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In the late 1990s, when I was features editor of The Register-Guard, one of my reporters wanted to write about a local Christian organization. I was surprised; this idea seemed out of the wheelhouse for this edgy young writer.
She was my polar opposite: young, female and well-pierced, a Cyndi Lauper (“Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”) to my Fred MacMurray (“Chip, can you help Uncle Charlie take out the garbage?”)
Goodness, I was an elder in my church.
I told her to go for it. When the story was done, I found it fair, insightful and fun. But the morning after it ran, an administrator from the Christian organization called, livid.
“I should have known that’s the kind of junk we’d get from the liberal media,” he said. “Your reporter made us look like a bunch of uneducated idiots.”
I took a breath, then remembered an interaction I’d had the previous morning.
“It’s interesting you say that,” I told him, “because at church yesterday one of your people” — and I named someone who worked with him — “told me he thought it was great.”
Silence. Then: “You go to church? I’m sorry, Bob. I didn’t realize you were, uh, one of us.”
Not long after that, I was at the Eugene Public Library when I heard a little girl softly singing while she stood next to her book-browsing mother. It was annoying. I mentally shook my head; this was a library — a formerly quiet library. She was, I noted, dressed much like her Mom — Birkenstocks, peasant dress, tights. I pigeonholed her, as if scanning her with a bar-code device whose digital readout said: “Earth Muffin … Hippie in Training … Lefty.”
As I moved closer toward her in search of a book, the singing continued. I wanted to say: “Freedom is a beautiful thing, mom, but this is a library. Perhaps this would be a great time to teach your daughter a lesson about rules and respect for others.”
Closer. But Mom didn’t seem to notice, lost in her book search, too. Closer still — so close, in fact, that for the first time I heard the song the little girl was singing.
“Jesus loves me, this I know / For the Bible tells me so / Little ones, to him belong / They are weak but He is strong.”
Oh, my gosh. I hadn’t realized she was one of us.
My obvious hypocrisy — my narrow-mindedness — was that I’d been offended when an administrator from a Christian organization stereotyped me as part of the “liberal media” — and treated me shabbily because of it. However, I had no compunction doing the same thing with the little girl. I only accorded her respect when her song validated her as a member of the tribe. My tribe.
Sometimes, we Christians — people not afraid of claiming we serve a big God — can think and act so very small. We can be so fearful of any person, situation or idea that might challenge our team’s narrative. So intent on winning that we twist our faith into political leverage for “our side” at the expense of concern for others, especially others not like us.
And truth be known, I was quietly complicit with that approach for a long time.
Now, in the wake of the death of Renee Good, shot by a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, and the deeper divide of tribalism that so many, including evangelicals, contribute to, I’m compelled to tell my story. Because I represent a demographic lost in the noise: conservative Christians opposed to an evangelical culture that has pledged undying loyalty to Donald Trump.
Allow me to explain. I embraced the Christian faith as a teenager, nurtured by an organization, Young Life, that nourished our fledgling faith with songs such as, “They’ll Know We Are Christians By Our Love.”
I grew up. Served as an elder in an evangelical church for more than a decade. Wrote a handful of Christian books. Was a guest on Pat Robertson’s “The 700 Club.” Led men’s retreats across the country. Keynoted what was then The Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast in Eugene.
I never was the Fox News-watching, Rush Limbaugh-listening guy, but I went with the flow. I wasn’t political. But I quietly assumed that wherever the motorcycle of faith ventured, the sidecar of “far right” had to come along.
Then Trump came down the golden escalator. In July 2016, shortly before the Republican National Convention, an out-of-state friend and evangelical pastor told a group of us, “We aren’t voting for a ‘pastor-in-chief’ but a ‘commander-in-chief.’” The inference was that Trump’s “rough edges” — cheating on his wife, bullying, lying, etc. — shouldn’t preclude us from supporting him for president. (Not, of course, that in the 1990s we evangelicals cut such slack to President Bill Clinton, whose extramarital sexual exploits were blood to the Limbaugh sharks.)
While most of the rest of my fellow evangelicals happily hopped on the Trump bus — a few slunk on only grudgingly, seeing him as the lesser of two evils — I resisted. I’d read up on him. I listened to what he was saying. I watched how he treated people. To me, he seemed like the living embodiment of 2 Timothy 3:2-5, which warns us of people who are “lovers of money, boastful, proud, ungrateful, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control [and] brutal.” We should, the verse says, “have nothing to do with such people.”
We trusted a God of grace; Trump was a man of greed. We trusted a God of love; Trump routinely scorned, mocked and belittled others. We trusted a God of truth; Trump lied without compunction.
But I had underestimated evangelicals’ fear, anger and — and at least among some — unabashed hate for the left, fueled by daily encouragement from Trump, Limbaugh, Fox’s Sean Hannity and others.
