The Washington Captivity Of The Church

From National Review, and George Weigel is right:

Which is all the more reason to lament that its opening has coincided with a display of gross Biblical ignorance — and, if I may say, hypocrisy — by putatively Bible-reverencing people supporting the egregious Roy Moore, Republican candidate for a U.S. Senate seat from Alabama.

Judge Moore has made a career of his defense of the Ten Commandments. Yet his most perfervid partisans seem to imagine it the work of Satan to suggest that his relationship to at least two of the ten (the ones dealing with chastity and financial probity) seems, to put it gently, somewhat strained.

Then there are those Evangelical leaders who, having given Donald Trump a moral get-out-of-jail-free card during the 2016 campaign, have been vocally supportive of Judge Moore in recent weeks. Which does make one wonder how Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr. read Matthew 18:6 on the abuse of the young, and what Jesus says about the fate of those who cause scandal to the innocent.

And then there are those of Roy Moore’s Evangelical defenders who declare their resentment at being criticized by “outsiders.” But surely not every critic of Judge Moore — and not only of his recently alleged behavior with teenagers, but his previous shenanigans from the bench and his dodgy financial relationship to the Montgomery-based Foundation for the Moral Law – is a card-carrying, dues-paying member of the devil’s camp. And in any event, has Jesus’s instruction on fraternal correction in Matthew 18:15–17 been amended,so that such admonitions are subject to state boundaries?

One hates to say it, but the Graham/Falwell bromance with Donald Trump, and now with Roy Moore, has done a far better job of reinforcing every Elmer Gantry stereotype about Evangelicals in the MSM and the high culture than the New Atheists could have managed doing overtime shifts at CNN. [HT: JS]

What concerns me is that major voices of evangelicalism are not calling this stuff out often enough and loud enough. A sign of the Washington captivity of the (evangelical) church.

If the gospel is about king Jesus, then the gospel is not about Washington DC.