Monday, August 13, 2018

THE EVANGELICAL RESPONSIBILITY TO CRITICIZE PRESIDENT TRUMP




In affirmation of an article written by Michael Brown (Townhall, 8/12/18) arguing that we do have a responsibility to criticize the President, one evangelical concurred:

·       But that fact is not a license to sin, nor does that fact excuse us from the responsibility to speak out against evil.  Because Trump has (so far) been good for a few issues we care about, we nonetheless have a responsibility to call sin “sin.”  We praise him when we can, but we criticize him when we must – not rationalize his actions.

In principle, I concur completely. However, I must admit that I am somewhat hesitant about entering into this highly unbalanced volume of verbiage clearly intended to destroy the President. This reminds me of a discussion I recently had with a highly respected Black Evangelical. He was in the process of writing a book about the collusion of the southern White Church with segregation. It also seemed that he was choosing the worst examples of this.

When I expressed my hesitation about his venture, he responded, “Why not; It’s the truth.” He certainly knew more about the topic than I. However, I raised the issue of balance. After all, two people could write a biography of George Washington. One could make him look like a scoundrel, and the other as a saint, depending upon their selection from the many details of Washington’s life. This is what I was concerned about here.

To highlight this problem, I cited the participation of thousands of White Evangelicals during the Reconstruction that had followed the Civil War, something about which we hardly ever hear anything.  Retired Professor of History and Black Church Studies and author of “Black Preaching,” Henry H. Mitchell, had admitted that he had written to raise the esteem of his Black people. Nevertheless, Mitchell also has some good things to say about the White Church and their role in Reconstruction:

  • After the South was opened up to the missionaries, under protection of military occupation, the Protestant churches of the North launched a veritable crusade to bring literacy to the huge host of the newly freed. (Mitchell, Black Church Beginnings, 142)

  • I was stunned to see whole pages of names of people who had been sent south to do mission work. There were hundreds of these names, in tiny print, on page after page. (142)

  • Regardless of paternalism and hazards to African American self-esteem, it was this huge crew of volunteer and minimally paid instructors, of not just Baptist but all denominations, who laid the foundation for all the secondary and college work reported in the pages that follow. There may have been only a log cabin church to teach in at first; it may have been by firelight, but these volunteers taught their very hearts out. There simply isn’t room to begin to cover the host of primary reading classes that were begun in churches and elsewhere soon after the Union troops took over. (142-43)

  • There were, of course, some educated African Americans from the North hastening south to lift their sisters and brothers. But this vast number of newly freed African Americans required this white host at the outset… The first Southern generation of locally educated African American instructors was first trained in schools planted by white missionaries. (143)

The unbalanced media has left this part out of their narrative. Instead, it seems committed to unearthing every injustice that had been perpetrated against our Black brethren, I think to their detriment.

Nevertheless, there is a place to criticize the White Church, but inflammatory unbalanced reporting seems to be winning out. Nevertheless, I think that there is also a place for us evangelicals to criticize the President, but carefully.

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