I first met Donald Trump when he was a guest at Pat Robertson’s eightieth birthday party in March 2010. Trump had been working the back rooms of evangelical politics for a year, and at Pat’s banquet he seized the moment to pompously perform, even audition, for a ballroom full of evangelical leaders. I really couldn’t make sense of Trump’s being there, except that he and Pat were both members of the billionaires’ club. The New York real estate magnate touted his Christian background and professed his love for his childhood pastor, the celebrity cleric Norman Vincent Peale, who wrote the 1952 motivational manual Power of Positive Thinking. (Trump clearly didn’t know evangelicals had long rejected Peale as an apostate.) On a large screen, the reality show star displayed a photo of his teenage self with his church confirmation class. Another blunder: evangelicals don’t do “confirmation.” Finally, he held up a Bible with his name embossed on the cover, telling his audience his mother gave it to him and he had cherished it all his life. None of the pages appeared to be dog-eared, the sure sign of an avid Bible reader. Except for the news that Trump had been trounced in a straw poll the next year at CPAC, the annual conservative confab, he remained largely unnoticed at my end of the conservative Christian universe. He was, at best, a barker in a political sideshow. No one I knew took him seriously—most certainly not as any kind of religious man.
After The Armor of Light was released in April 2015, I spent an enormous amount of my time promoting it and talking about guns in the evangelical community. It had become a new crusade for me, but not one that replaced all my other work with Faith and Action, which continued unabated. I still supervised the training and deployment of short-term missionaries to work among top elected and appointed officials; I manned the back room at the National Prayer Breakfast; I presided at the opening of the National Bible Reading Marathon; I led prayers in front of the Supreme Court building on the National Day of Prayer; and I always read the gospel account of Christmas during our Live Nativity, when we paraded exotic animals and amateur actors in period costume between the Capitol and the Supreme Court to stage a reenactment of Jesus’ birth at Bethlehem.
After eight years of Obama, my people were pining for a Republican presidential victory in the 2016 election. The field was crowded in the early months, and Jeb Bush was my choice to lead our country. I had met him a few times and found him very different from his brother. Meeting behind closed doors, I was impressed with what I read as his humble disposition, his candid critique of his own brother’s presidency, and his facility in Spanish. I knew he had lived through his daughter’s opioid addiction and recovery, and it seemed to both temper him and leave him sensitive to the suffering of others. Of course, like most Americans, I could never have imagined what would finally happen in the primaries.
The playboy and reality TV star who would become the Republican Party’s 2016 nominee for president posed a terrible dilemma for me. I did not want Hillary Clinton to be president. I had too many issues with her and her party. At the same time, I thought Donald Trump appealed to the very worst impulses within the conservative and Christian worlds. If Hillary was a throwback to an old liberal statism that had not advanced much in terms of its ethical moorings, Trump represented a new brand of amorality and nativism that was just as threatening—perhaps more so. Trump’s extravagant promises to evangelicals did nothing to assuage my concerns. I was aware of many leading Christian figures who, like me, vowed never to vote for Trump. Yet by the summer of 2016, you were either on the Trump train or you were a traitor. The logic was that we needed to elect a Republican at any cost, and my fellow evangelicals added a special urgency to this logic. I took the coward’s way out of the dilemma and left the Republican Party.
For more than thirty years, people like me had prayed, worked, and repeatedly condemned nearly everything Donald Trump represented. The fact that, for most evangelicals, he now posed no problem at all was evidence of a crisis. In my estimation the Trump phenomenon foreshadowed not only the downfall of the old guard of American evangelicalism but perhaps the collapse of it altogether. It was hardly surprising that in poll after poll, interview after interview, many respondents would describe our support of Trump as unprincipled and cynical. We were seen as so craven, we were willing to pander to a demagogue in order to reclaim lost political clout.
Back in the Operation Rescue days, my colleagues and I considered the profligate Trump to be a one-man promotional operation for a hedonistic New York culture that needed abortion on demand as a safety net for their reckless lifestyles. And his relentless self-congratulation, his gilded airplanes, and his history as a casino mogul were the antithesis of not just middle-American values but of Christian virtues. In June of 2015, in an interview with CNN, Trump admitted it had never occurred to him to ask for God’s forgiveness. When I heard that, I literally gasped. This was a living example of the man Jesus spoke of “who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell, and great was the fall of it.”
