like refering to MS-13 gang members as ‘animals’.? Would Jesus approve of that?
Without going one by one through the specific examples, let’s look at the principle itself. Is saying something ‘mean’ a disqualifying action?
What did Jesus say to people? He once called a Samaritan woman a ‘dog’. He called the most esteemed and respected leaders of his day ‘whitewashed tombs full of dead men’s bones’. He even said that when they made converts, those converts were ‘twice as much a son of hell as yourselves’.
That’s a pretty PERSONAL (and public!) attack against an esteemed religious leader, don’t you think? How ‘unpresidential’ of Sweet Jesus!
But the other things Trump says are the ones that REALLY set him off. The scandalous things like raising the issue of much-ballyhooed ‘rat-infested’ Baltimore. (WATCH: Here’s What We ALL Missed About Trump’s Baltimore ‘Scandal’ … Someone Tell CNN) Or calling journalists ‘fake news’ and an ‘enemy of the people’.
Would Sweet Jesus have something to say about that?
Perhaps not what we think. After all, Jesus himself was known to skewer a few sacred cows in his own day.
Remember that meeting with the woman at the well? Sweet story, wasn’t it?
Are you so sure about that? He didn’t hesitate to meddle with her life.
‘Go call your husband’, he said. ‘I have no husband’ she answered.
‘You have well said, ‘I have no husband,’ 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; in that you spoke truly.”
Outsiders are shocked that Christians hold unpopular views about marriage and dare to hold us all up to some kind of a high moral standard. But Jesus did exactly the same thing in HIS day.
That dude you’re shacked up with is NOT your husband. And yet, it was exactly what she needed to hear, exactly the point of pain in her life that God needed to bring healing to.
He had some pretty pointed things to say about marriage, divorce and infidelity, too. The kind of ‘meddling’ things you don’t need to run with the Rainbow crowd to find prickly.
Idols. Sabbaths-keeping. Money. Power. Fake piety. He was an absolute TERROR to the sacred cows of his day.
And that’s a big part of why people came to hear Jesus. The people weren’t getting some glossy veneer of what is safe and acceptable to say. He was saying something of weight and significance.
In fact, it was even said of him: “And they were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one who had authority, and not as the scribes.”
Isn’t that kind of plain-speaking a big part of the reason Trump fills stadiums when others don’t? What HE has to say is NOT what ordinary politicians have been shoveling to us.
The objection about Trump’s language was actually one of about two dozen similar topics addressed in depth in a new book:
“Would Jesus Vote For Trump?” by Doug Giles and Brandon Vallorani.
Would Jesus ever choose someone, with a less than stellar past, to be a leader? Would Jesus be cool with how Trump blasts CNN, The Left, and his feckless ‘compadres’ on The Right? What about Health Care? Would the Great Physician give Trump’s opposition to ObamaCare the ‘two thumbs up?’ Find out in this BEST-SELLER!
