When God Deployed a Sinner to Save a Nation: The Biblical Precedent
Would God call a known sinner to save a nation? If so, it would not be for the first time if Religious Freedom is at stake. There is a striking Biblical precedent.
Over fifteen years of writing for Beyond These Stone Walls, I have tried to steer clear of politics. It hasn’t been easy because politics by its very nature has tentacles reaching into every aspect of existence in the human community. The word comes from the Latin, politicus which came from Greek, politikos, meaning “citizen of the city.” To be human is to practice politikos.
But as you know from the daily news, practice does not make perfect. I had a little practice of my own in my highly politically sensitive post, “The Unspoken Racist Arena of Roe v. Wade.” For some, just using the current President’s name in a sentence is to lend to him some sort of tacit endorsement or approval.
Listening to the news, some commentators refuse to call him “President” Trump. He is, for them, simply “Trump,” uttered with a hint of audible disdain that would have been widely condemned during previous administrations. At MSNBC, he appears to be the only politician in America.
Recently, I passed by a group of twenty-something young adults in a heated argument about Mr. Trump’s fitness for office. I tried to stay out of it, but as I passed I was asked whether I think he should be elected. I responded politically: “Well,” I said, “that is a matter for all the voters to decide, and not just the pundits from the ruling class.”
Because I qualified my answer, the “Not My President” crowd was horrified. “So, you actually LIKE Trump?!” they shot back incredulously — as though I were wearing a MAGA hat and a red tie of my own. My response was not a matter of like or dislike, but rather one of truth and its various distortions that today pass as journalism and broadcast news.
There is a vast difference in the politics of today and those of decades past. There are few Americans in America. We are now mostly Republicans and Democrats.
Should Christianity Today Trump the President?
I have long admired the work of Eric Metaxas, author of over thirty books including, If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty. In 2020, I was very pleased to see a provocative op-ed from him in The Wall Street Journal entitled, “The Christian Case for Trump” (Jan. 8, 2020).
Before the 2020 election, much of the news media had hyped an editorial in the venerable Evangelical magazine, Christianity Today, founded by the late Billy Graham. On the heels of the impeachment vote in Congress, the editors of Christianity Today endorsed the removal of President Trump from office citing that his behavior has been “profoundly immoral,” his character “grossly” so, and the “facts” of his guilt “unambiguous.”
I also cringed when I first read the response by Eric Metaxas because I knew that I might feel compelled to write about it. That means wading into a national partisan battle of words and attitudes with little connection to truth. I know some readers cannot see the Metaxas article without a WSJ subscription, so I will summarize its major points.
Mr. Metaxas clarified the politics behind the flap. In the 1990s, the editors of Christianity Today publicly endorsed the impeachment of President Bill Clinton citing that his moral failings made him unfit for office. As you may recall, President Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives but acquitted by the Senate.
Some of Mr. Trump’s detractors cited the Evangelical magazine’s position in the Clinton case while accusing Evangelicals of hypocrisy if they did not apply the same standards to Mr. Trump. As with President Clinton, Mr. Trump was impeached by the House but acquitted by the Senate. But Mr. Metaxas asks whether the comparison makes sense. “Aren’t the political realities different two decades later?” I will get back to that, but the heart of the point made by Metaxas is theological, and it is a point with which I strongly agree:
“But these subjective pronouncements promote a perversion of Christian doctrine, [a doctrine] which holds that all are depraved and equally in need of God’s grace. For Christianity Today to advance this misunderstanding is shocking. It isn’t what one does that makes one a Christian, but rather faith in what Jesus has done.”
Christianity Today got this embarrassingly wrong. The political reality of the last two decades has seen orchestrated efforts to park Christianity outside the public square. Jesus may be seen as irrelevant by the growing secularism in America, but this must not be so for people of faith. Metaxas described the magazine’s editorial as evidence not of its noble truths, or its roots in the Biblical witness of Reverend Billy Graham, but rather of its “Slough of Despond populated by liberal elites.”
In light of a prior post at this blog — “March for Life: A New Great Awakening” — I am conscious that this self-righteous culture may be seeing a moral splinter in this President’s eye while ignoring the immensity of the moral lumber in its own. I was encouraged and affirmed in the above post by this brilliant but deeply unsettling presentation by Eric Metaxas of the truth about our moral compromises:
“In the 1990s, some Democrats were antiabortion. Neither party could exclusively claim the high ground on this deepest of moral issues. Mr. Clinton spoke of making abortion “safe, legal, and rare.” No longer. Democrats endorse abortion with near unanimity often beyond viability and until birth. If slavery was rightly considered… both a moral and political issue, how can this macabre practice be anything else? How can Christians pretend this isn’t the principal moral issue of our time as slavery was in 1860? Can’t these issues of historic significance outweigh whatever the President’s moral failings might be?”
