Things have gotten fairly contentious inside the conservative evangelical split around Donald Trump’s candidacy, as evidenced yesterday by the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, a Trump supporter, saying that evangelicals who are criticizing him for supporting Trump but who didn’t get involved in the GOP primaries are being “unbiblical.”
Perkins spoke yesterday on his “Washington Watch” radio program with Wayne Grudem, a theologian who revoked his support for Trump after the emergence of a recording of the GOP nominee boasting about sexual assault but who eventually changed his mind again to say he would be voting for Trump’s “policies.”
“Dr. Grudem,” Perkins said, “Christians now, and there’s a lot of them, there’s a number of them that are saying, ‘You know what, we just can’t vote for these two candidates, they’re reprehensible, we can’t do it.’ But in large part I believe this is a problem of our own making because too many Christians have not been involved in this arena of our world, being involved in supporting candidates, being candidates and advocating for candidates like you did in the primary, like I did. And we come down to a situation where we’re faced with an undesirable situation in large part because of our own making. We have to be more involved.”
“How many of the people who say ‘I can’t vote for Trump’ really gave their time and their money, their name and reputation to another candidate who could have stopped Trump in the primaries?” Grudem responded. “Because when decisions could have been made, that’s where the change could have been made, and that’s where people failed.”
“And in my view,” Perkins added, “those folks that sat on the sideline, not wanting to damage their reputation in terms of getting involved in the political process or offending some of their supporters or donors and they just stayed out, and now they can be critical of everybody in the process, I just find that, quite frankly, I find it unbiblical.”
