The Christianity Today editorial takes us to new levels of debate in post-America

The Christianity Today editorial calling for Trump’s removal from office has had a cultural impact beyond the immediate point it makes. My own position on that immediate point is that it’s moot. The stage is set. The Senate is going to acquit Trump and the odds are quite good that he’ll be reelected next November.

I wholeheartedly agree that his removal would be justified. Even given all the arcana we’ve had to sift through over the last two years (the Mueller investigation, with its sprawling cast of characters, government agencies and documents, followed by the Ukraine situation on which the impeachment hinged), it’s clear that the July phone call with Zelensky, as well as the shadow-Ukraine-policy team led by Rudy Giuliani earlier this year, demonstrated an intention to politicize the aid to that country to help it fend off Russian aggression. It justifies impeachment.

The reality on the ground can’t be ignored, however. The Very Stable Genius has a grip on the Republican Party that precludes his removal. For reasons including not wanting to be primaried, to not wanting to be the subject of Trump’s Twitter wrath, to the Trump enthusiasm among constituents, this is going to play out along party lines, and Republicans are going to behave in an utterly predictable manner.

The horse is out of the barn. In a world that even remotely conformed to my sense of how it ought to be, Trump would have stuck with brand-hustling, reality TV and real estate development and never dipped his toe into the political world. Republicans would have nominated a principled three-pillar conservative in 2016, someone articulate and fierce in his or her fealty to his or her values, capable of exposing Hillary Clinton for the power-mad empty suit that she was. We’d then have all the great policy moves we’ve had with Trump - judicial appointments, deregulation, the tax cut, pulling out of the Paris climate accord and the JCPOA, moving the embassy in Israel to Jerusalem - without any of the embarrassment and incoherence. But that didn’t happen. Events took a different turn and we’re saddled with our present set of circumstances.

So there’s something quixotic about what CT editor Mark Galli is demanding. It ought to happen, but it’s not going to.

What his piece has done, though, is expose yet another set of fissures in our already brittle society. We already had the basic right-left dichotomy. That’s been going on for decades. Then came the Trump phenomenon, which has led to a battle for the mandate to define conservatism. (I’m objectively laying out a timeline here; my own position is that Trumpism is a distinctive phenomenon. It can’t be conservatism; its leader is not a conservative.) There has arisen an entire spectrum on the right that opposes Trump, ranging from those who aren’t even conservative anymore, like Jennifer Rubin and Max Boot, on the one end, to the Principles First movement and publications such as The Dispatch and The Bulwark on the other. As this battle has been raging, the question of why a clear majority of evangelical Christians have cast their lot with Trump has persisted. Most of the explanation coming from the Trumpist evangelical camp has centered around some variation of the “God has used deeply flawed people throughout history to carry out his plan; consider King David.” (In the King David example, at least, a big difference between Trump and the divinely-appointed-but-deeply-flawed person being put forth is that the latter came to a point of contrition and a sincere desire to put worldly ways behind him and glorify Him who did the appointing.) Now the inevitable split among evangelicals is unavoidably on our plate.

Franklin Graham, of course, has to be discussed at this point, given that his father founded Christianity Today, and the younger Graham invoked him in response to Galli’s piece, saying Billy voted for Trump in 2016. I’m aware that lots of people who live into their late 90s are lucid and thinking rigorously until their passing, but I’d like to see more than this one source - Franklin, whose plunge into Trumpism is a mystery that will be the subject of ongoing examination - as some kind of proof that Billy Graham had signed on wholeheartedly.

Then there is the Very Stable Genius himself, whose tweet in response to the editorial bore his signature transactional tone. I’ve done more for religion than anybody! He also characterized CT has having gone far left, something that Galli refuted in a subsequent Atlantic interview.

Other opinion outlets that have taken the stance that the editorial was off-base have largely centered on the question of whether an impeachable offense has been committed. As I state above, my position is that one has, but if one grants that reasonable people can come to different conclusions about that specific point, the overall picture of who Donald Trump is as a person, which the editorial touches on, is now something that has to be seriously discussed within the evangelical community.

There’s also the matter of Galli, early on in the piece, granting that Democrats have been rabid in their zeal to get Trump removed from office since he was sworn in on the capital steps in January 2017. Galli also provides the justifiable acknowledgement of the good policy moves. It’s near the end where he concludes that these mitigating factors are not enough to outweigh the ample compilation of evidence of his unfitness.

While I don’t harbor any illusions about how the next year is going to unfold politically, I am heartened by where I see the onus lying regarding whether Trump deserves Christian support. It seems to me that it’s up to Trumpists to make the convincing case that a guy who’s petty and vindictive, who demands personal loyalty like some kind of Cosa Nostra don, and knows no other way of responding to slights than to engage in schoolyard taunting, who, while at a golf tournament in Lake Tahoe while his third wife was home with their newborn son, embarked on affairs with the pornographic movie actress Stormy Daniels and former Playboy Playmate of the Year Karen McDougal, who floated the most outrageous conspiracy theory about Ted Cruz’s father in a late-campaign Hail Mary move, and who, just the other night, cracked wise that perhaps Debbie Dingell’s late husband was in hell can be an agent for the ushering in of the kind of society evangelicals, and, more broadly, conservatives want to see.

It doesn’t matter who wants to see him impeached. That’s not going to happen. What can happen over the course of the next year and beyond, though, is a loud and healthy conversation about whether it is good or bad that we allowed ourselves to come to this juncture.

There will be some more good judicial appointments. There will also be a further erosion of dignity, clarity and grace in post-American society.

Is that a good enough future for you?