Prolife Catholics and Evangelicals were also affirmed when President Trump became the first sitting U.S. President to appear in person and address the March for Life. Evangelical Americans formed a wide cross section of President Donald Trump’s support in the 2016 presidential election, though it is widely believed that at least some of their enthusiasm was not so much for Trump as it was against the alternative. That is the same case in play in 2024. Pope Francis, who never injects himself into U.S. politics, has urged American Catholics to vote for the candidate and party that inflicts the least moral harm. He clarified, without names, that one candidate rejects migrants while the other “kills children.”
The choice of president in 2016 also presented one, and perhaps two, opportunities to nominate lifetime appointments to fill likely vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court. As you know, it turned out to be three vacancies which led directly to overturning Roe v. Wade and therefore returning the judgment to voters in each state. For many who found themselves weighing the lesser of evils in 2016, consideration of who sits on the Supreme Court for life actually (and morally) outweighed who occupied the White House for the next four years.
Two Decades of Christianity’s Cultural Decline
As I have written elsewhere, the first Great Awakening in America was a religious revival in the Colonies by Presbyterian preachers who inspired a sense of national identity that led to the Revolutionary War of 1776. In the United States today, self-described Wiccans outnumber Presbyterians.
This is not the same country that it was just a decade ago. Topics like religion and Religious Liberty have been under increasing assault. We have every reason to believe the trend toward secularism will continue. The need to protect Religious Liberty has never been more urgent. In 2010, seventy-six percent of Americans identified as Christians. By 2020 that figure had diminished to sixty-five percent.
In 2010, fifty-one percent of Americans identified as Protestant. By 2020, the figure had dropped to forty-three percent. The missing eight percent did not convert to some other religion. They abandoned religion to join the “Nones,” people who profess no faith in anything but secularism. In 2010, seventeen percent of Americans did not identify with any organized religion. In 2020, that figure now exceeds twenty-six percent.
The Southern Baptist Convention, America’s largest Protestant denomination and a conservative political force, lost 1.5 million members over the last decade. The second and third largest Protestant denominations, Episcopalians and Methodists, had major schisms, dividing over LGBTQ issues along political fault lines.
Among American millennials — identified as those born between 1981 and 1996 — forty percent claim no religious affiliation at all beyond their embrace of secularism. For this age group, this represents an increase of thirteen percentage points in just the last decade.
In the same decade — despite media hype of sex scandals, financial scandals, and battles between Traditionalists and progressives — those calling themselves Catholic declined by only three percent. Lest Catholics take too much pride in that, a WSJ/NBC news poll in 2000 revealed that Americans, including Catholics, who attend religious services at least once per week stood at forty-one percent. By 2020, the figure had declined to twenty-nine percent.
All of these statistics create a snapshot of religion in America before Covid. During the Covid crisis under the Biden Administration, government mandates at the state and federal levels across the land shuttered churches as “nonessential” gathering places. Liquor stores and casinos remained open while most Christians were barred from congregrating in any way but remotely. I wrote of the catastrophic effect this has had on the Catholic Church in American when too many of our bishops placidly went along with these government restrictions. That post was “The Faithful Departed: Bishops Who Bar Catholics from Mass.” Christianity in America has not recovered from Covid.
The decline has merely continued and we have no reason to believe it will stop. If the next president is not someone who is sensitive and supportive of Religious Freedom, regardless of whether he or she practices any religion of their own, then religion in America is doomed.
My Country ’Twas of Thee
History sometimes repeats itself. In “President Donald Trump’s First Step Act for Prison Reform,” I wrote of another possible basis for seeing a flawed character in a more Biblical light.
In 722 B.C., Israel fell to the Assyrians and was sent into exile. In 605 B.C., the Kingdom of Israel divided between north and south. The southern Kingdom of Judah fell into Babylonian captivity. In 587 B.C., Jerusalem and the Temple were destroyed. This was the time of the apocalyptic Prophets — Daniel, Ezekiel and Baruch. A century earlier, Isaiah actually prophesied the name of the man who would one day restore Israel to its rightful path and preserve its heritage:
“Thus says the Lord to his anointed: To Cyrus, whose right hand I have grasped to subdue nations before him and ungird the loins of kings, to open doors before him that gates may not be closed.”
