"I don't intend to overstate. I think we understate the case, because I think Donald Trump is the greatest threat to the world that we've seen in our lifetime. He is a menace. I believe he's against everything Jesus Christ teaches. I believe he is cruel. I believe he is evil. I believe he is Satan in disguise and I I'm not overstating that." --Mark Wingfield, Baptist News Global Executive Director in an interview on the podcast "Stuck in the Middle With You."
The word "apostasy" comes from the Greek root word apostasia, which basically means to forsake or desert the faith that one formerly held. It's a term that gets a lot of use within the boundaries of the various forms of Christianity that have been shaped by history. In the United States, where Christianity developed in an atmosphere of complete religious liberty, with no political power dictating doctrine, theology or practice, the term has more often gained popular use when one group of Christians, who conclude that they are God's chosen people because of their doctrinal purity, and their adherence to a set of specific practices, or "commandments," criticize another group of Christians whose doctrine, theology and practice differs from their own.
Looking at what has happened to the conservative, Evangelicals who have fallen victim to the idolatry and apostasy of Trumpism, there's not even a need to argue that their version of the Christian faith isn't an authentic or accurate one. Their support for Trump is a denial of their own version of Christianity and their own interpretation of the Bible. Wingfield told the podcast interviewer, Bejamin Cole, "unwittingly supporting the antichrist."
Unwittingly? Trump's statements, beliefs, lack of ethical behavior and worldly, licentious immorality are defiant in their abject denial of anything resembling the Christian faith. Every public act of his has been an explicit and deliberate violation of every characteristic of the Christian gospel Jesus laid down in the Sermon on the Mount, found in Matthew 5, 6 and 7, from his pathological lies and denial of truth, to his driven, wicked desire for vengeance against those not loyal to him, to his adulterous affairs and divorces so that he could marry the "other women," with whom he was having an affair, except Stormy Daniels, who he bribed to cover it up, because he couldn't afford the bad publicity in a run for the presidency. His open denial of having done anything for which he requires God's forgiveness is a blatant refusal to accept Christian conversion, and a defiant act toward both God and the Evangelical leadership who serve as his willing sycophants. And their support for him makes them apostates.
So when some conservative, Evangelical like Gary Bauer, of the James Dobson Family Foundation, comes along and praises Trump without mentioning any Christian value or virtue, because those are not observable in Trump, he is telling us, very clearly, that he is apostate. He, along with most other white, conservative, Evangelicals in the United States who overlook Trump's open denial of the Christian conversion experience, and his immoral, licentious, anti-Christian lifestyle, have abandoned the Christian gospel in favor of the gospel of Trump.
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There's been nothing particularly "Christian" that would characterize anything having to do with Trump's second term, except the Christian nationalist themes that come with Project 2025, but those are not found anywhere in the Christian gospel, though they prompted a complaint from James Dobson Family Institute officer Gary Bauer that the left was characterizing and criticizing them as "Christian nationalists." Bauer made the argument from absence of evidence, claiming the "other side," meaning the Biden Administration, was made up of "radical secularists, socialists and globalists," and that it promoted "tyrannical, decadent, perverse and ungodly" policies while ignoring the Constitution and "attempting to demonize Christians who love Jesus and America, calling us 'Christian nationalists.'"
Prove those claims, Mr. Bauer. And if the "Christian Nationalist" label is offensive, then don't adopt a Christian Nationalist political agenda like Project 2025.
In fact, groups like the James Dobson Family Institute, the Family Research Council and Dobson's former ministry, Focus on the Family, are full-blown endorsees of Christian Nationalism. The pseudo-Christianity that they preach rests on an intellectual assent to a specific set of doctrines, mostly theological commandments, that developed as the practice of the fundamentalist movements of the late 19th century, and the Pentecostalism of the early 20th, which abandoned Christian faith as a lifestyle generated by the spiritual transformation of a Christian conversion experience, visible in the values and virtues of the gospel, found in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, and in other places in the gospel accounts of the New Testament.
In fact, Family Research Council's Jerry Boylan, a retired lieutenant general, advocates genocide in Gaza as a means of resolving Israel's "Palestinian problem." He has determined that the Palestinians have been "predestined" to be condemned, because of their refusal to acknowledge the existence of God, and to accept Christian faith and practice. And because this has been determined by the will of God, they cannot be redeemed. This is diametrically and fundamentally opposite the foundational principle of the Christian gospel, the sanctity of all human life created in the image of God. Such a belief is defined by the Apostle John, in two of his church epistles, written in the latter half of the first century, using the term "antichrist."
It's pretty clear, by observation, that there is nothing Trump or his followers support that resembles biblical Christianity, and all of it, in its self-declaring defiance, can be defined as "antichrist." Most conservative Evangelicals, particularly those of the Pentecostal/Charismatic persuasion, get caught up in confusing and speculative "end times prophecy" scenarios, seeing "antichrist" as some historical figure or world ruler. I don't believe any of that, but the term "antichrist" does have a clear meaning in defining philosophy, religion and actions that are the opposite of the Christian gospel taught and lived out by the example of Jesus. And I think the political philosophy and principle, if you can call it that, of Trump's politics, including making right wing political extremism into Christian theology and doctrine, is most definitely antichrist.
Neither the "healthy masculinity" that they credit to Trump, which is nothing more than psychotic misogyny, or the "manifest destiny reborn," provide any evidence of a connection between Trump and biblical, authentic Christian faith and practice. And those conservative, Evangelical leaders, following the path of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson by leading their followers down the same path, are causing the apostasy of conservative, Evangelicalism in the United States.
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