Seduced by Trump sounds like a movie you’d catch on Lifetime on a random Saturday afternoon, but Dr. Michael L. Brown — a prominent religious leader, radio host, and founder of the AskDrBrown Ministries and FIRE School of Ministry — believes it has become an unfortunate reality for many of his fellow Christians (himself included).
As Raw Story reports, in a new column for the Christian Post titled “Is the Church ready for Trump 2024?,” Dr. Brown wrote about the ways in which Donald Trump changed the Christian way of life — and how the fault of that rests with he and his fellow Christians themselves, not Trump directly.
“After all, he was the man he had always been: a rough and tumble, often contentious, frequently nasty, quite narcissistic, wealthy New York businessman turned politician,” Brown writes. “And while many of us hoped he would change, he did not.”
Brown makes it clear that he is not anti-Trump, and actually commends the former president for doing “so many excellent things and [keeping] his promises to his conservative Christian base… In four short years, despite constant opposition and harassment, he did a tremendous amount of good on both a national and international level.” (He did?!)
What concerns Brown is “the fact that many of us exalted him as some kind of political savior,” and whether he and his fellow Christians can both be a Trump supporter and still uphold their religious values, when so much of what they apparently enjoyed about the former president was “The fact that we enjoyed watching him belittle and mock his political opponents, often in crude and cruel ways,” which doesn’t sound very Christian.
But therein, according to Brown, lies the problem:
In the case of Trump, there were so many good things he stood for, so many admirable things he championed, so much courage he displayed, so much of our burden that he shared, that it was all too easy for us to get seduced. (By seduced I don’t mean voting for him; I mean acting the way we did.)
In the process, we compromised our witness, put our trust in the political system, and divided over the president rather than united around Jesus. Will we do better if Trump decides to run again?
This much is sure: If we don’t recognize our past errors, take stock of our own lives (and/or ministries), and make serious adjustments at the root level, we will not be ready for Trump 2024.
Is anyone?
(Via Raw Story)