Many political personalities in my community privately expressed to me their serious reservations about Trump but then publicly supported him. No one caused me more distress than Paul Ryan. I had come to know Paul fairly well since we first met some twenty years earlier when he was a young staffer for Kansas senator Sam Brownback, whom I would go on to befriend, attending many prayer gatherings and Bible studies at the senator’s office. I saw Paul often over the next sixteen years he spent in the Congress, and I traveled with the Romney campaign when he was the vice presidential candidate.
The last time I had talked at length with Paul was in September 2015 when we sat next to each other at Mass during Pope Francis’s visit to Washington. He expressed admiration for the new pope, especially Francis’s emphasis on the gospel as what theologians and other religious scholars refer to as “God’s encounter with the other”—if we are to be like the Son of God, we needed to reach out to those who are different from us. “He’ll be good for the church—and for everybody,” I remember Paul saying of the pontiff. We spoke about one of Paul’s favorite subjects, moral theology. Sometimes I would bump into him in the dining room at the Capitol Hill Republican Club and he would have a priest or a theology professor with him. As we sat together at the Mass, I had a hopeful view of his possible rise to Speaker of the House, but the glow didn’t last long. Once in office, Paul refused to take on the gun lobby. Then I watched his vacillating support of Trump give way into a generally positive and mildly-critical-when-necessary mode. Finally, Paul endorsed Trump. It was dispiriting to say the least.
Party loyalty, while distressing, was predictable, but what about the religious community? Trump’s public comments about Christianity, religion, and even Holy Communion indicated he was utterly nonreligious, totally unfamiliar with the most rudimentary knowledge of the Bible, much less able to quote a chapter or a verse. Yet many of the people with whom I had served over the years—Jim Dobson, Tony Perkins, Gary Bauer, and others—provided Trump with evangelical affirmation. Dobson went so far as to describe him as a newly born-again “baby Christian.” Presenting a consistent position to the world was essential for these leaders: they were not going to break with the likes of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who reminded us repeatedly of the importance of a Trump victory to secure a conservative Supreme Court appointment. Rationalizing the choice became an important part of their role in the campaign.
My silence about Trump—worse, my criticism of him—would be noted and likely punished with ostracism, public censure, and more loss of financial and political support. I would be labeled disloyal and accused of being one of Hillary Clinton’s secret minions. When dealing with nuanced and difficult conflicts within our community, we were quick to call out a defector, a traitor, or even an instrument of Satan. Maybe we’ve just learned as a species over the centuries that the only way to control our unruly bunch is to use communal intimidation. A month before the Republican National Convention, I tweeted, “I’ve met Trump. Warning 2 fellow evangelical leaders: No good choice this year is no reason to abandon core moral principles. Trump = danger.” Many responses from other church leaders were hostile. Reacting to my warning in his own tweet, a pastor I had known for almost thirty years accused me of having been in D.C. too long: “Maybe upside will be money from the Clinton Foundation. SAD!”
Every time Mr. Trump would offer us another favor to seal the deal of our support—moving the embassy to Jerusalem, for example, or delivering a pro-life conservative to the Supreme Court—pastors and donors from all over the country called, emailed, and texted me to gush. In their minds it was reason enough to vote for him to eliminate the Johnson Amendment so we could endorse candidates from the pulpit. What about Merry Christmas? One of Trump’s regular speeches included his assurance, “I told you about Christmas, and I guarantee you, if I become president, we’re going to be saying Merry Christmas at every store . . . every store . . . every store . . . I’m saying Merry Christmas to whoever the hell wants to hear it.” I asked a colleague who had jumped on the Trump bandwagon, “Is that why some of us went to prison: to say ‘Merry Christmas’?”
Then came the ultimate gift to evangelicals, the pièce de résistance—Mike Pence. Mike was the governor of Indiana, a former congressman, and a tested evangelical. I had interacted with Mike throughout his twelve years in the House of Representatives and had given him the Ten Commandments Leadership Award. Needless to say, my people were thrilled with Trump’s pick. When I raised questions about whether the rest of the Trump-Pence agenda would serve the country or even our members, they lost patience with me. The response was predictable: “Do you want Hillary?”
