As Donald Trump surged to the front of the Republican presidential field, Jimmy Carter announced he was battling cancer. The soft-spoken former president and the blustering billionaire could not have presented a starker contrast in temperament and character. There is no greater irony in U.S. politics than evangelical Christian voters’ attraction to Trump and low regard for Carter.
An Aug. 16 poll placed white evangelical support for Trump at 27 percent, far ahead of closest rival Ben Carson’s 14 percent. Married three times, vainglorious and profane, unapologetically insulting toward women, Trump embodies character flaws one would expect Christians to deplore. Yet his supporters praise his honesty, professing to love that he boldly says what he thinks.
More important than candor, though, is the content of a person’s words and thoughts. Trump’s boasts and insults — delivered with belligerence and thinly veiled appeals to racial prejudice — reveal deeply unchristian arrogance and disrespect.
On religious topics, Trump is inept. Asked whether he preferred the Old Testament or the New, Trump replied, “probably equal,” and added, with typical shallowness: “I think it’s just . . . incredible, the whole Bible.”
What is, in fact, incredible, is that evangelical Christians feel any affinity whatsoever for a man who says he’s not sure if he’s ever asked God for forgiveness.
Presidents don’t need to be theologians, and Trump will never be mistaken for one. Carter, on the other hand, effortlessly shows his biblical acumen and backs it up with actions. In the same week that Trump asserted the equality of the Testaments, the 90-year-old Carter taught Sunday school at Maranatha Baptist Church in Plains, Ga., on Aug. 23. Nearly 1,000 people showed up, so Carter led two sessions.
“We are studying the most important aspect of Christianity,” Carter said, according to a Reuters report. He read from the Sermon on the Mount: “I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Here was a former commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces describing Scripture as Anabaptists would: The New Testament above the Old. The words of Jesus above all others. The Sermon on the Mount, including the command to love enemies, the most important of all.
Speaking at the 2003 Mennonite Church USA convention in Atlanta, Carter observed: “It’s easy for us to say, ‘I’m a Christian.’ . . . But we say it glibly and almost automatically.” Noting that “Christian” means “little Christ,” he suggested we would take our faith more seriously if we erased “Christian” from our vocabulary and replaced it with “little Christ” — and considered how our lives would need to change to live up to that title.
A voice for social justice, Carter cut ties with the Southern Baptist Convention in 2009 to protest a lack of equality for women in ministry. Trump’s idea of justice is to propose rounding up and deporting 11 million undocumented immigrants.
The rich man who will never be president could learn a lot from the humble Sunday school teacher who was. But it’s hard to imagine Trump in a pew in Plains.
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