Not that I considered this a binary proposition. Resistance to Thing One doesn’t necessarily mean fully embracing Thing Two; it just means refusing to support Thing One. That was me. I hadn’t suddenly lurched hard to the left. Instead, through prayer and reading, I’d determined that my allegiance needed to transcend both the Republican and Democratic parties, to Jesus alone.
For me, this was deeper than a vote. It was, I realize in hindsight, quiet personal repentance.
Because, until now, I’d missed what was actually happening: the far right was no longer sitting in the motorcycle’s sidecar. It was driving the hog, revving the engine as if to demand respect. We, as Christians, were now just along for the ride.
In 1981, when Ronald Reagan became president, America’s most iconic evangelical, Billy Graham, said: “It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.”
I’d come to believe what he’d learned: politics plus religion always equals politics.
But many of my fellow evangelicals weren’t listening — including Billy’s son, Franklin. He gave Trump pass after pass, regardless of how low the man set the moral limbo bar. Eight in 10 evangelicals voted for Trump, powering his 2016 presidential win. I wrote-in Trump critic Evan McMullin, a conservative from Utah.
Three years later, I pitched to my literary agent, who represents mainly Christian authors, a book about this undying loyalty among evangelicals for a man whose actions and words routinely defy the very Jesus we as Christians ostensibly worship.
He turned me down. I would be a newspaper guy — Trump, while crossing his fingers for Fox News, had called the media the “enemy of the people” — writing to evangelicals, most of whom believed wholeheartedly in the man. Bad combo.
So, in December 2021, after 18 months of research and writing, I self-published “Cross Purposes: One Believer’s Struggle to Reconcile the Peace of Christ with the Rage of the Far Right.” I knew I would be a voice in the wilderness but, as Martin Luther King Jr. said, “There comes a time when silence is betrayal.”
In the book, I encouraged my fellow Christians to stop grading on a curve — “Well, the Democrats did this and that” — and start prioritizing Scripture, not politics; Jesus, not MAGA; conscience, not control. Many wanted to make this a simple right-left, good-vs.-evil issue.
But in trying to slay the dragon — the “demonic left” as some called it — were evangelicals becoming the dragon? In defense of Trump, they shamed popular Bible teacher Beth Moore, whose events were canceled in droves by churches after she refused, unlike Franklin Graham and others, to write off Trump’s “grab-’em-by-the-pussy” comments as so much locker room talk. (Moore had been sexually abused, not that that refrained a handful of bigwig pastors from pressuring her to recant her remarks.)
One way to test whether a movement is truly “of God” — and Trump was gift-wrapped as such from the night of the 2016 Republican National Convention — is to ask the question: Who, in the end, benefits? Is it the “least of these,” those whom Jesus prioritized, or the rich, whose faith, Jesus warned, could be hindered by their egos, arrogance and self-sufficiency?
Trump unabashedly chose the rich who succeed, the soldiers who aren’t captured, the winners who brashly do whatever it takes to prevail. Not the poor, not the disenfranchised, not the quiet people of integrity who play by the rules.
“Cross Purposes,” which was aimed at my fellow evangelicals, sold like sunblock in Ketchikan. It became the elephant in many a room I entered. Some of my closest friends refused to read it. I was, I’d heard through the rumor mill, “woke.”
I appreciated an honest conversation with a Bushnell University administrator who invited me to lunch for a thoughtful discussion of the book. But of the two-dozen local evangelical pastors to whom I sent copies, only a couple even acknowledged receiving it. I used to occasionally be invited to speak at evangelical churches. That trickle of water virtually stopped.
On the rare occasion when I’d talk with evangelicals who disagreed with me, invariably they framed the conversation with political, not spiritual, points. “But look what Biden did!” Or “Trump fights for us!” I argued that God was bigger than politics and, according to Scripture, wouldn’t abandon us regardless of who was in power. In fact, Jesus eschewed power; we’re called to be “sojourners and exiles.”
Trump’s “pro-life” and “conservative Supreme Court justices” stances became his get-out-of-jail-free card for evangelicals who might not have approved of his character but liked his policies.
I suggested evangelical pastors routinely preach against such “end-justifies-the-means” thinking. If Trump’s lying and bullying could be written off as just “Trump being Trump,” why shouldn’t pastors give such passes to parishioners in their congregations? “You cheated on your wife, Frank, but that’s just you being you, right? Hey, you’re fine. Move on.”
Why the hypocritical double standard? Because, of course, Trump held the keys to power. He got evangelicals a seat at the table, and policies they wanted. He enabled countless pastors who’d been bullied on the playground to be the bully — because he was now the playground monitor.
Herein lies the galling irony. My resistance to MAGA wasn’t based on me having been kidnapped by “unseemly liberals” and brainwashed. It was based on what I’d been taught for half a century by the evangelical church itself: that as Christians we should live out, defend and promote loving one another, telling the truth and showing grace, the stuff of Scripture.