In comparison with my work on the gun issue, I thought withholding support for Trump would be easy, but now I found myself at odds with just about everyone with whom I had worked for decades—especially with an organization that had been a central part of my life and one for which I had been serving as chairman for three years. A minister generally leaves a denomination for only one of several extraordinary reasons. When I moved from Elim Fellowship to the Assemblies of God, I did so because I was required to. When I left the Assemblies of God, it was because I could no longer feel comfortable with its doctrinal requirement of speaking in tongues. Sometimes a minister is forced out due to a moral failing. But none of these were at play when I decided to leave the Evangelical Church Alliance.
I had been an ECA member since 1999, when I sought a spiritual home that was suitably broad but still conservative. I enjoyed my relationships with fellow members and closer friendships with our leadership team. There was great unanimity in our ranks: one party, the GOP; one philosophy, conservative; and one television network, Fox. These nonnegotiable twenty-first-century commandments became harder and harder for me to abide by, much less to promote. A month before the July 2016 semiannual board meeting of the Alliance, which took place on the opening day of the Republican National Convention, I resolved to resign my seat as its chairman and leave the organization altogether.
In addition to the confining ideological demands we placed on each other, we spent a lot of time and resources policing our members’ personal behavior, especially having to do with our prohibition against alcohol. Most evangelical church bodies trace their roots to the nineteenth-century temperance movement, which campaigned against drinking and successfully brought about Prohibition. We were, as a Bible college instructor of mine once said, “majoring in the minors.” Based on our strict policies regarding personal conduct, had Dietrich Bonhoeffer been among our clergy, I would have had to dismiss him because he was a smoker who also enjoyed an occasional brandy. It was difficult for me to sustain some of my important relationships with people for whom teetotaling had taken on a sacramental quality, especially given the fact it wasn’t mandated by scripture in the first place. Strange as it seemed to me, this is where many of our members had found final consolation in their support of Trump: he may have been a vulgar womanizer, but he didn’t drink. Did that really make him one of us? I asked myself.
It was our new political criteria for evaluating clergy that worried me most. The few members I knew to be Democrats were classified as morally suspicious. Was party affiliation a way of imputing that abortion wasn’t murder? Or perhaps cloaking their approval of same-sex marriage? Or maybe they thought the federal government was better at taking care of people than the church? I was concerned this unofficial standard would be especially difficult for our African-American, Latino, and women members.
The breaking point with the Evangelical Church Alliance for me came after the Supreme Court’s expansion of legal same-sex marriage reawakened a siege mentality among our leadership. The ECA board strengthened the wording of the policy prohibiting our members from solemnizing same-sex unions. When the terrible mass shooting by a self-proclaimed radical Islamic terrorist took the lives of forty-nine people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, I felt it was time at last for evangelicals to come to terms with our own attitudes toward the LGBTQ community. We could no longer glibly assert our tired adage, “Hate the sin but love the sinner.” We would have to model more than tolerance for gays and lesbians; we needed to find authentic love and affirmation for them in their totality. This approach was anathema to the officers of the ECA. If I could not bring about change, then I needed to move on.
I had given the board advance notice of my intention to resign, so everyone was fully aware of what was coming. When I arrived at the Chicago hotel and met my fellow board members, our conversation was strained: everyone tried to ignore the elephant sitting patiently in the corner of the room. Following the meal, we moved to an adjacent conference area where I struck the gavel and called for the opening prayer. After the amen, I announced I would exercise the privilege of the chair to read my letter of resignation. I handed copies to the men around the table and, swallowing hard, began to read:
My decision to resign falls in three areas of concern: my longtime unease with the implications of our rules about externals, particularly on alcohol and tobacco, but not for the more obvious reasons; my imminent plans to begin publicly speaking on what I see as the existence of a huge ethical failing in the evangelical support for a Trump presidency, and what it suggests about us; and, finally, my concern for the challenge that lies ahead in ministering to self-identified LGBTQ persons.
By reading the letter aloud, I was essentially calling for a motion to accept my resignation, which was promptly offered. After a perfunctory second, I followed protocol and announced I would leave the room for the vote. I asked permission of the chair to say a personal good-bye to each of my fellows and give each a “holy hug.” When we embraced, one of my longtime friends whispered, “Don’t lose who you are.”
