Michael Brown, a North Carolina-based pastor and anti-LGBT activist, is among the huge number of Religious Right figures who have been backing Ted Cruz for the presidency. Brown, author of “Revolution! The Call to Holy War,” was quick out of the gate with his reaction to Cruz suspending his campaign, which all but assured Donald Trump’s Republican nomination.
Trump’s victory, Brown says, may be a sign of “divine judgment on America.” He declares Trump “a National Enquirer candidate for a Jerry Springer generation,” bemoaning the “generation raised on a steady diet of amoral and immoral reality TV.”
Brown acknowledges that some of his fellow evangelicals are in Trump’s corner:
Of course, there are fine people who also believe in Trump’s candidacy, people of conscience, spiritual people, patriotic people. I certainly do not condemn all of their judgments, nor is it my place to do so.
I have also listened carefully to the prognosticators who have predicted for months that Trump would be our next president — some even claimed prophetic inspiration for these predictions — and that he would be a tool in God’s hand to destroy the corrupt political establishment and do good to our nation.
I fervently hope that these prophecies will prove true and that I will have to eat every word I have written — and I am writing.
I have no desire to be right; I do have an intense desire to see America blessed; and I would far rather say, “I was so wrong about Donald Trump,” than say, “I told you so!”
But, says Brown, “it appears today in America that God has given us over to delusion, a phenomenon mentioned several times in the Bible when God takes away a people’s moral and spiritual sensibilities as a judgment on their sin. In other words, because people reject Him and His standards, He says, ‘Go ahead then. Have at it,’ further pushing us into our folly.”
After ranting about transgender people’s use of bathrooms, Brown asks, “how else do we explain this unless we have been given over to a spirit of delusion?”
I see the Trump candidacy in the same way. Tens of millions of Americans are not put off by his blatant, well-documented lying. Tens of millions of Americans are not put off by his consistent practice of vile character assassination for the purpose of political gain. Tens of millions of Americans are not put off by his vulgarity and profanity. Tens of millions of Americans are not put off by his ignorance of critical issues and his complete flip-flopping on major positions.
And among these tens of millions of Americans is a significant percentage of professing evangelical Christians, despite Trump saying he has never asked God for forgiveness, despite his failure to renounce his previous adulteries or to acknowledge the wrongness of making money off casinos and strip clubs, despite his taking offense at the distribution of the near nude photo of his wife Melania — not because he thought it was a bad picture but because it was made out to be bad.
And evangelicals continue to flock to him.
At other times in America’s history, Brown says, Trump’s negatives would have killed his campaign.
Not today.
Instead, we find ourselves with the increasingly likely possibility that either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton will be our next president, and to me, there is only one satisfactory explanation for this: God is giving us what we deserve and handing us over to judgment.
All the more, then, should we be on our faces, repenting of our own sins. All the more, then, should we be asking ourselves, “How much is Donald Trump a reflection of each one of us?” All the more, then, should we who profess to know the Lord be asking Him, “How have we failed as Your people? How have we failed in our calling to be salt and light? How did things sink so low on our watch?”
All the more, then, should we be praying for Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton.
Barring merciful divine intervention in their lives, America is on the verge of a great and fearful shaking.
