'Slandered the name of Jesus': Ex-Bush aide torches Trump’s evangelicals

Peter Wehner, a former George W. Bush White House aide, makes the case in a fresh opinion piece for The Atlantic that Tuesday’s Democratic takeovers of Senate seats in Texas and Kansas are a rebuke to the kind of Christianity that put itself at Donald Trump’s disposal.

Wehner says the success of James Talarico in Texas and Adam Hamilton in Kansas is due in part to an increasing feeling that many politicians touting “Christian values” have “slandered the name of Jesus in their words and their deeds.” It is something even non-believers can spot: “the politics of cruelty is at odds with Jesus’s command to love your enemy.”

The relationship has changed over time. Fifty years back, white evangelicals were divided between Republican Gerald Ford and the born-again Southern Baptist Democrat Jimmy Carter. By 1980 they had made a firm move to the GOP, and about eight in 10 cast their lot with Trump in all three of his bids. What was once an alliance became a fusion, to the point where evangelicalism became a de facto arm of the Republican Party.

In his long career in politics, Wehner has not encountered a group “more easily seduced by political power than evangelicals.” Their talk grew apocalyptic, and the attendant fear and grievance curdled into hatred for some. They set out for a warrior who would not only best the opposition but make it bleed, and they found one in Trump, whom Wehner describes as “the cruelest and most corrupt president in American history.”

He argues that Talarico and Hamilton are cut from a different cloth. They cite Micah 6:8, the Good Samaritan, the Sermon on the Mount, and Matthew 25. Talarico has put it this way: “the politics of division is no match for the politics of love.”

Wehner isn’t naive and says that Democrats have been openly hostile to Christianity on occasion and that many evangelicals are still leery of the two parties' political theology and stances on certain issues. The senators-elect are going to be tested in the same way others have been, he cautions, with the lure of politicizing their faith, making scripture a prop for their ideology and letting loyalty to Team Blue silence their prophetic voice.

Then again, with Talarico and Hamilton having a common cause with Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock in the Democratic caucus, Wehner thinks there is an opportunity for the ice to thaw between the party and believers. It would do both the Christian faith and the Democrats some good.

Wehner concluded, writing: “Many millions of Americans, and not a few evangelicals, have been sickened by those who distort the Gospel while pretending to proclaim it. Something deep and good is stirring in our land.”