Starting in July last year, I have now blogged about 25 posts against Donald Trump for president. As I stated in one of those posts, in all my fifty plus years as an American voter, I have never felt strongly against any Republican or Democratic nominee for U.S. president until this one. Moreover, I think Christians should be careful about expressing their political views, especially when they meet together as a church. I have been in an extremely political church, and I don’t like it. Jesus wasn’t very political; he was in the business of saving souls and discipling them, and that’s where the church should be focusing its energies.
But what about having a president who you fear could really take the country down morally and relationally with other nations to the point from which the nation may never recover. That’s the way I feel about Donald Trump being our president. But Wayne Grudem didn’t think so.
I know Dr. Wayne Grudem. He is a professor at Phoenix Seminary in Phoenix, Arizona. We both live in the metro-Phoenix area. We’ve gone to the same church for many years. I often study in the seminary library. It has Dr. Grudem’s 1100-page Systematic Theology. Such books have a significant effect on how Christians believe. This book has been the #1 bestselling systematic theology book in the U.S. for twenty years or more. Thus, Dr. Wayne Grudem has significant influence on how American Christians think, at least in the Evangelical and Pentecostal communities.
On August 2nd this year, I posted, “Professor Wayne Grudem Endorses Donald Trump for U.S. President.” In this piece I criticized him for doing so. Dr. Grudem actually said quite a bit in this public endorsement.
Yesterday, Wayne Grudem publicly withdrew his endorsement of Donald Trump for president. But it only happened because The Washington Post released the audio video yesterday in which Trump speaks with vulgar language about his philandering. As I posted yesterday, that should not have come as a surprise about Trump’s moral character. It has been well documented especially by the New York Times, the most knowledgeable newspaper in the land about Donald Trump since he has been all of his life, and still is, a New York City resident.
Grudem is forthcoming in this statement, saying, “Some may criticize me for not discovering this material earlier, and I think they are right. I did not take the time to investigate earlier allegations in detail, and I now wish I had done so. If I had read or heard some of these materials earlier, I would not have written as positively as I did about Donald Trump.”
That is what is wrong with a lot of these evangelical leaders who have endorsed Donald Trump for president. They have done so because his political platform has certain positions on social issues with which they agree and that differ from those of Hilary Clinton’s platform, such as pro-life vs. pro-choice. So, they ignore good investigative journalism on who Trump is and what he has done. It doesn’t matter to them who the man is, and that has disgusting to me about these evangelicals. But as of the video release yesterday, that is now biting them in the you-know-where.
Then there is the issue of lying. Some Trump’s supporters think Hilary Clinton is a bigger liar than The Donald is, and that’s how he gets away with constantly calling her “crooked Hilary.” Baloney! As I have been blogging since my first post in July last year about this election, Donald Trump is the biggest liar of them all. Just look at the fact checkers. That in itself is one of the statistics Wayne Grudem should have considered.
What surprises me is that Dr. Grudem admits, “I did not take the time to investigate earlier allegations in detail, and now I wish I had done so.” At least he admits this. But due to Grudem’s influence, he never should have endorsed Trump without looking into the matter deeply. This was an irresponsibility on his part. It was a big deal in the academic evangelical community for Grudem to make such a firm Trump endorsement, and believe me, it was very firm. Just read it in the above link.
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