And then it was over. I had never felt truer to myself, and yet I also felt more alone than I had for a long time. Deep personal and professional partnerships mean a lot to me. I’d been married to the same woman for thirty-eight years. There were churches whose pulpits I had routinely visited to see children born in them, grow into adults, and start their own families. I still had the same ministerial mentor I had when I was twenty. I had stayed in touch with people I knew in Bible college, and most of my best friends had been so for twenty-five and thirty years. My resignation meant a massive rupture in my life and an end to more friendships than the ones around that boardroom table. But, hard as it was, this was a necessary loss. As I drove the thirty-five miles back to the airport, I felt the same two emotions that I’d heard about from so many newly divorced couples: relief and remorse.
* * *
When I arrived in Cleveland for my tenth Republican National Convention, I wondered if this one would be like all the others—a kind of warm and happy reunion, a chance to meet friends, some of whom I saw only every four years. But there was nothing familiar about this convention: the delegates, the speakers, the role of the Republican establishment, and, obviously, the nominee were mostly strange to me. This no longer felt celebratory and familiar.
Outside the convention center I ran into former RNC chairman Michael Steele, a moderate, pro-life Catholic. Our paths usually crossed only at the annual Red Mass each October at Washington’s St. Matthew’s Cathedral, when members of the judicial branch, including most Supreme Court justices, attend church together the Sunday before the term begins. Michael and I had become regular nonjudicial guests and developed a warm friendship in that setting. But I could tell he wasn’t his normal jovial self that day. I asked him about his feelings on the presumptive nominee, and he told me emphatically that Trump did not represent his corner of the party. He was about to say more, when Jim Garlow, pastor of an evangelical mega church in San Diego, approached us.
If Michael expressed ambivalence, Jim was all in, announcing happily that in Trump we had “God’s man.” Noting our skepticism, he acknowledged that his first choice was Ted Cruz, but assured us that God uses all sorts of people, even immoral men, invoking a reference to Cyrus I had heard many times in conversations about Trump. Cyrus was the sixth century B.C. megalomaniacal Persian emperor who became the go-to biblical justification for Trump among evangelicals. Even though Cyrus was a madman, he defeated the Babylonians who had held the Jews captive—thus, the prevailing interpretation went, God used flawed creatures for higher purposes. Jim’s euphoric certainty that God was going to use Trump to do the work of the angels was an opinion reflected by every evangelical I would encounter at the convention.
Once inside the giant Quicken Loans Arena, I asked if there was a prayer room. All the conventions I had ever attended had such a designated space, but no one at the registration desk in Cleveland knew anything about a prayer room. When, finally, someone discovered a space in the adjacent ballpark for that purpose, I began holding services there, but no one came. Over the few days I was at the convention, the space became a kind of hermitage for me. I sat in that small prayer room, an island of peace amidst the convention’s maelstrom—the chants of “Lock her up! Lock her up!” echoing in the distance. On the night Trump delivered his acceptance speech, he promised, “when I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order to our country.” He went on to announce that he would “bring jobs back to Ohio,” and bragged he had “the strong endorsement of the NRA.” Then he thanked the evangelicals. The crowd cheered. I did not.
When I returned home, Cheryl saw how glum I was. In fact, being at the RNC in Cleveland had so vexed me that I decided to drive home instead of fly because I’ve always found long drives therapeutic. I needed time alone—with God, with my conscience, with my emotions. I was deeply, deeply troubled. After ten hours behind the wheel, alternating between carping, crying, and praying, I resolved that what I had been witness to in Cleveland was the final moral collapse of the politicized religion that had infected me and millions of others back in the eighties, when American evangelicals entered into their Faustian pact with Ronald Reagan’s party. Nothing good could come of this badly diseased body. At home, I told Cheryl I could no longer toe the Republican or even the evangelical line when it came to our political choices. She shocked me when she said she didn’t plan to, either; in fact, for the first time since Jimmy Carter in 1976, she would vote for the Democratic candidate, Hillary Clinton. Just a decade earlier, such an announcement would have had me thinking about divorce, but at this point I considered joining her.
Four days later I attended the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, and it stood in complete contrast to the previous week’s dystopia. I still bristled when Cecile Richards of Planned Parenthood associated abortion with “reproductive rights,” but not for the same reasons I had in the past. Now it was because I believed she knew abortion meant loss—of someone and something—and shouldn’t be cheered. For the first time ever, I agreed with virtually everything else Richards said. She was not the only one. I never thought I would find such relief with liberals. If it wasn’t their words, it was the optics. The stands in Cleveland had been a sea of white and mostly middle-aged people, but in Philadelphia, everywhere I looked reflected the gorgeous diversity of God’s creation—every color, every ethnicity, every age, and as many women as men.