— Isaiah 45:1
Between 559 and 530 B.C., a man named Cyrus the Great united the Medes and Persians [in present day Iran] to form the great Persian Empire. Fifty years after Israel was invaded, cast into exile, and suffered the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple, Cyrus and his armies conquered Babylon.
However no one but Isaiah could have predicted that, for the Jews in exile, Cyrus would turn out to be more of a liberator than a conqueror. He practiced no religious faith that the Jews could recognize. He lived a lifestyle with values deplorable to them. But this disruptor of no faith at all turned out to develop deep respect for theirs.
Cyrus restored the Kingdom of Israel, ordered his armies to rebuild Jerusalem and the Temple, declared an end to slavery and oppression, and established a charter to protect Religious Liberty. The Book of the Prophet Ezra contains the entire Decree of Cyrus guaranteeing Religious Liberty for the Jews and protecting it throughout the Persian Empire. But Cyrus himself never changed.
The Prophet Isaiah certainly never envisioned anyone like Donald Trump leading an America in rapid religious decline. He is notorious for living in a manner understandably anathema to Evangelical Christians, and yet he has also come to be seen as a Cyrus-like defender of Religious Liberty. No president in modern times has done more to protect and defend Religious Freedom.
So let me repeat myself, please. If the “Not My President” crowd is horrified as though I wrote this post wearing a MAGA hat and a “Not My Impeachment” T-shirt, this is not a matter of like or dislike. It is a matter of truth and its various distortions that today pass as journalism and broadcast news, and I am not willing to hand my Truth over to them.
A little perspective is always a good thing. This candidate’s moral past, his former overused Twitter account, and his novel approach to both foreign policy and the swamp of contemporary politics pale next to the moral decline of a nation that has terminated the lives of sixty-two million future citizens.
Some were appalled, but not nearly appalled enough, when 2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg, a member of the current White House Cabinet, distorted our Sacred Scripture to defend the mass extermination of human life:
“There’s a lot of parts of the Bible that talk about how life begins with breath… the kind of cosmic question of where life begins. It ought to be up to the woman making the decision.”
We were not nearly appalled enough when former candidate Beto O’Rourke called for an end to Religious Rights and Freedom for any institution that fails to fall in line with same-sex marriage and the LGBTQ political narratives. We were not nearly appalled enough when the remaining Democratic candidates offered no rebuttal, not even an audible gasp.
But to quote Eric Metaxas one more time, “It isn’t what one does that makes one a Christian, but rather faith in what Jesus has done.” That may include faith in the notion that God can choose a sinner like King Cyrus as an instrument of good in the bigger picture of human history, and maybe even one like Donald Trump.
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Editor’s Note: Father MacRae emphasizes that this post is not an endorsement of a political candidate. It is an endorsement of a solid Catholic tradition that redemption is open to all who seek it.
Please share this post and ponder these related posts from Beyond These Stone Walls
Donald Trump Has a Prayer by Father Raymond de Souza
Cultural Meltdown: Prophetic Wisdom for a Troubled Age
President Trump and Melania Trump pray at the Shrine of Saint John Paul II in Washington, DC
The Eucharistic Adoration Chapel established by Saint Maximilian Kolbe was inaugurated at the outbreak of World War II. It was restored as a Chapel of Adoration in September, 2018, the commemoration of the date that the war began. It is now part of the World Center of Prayer for Peace. The live internet feed of the Adoration Chapel at Niepokalanow — sponsored by EWTN — was established just a few weeks before we discovered it and began to include in at Beyond These Stone Walls. Click “Watch on YouTube” in the lower left corner to see how many people around the world are present there with you. The number appears below the symbol for EWTN.
Click or tap here to proceed to the Adoration Chapel.
The following is a translation from the Polish in the image above: “Eighth Star in the Crown of Mary Queen of Peace” “Chapel of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament at Niepokalanow. World Center of Prayer for Peace.” “On September 1, 2018, the World Center of Prayer for Peace in Niepokalanow was opened. It would be difficult to find a more expressive reference to the need for constant prayer for peace than the anniversary of the outbreak of World War II.”
For the Catholic theology behind this image, visit my post, “The Ark of the Covenant and the Mother of God.”