Donald Trump owns many properties; American Christianity cannot be one of them.
If, by some wonder of time travel, you were to visit a small-group Bible study in 2010 and someone were to ask you, “What’s the state of the evangelical church where you are, up ahead of us in 2024?” you might explain all of the divided congregations, all the friendships broken, all the estranged families. You might mention that almost no evangelical under the age of 40 wants to use the word evangelical at all.
And if someone were to ask, “How did all this happen?” you might mention that a revolutionary leader emerged, demanding loyalty and vowing retribution and revenge against those who stand against him. You might add that this leader asks his supporters to wave away his sexual abuse of women, his criminal charges for seeking to use mob violence to keep him in power, his hush money to a porn star, his incitements to violence, his lies, his cruelty, his narcissism, and his dismissal of personal moral character as weakness.
Maybe one of those before-times Christians would slam their fist into their hand and exclaim, “This is exactly what Francis Schaeffer and Charles Colson and James Dobson all warned us about—this is what happens when evangelicals retreat from the public square. When the culture war is lost, immorality, relativism, and filth fill the void!”
Another might ask, “What are you 2024 Christians doing to try to turn the young people away from the normalization of this kind of decadence?”
“It’s not the young people who are turning to this,” you tell them. “It’s us. That’s why many campus ministries won’t use the word evangelical. In 2024, the next generation thinks support for this man, Donald Trump, is in fact what …
