Top evangelical magazine calls for Trump’s removal
The impeachment — and removal from office — of President Donald Trump gained an unlikely supporter Thursday: the country’s top evangelical Christian magazine.
Christianity Today editor-in-chief Mark Galli wrote in an editorial that “the facts in this instance are unambiguous: The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents. That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.”
The piece landed like a thunderclap just one day after the House of Representatives, for the third time in American history, voted to impeach the president. The late Rev. Billy Graham founded Christianity Today in 1956.
Though the country is roughly evenly split on Trump’s impeachment, white evangelicals have long made up a critical part of his political base. He scored four-fifths of the white evangelical vote in 2016, and prominent evangelical leaders have stuck by Trump through many controversies.
Galli wrote that “Democrats have had it out for him from day one,” and he argued Trump should have had more opportunity to defend himself in the House impeachment process.
But he slammed Trump as a deeply immoral person, and he admonished Trump’s evangelical supporters directly: “Remember who you are and whom you serve. Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior. … It will crash down on the reputation of evangelical religion and on the world’s understanding of the gospel.”
Noting that Christianity Today excoriated President Bill Clinton for “[u]nsavory dealings and immoral acts” in 1998, Galli wrote that the parallels impelled the magazine to apply the same standards to Trump.
But he included the caveat that Trump’s removal from office could come either at the hands of the Senate or at the ballot box next November.
Galli, who is retiring in two weeks, told The Washington Post on Thursday that he had accommodated evangelical Trump supporters too much: “I bend over backwards to be charitable and patient with people, including people who support Trump,” but “I probably went too far on that.”