And yet when, in “Cross Purposes,” I said as much, the response from some evangelicals was a subtle shunning.
For lots of reasons, my wife and I left our church, the two of us winding up in a new church that now feels like home.
Meanwhile, evangelicals only grew more loyal to Trump. In 2020, when he denied the results of an election that more than 60 courts — and the attorney general he appointed — deemed fair, most evangelicals agreed with Trump that it was “stolen.” After an attack on the Capitol a few weeks later as Trump thumb-punched an iPhone while Vice President Mike Pence and lawmakers ran for their lives in legislative chambers, most evangelicals agreed with Trump that the event was much ado about nothing.
But in February 2024, when a series of commercials during the Super Bowl encouraged Christians to love others not like us — even our enemies — many evangelical pastors exploded online in rage.
And on the day after Trump’s inauguration in 2025, when a Methodist bishop encouraged him to “have mercy” on, in essence, the “least of these,” Trump called her “nasty” and “ungracious.”
What’s wrong with this picture?
“When you worship power, compassion and mercy will look like sins,” writes Benjamin Cremer, a Wesleyan pastor from Idaho. “When you worship power, cruelty towards your ‘enemies’ will look like righteousness and truthfulness.”
To assure loyalty from their flock, strongmen must constantly convince their followers to hate those with whom they disagree, which flies in the face of Jesus’ call to “love thy enemy.”
Which is why Renee Good, 37, killed by an ICE officer in Minneapolis Jan. 7, had to immediately be depicted as the enemy. The courts will ultimately rule on whether ICE was justified in shooting the young mother. But Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem immediately blamed Good for her own death.
Strongmen must keep their followers afraid and emotionally whipped up, lest the flock see the authoritarian leaders for who they really are: small, cowardly people hiding behind the shield of power. Political Wizards of Oz.
This was a case of “domestic terrorism,” said Noem.
Trump said Good, whose last words to the ICE officer were, “It’s fine, dude; I’m not mad at you,” “violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE officer.” Did video footage really show that or was the president lying?
On Facebook, an evangelical I know posted his former pastor’s Trump-affirming views of the shooting; all but one of the 22 commenters agreed, some with teasing from an old Jim Croce song: “You don’t spit into the wind, you don’t tug on Superman’s cape …”
This from an ostensibly Christian audience whose knee-jerk reaction seemed less like the “pro-life” stance of campaign days than like the “clanging cymbal” of 1 Corinthians 13. (“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.”)
Which is why Trump, a man seemingly devoid of empathy, keeps lying: Because many evangelicals ignore, excuse or encourage his lies and bullying with the consistency of an auto-reply message. Because many evangelicals seem more passionate about protecting political values than Jesus’ values.
“The truth will set you free,” John 8:32 says, but it’s apparently expendable when political power is on the line.
Herein lies another profound irony: We may not have been voting for a “pastor-in-chief,” as my pastor friend suggested in 2016, but many evangelicals treat Trump as exactly that, even if they’d be loath to admit it. Republican strategist and Trump loyalist Ralph Reed called Trump “the pied piper” of evangelicals. How can you disagree? Where is the evidence? Who are the inner-circle evangelicals who have mustered the courage to say the emperor wears no clothes?
Ten years ago, this Friday, while campaigning for the 2016 presidential bid, Trump said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”
Say what you will about the man, he is prophetic. His cold-hearted reaction to the shooting of Good represents a reasonable facsimile to his 2016 boast. There’s little to suggest he lost any evangelical support by suggesting Good, technically, deserved to die.
Which raises the question: Is there anything the man could do or say — anything at all — that would cause my fellow conservative Christians to turn away from him? To disavow him? To take up their crosses and walk away from this idolatrous tryst? Or is their loyalty unconditional?
On Jan. 9, Trump said the only thing restraining his exertion of global power is “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
To me, that sounds like the type of man whom every preacher I’ve sat beneath warned against, the I’m-bigger-than-God guy.
To me, that looks like another step down a darkening staircase to a pitch-black cellar — unless evangelicals can muster the courage to reprioritize truth over tribe.
To me, that feels exactly the opposite of how a young, long-haired piano player at Yachats First Presbyterian Church, after I’d shared about politics and faith, made me feel when he closed the service I’d spoke at by spontaneously playing “They’ll Know We Are Christian By Our Love,” which I’d mentioned in my remarks.
I grew misty-eyed at the pulpit. In some ways, it’s been a lonely decade for me, living with a sense that I’m tainted because I’m a Christian who won’t fly the MAGA flag. But, when it comes to the tribe, I’m happy to no longer be “one of us.” A Jesus follower? Yes, now more than ever, even if the girl-in-the-library incident, and others like it, remind me that I am, and always will be, a flawed follower. But sitting in the sidecar of a MAGA-driven motorcycle that routinely shames God? No thank you.
As the French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre said: “The worst thing about being lied to is knowing you are not worth the truth.”