Jerry Falwell Jr. is the son of the founder, and is the current President of Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. As was his father, Jerry Jr. is a hard-core right-wing Christian fundamentalist. On August 19 he offered a full-throated endorsement of Donald Trump in an opinion piece printed in the Washington Post. The following is my response.
Dear President Falwell,
Having carefully read your opinion piece in The Washington Post, I respond as a retired pastor, who like you, is deeply interested in what is going on in our nation and in the factors shaping our public agenda. I have no need or desire to question your political stance or your right to voice your opinions. As are all Americans, you are free to spread your political concerns as far and wide as you can. My argument with you is about an entirely different matter.
Unless I have badly misunderstood who you are, I believe that your primary commitment and loyalty is to Jesus and the reign of God he proclaimed. Here is my question: Is there anything in Donald Trump’s life that remotely resembles the vision Jesus had of the God-directed society centered on acceptance, peace and justice? So I wonder how your political affection for this billionaire can possibly flow from the life and spirit of the one we both call Christ. Isn’t Trump’s life story well known to us:—his multiple marriages and a lurid reputation outside each of them? There is the underhanded way he became wealthy by steamrolling and cheating everyone who stood in his way, including his multiple bankruptcies by which he used the tax code as an excuse to abandon thousands who had worked for him.
I note you cited his “love for ordinary Americans and his kindness, generosity and bold leadership qualities.” Where is the evidence for this love, kindness and generosity? His life story is a testimony to arrogance and greed, the polar opposite of how Jesus defined the faithful life.
Donald Trump’s self-serving commitment is also the opposite of the blessed life Jesus outlined in the beatitudes. President Falwell, can you cite any evidence from what we know about the life and teachings of Jesus that suggests that Donald Trump either knows or understand the nature of the God-committed life?
How do you explain his promise to take torture far beyond water boarding, or to solve international problems by the wholesale killing of our enemies? Does this bare any resemblance of the call from Jesus that we are to love our enemies? I don’t think by that he meant us to masacre them.
The decision to have a fully armed campus with allowable weapons discreetly carried and now available in every dorm room, says quite a bit about the political nature of your institution, but to call this a Christian policy leaves Jesus far behind.
The Jesus I know built bridges of understanding, while the world around him was content to build walls. The Jesus I know welcomed strangers and embraced his nation’s outsiders and aliens; wrapped his arms around the non-persons of his day; honored those whom many of his countrymen distained and rejected.
I would be interested to hear anything you know about Donald Trump that flows from deeper Jesus-directed commitments. While the United States has been and continues to be a secular state, and while no politician or party platform can really approximate Jesus’s ethical standard, there are those who depart so far from it that the ethic of Jesus is totally lacking. Certainly we have a right to expect that our leaders be grounded in a standard that flows from a deeper loyalty to the common good, and even perhaps from a religious reservoir. If there is the smallest shred of Christian morality that has shapes Donald Trump, I have failed to see it and you have failed to submit it.
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