I was caught in a riptide of conflicted thoughts and emotions. I spent nearly all my ministry life depicting the Democrats as the party of death—and yet, in comparison to the Republicans in Cleveland, the optimism, dignity, and hope I saw in Philadelphia renewed my confidence in the human family. When I was with the Democrats for Life, I felt closer to their worldview than I did with what had become a strange Republican admixture of a pro-life religious ethic with a kind of godless Ayn Rand objectivism. Hillary Clinton had been formed religiously in Methodism, Wesley’s “religion of the heart,” and this was the Christianity present in that arena. I felt a surge of love for the people who surrounded me, and a fragile hope about the future. My whole world had turned upside down. When the towering Pentecostal preacher Dr. William Barber took to the podium, he announced, “I’m a theologically conservative, liberal, evangelical biblicist.” In doing so, he articulated exactly what I thought Bonhoeffer to be, and what I hoped to become.
Just days before the election, our lawyer and friend Jay Sekulow asked if I would join him in Nashville to participate in a Facebook live video coverage of returns. On Election Day, I arrived at the studios of the American Center for Law and Justice, a sprawling industrial-style complex. In the thirty years I’ve known him, Jay has always been intense and driven, but that night he was uncharacteristically subdued. Throughout the evening, the staff clustered around several large wall-mounted screens, watching various news outlets or staring into glowing monitors. My role was to offer intermittent commentary on the election results.
When Jay asked me who I thought would win, I provided the conventional wisdom in the days leading up to the election: that the race was a lock for Clinton. Around six p.m. Nashville time, as Jay paced the floor nervously, I received a text from a contact in Washington. It contained polling numbers from inside the Republican National Committee showing Hillary trouncing Trump. I was left gazing at my phone, adjusting to the reality of another Clinton presidency but one that, this time, I welcomed with relief. I voted in Washington, D.C., a secure Democratic victory, so I didn’t cast my ballot for her. I felt as if I knew too much about the Clintons, and also knew that my vote for write-in candidate Evan McMullin would not swing the election. Like many Americans, if the Democratic nominee had been anyone else—Joe Biden, for instance—I would have switched parties.
Watching the returns, I chatted with some employees and other guests, and texted Cheryl. Then the numbers started coming in. A few states broke for Trump, followed by a few for Hillary. The next hour was a horse race and I was pulled into the studio for a few segments, during which I was so preoccupied by the vote tallies that I don’t remember what I said. At nine o’clock the guests and crew huddled around the screens and went silent. Donald Trump was winning, but there were no cheers.
The Electoral College totals eventually turned toward Trump and stayed that way until Pennsylvania was called. When Trump was declared the winner, I was yanked back into the studio and spouted some meaningless jabber. I was stunned. I knew most of Jay’s audience would be celebrating the unexpected victory, but like so many Americans that night, I was feeling sick. Trump’s victory was the direct result of the evangelical sellout I had mourned after the Cleveland convention.
On the ride back to the hotel, I looked out the window and wondered what his win portended and how we might reclaim the moral core of our community. Before going to sleep I called home: Cheryl was anxious and incredulous, and my daughter was livid. A week later, the data would show that 81 percent of evangelicals had voted for Trump. I wasn’t surprised. Many of our most generous supporters told me they wouldn’t be helping our organization in the new year because they’d sent their money to Trump. One planned to attend the presidential inauguration; it would cost him $15,000.
As all this was unfolding for me, Paul was undergoing his own ordeal. He and I agreed that Donald Trump was a disaster for Christians, evangelical and Catholic, but the divisions in the Catholic community over Pope Francis and his invitation to members who had been ostracized—divorcees, gays, and lesbians—to come back to the Church had dominated Paul’s time and sapped his energy. He decided it was time to make a clean break from his hybrid Catholic-evangelical project and work on his own. He would take the National Pro-Life Action Center in a new direction, rendering it autonomous in the process, and bring it in line with Catholic social teaching. It would become, for all intents and purposes, an entirely Catholic organization. For the first time in nearly forty years, we would no longer be paired in ministry.