A so-called worship service at the White House
In the wake of a week of outrages from Trump, the religious right proved, once again, that no outrage is too much for them.
In case you missed it, Easter Sunday saw something that has become as certain as death and taxes in the decade since Donald Trump came down the escalator. Trump saw fit to post a deranged Easter greeting on Truth Social. If that wasn’t enough, he then used the official White House social channels to promote it.
Trump's deranged social media behavior shows why he is unfit for office
One of the few diehard Donald Trump supporters among my friends often says that I shouldn’t let my disgust at Trump’s behavior blind me to what he’s supposedly doing for the country. She frequently says, “You’re not inviting h…
Just about everyone who doesn’t have MAGA hats glued to their heads was outraged, and rightly so. After all, it was yet more evidence that Trump does not have the temperament and mental stability to be president. But one element was particularly notable in its silence—the religious right.
I thought that at least one of the nation’s moral guardians would say something, especially after Franklin Graham noted last month that he wrote Trump asking him to curb his cursing on the stump. Even without that to consider, their silence was particularly deafening considering how the religious right melted down over former president Joe Biden publicly recognizing Transgender Visibility Day on a day that happened to fall on the same day as Easter Sunday. To put it mildly, going into DEFCON 1 over Biden acknowledging the trans community, then sitting on your hands when Trump acts deranged on social media, is a really bad look.
But it turns out that some elements of the religious right did something far worse than remain silent. On Saturday, Charisma magazine shared video of a praise and worship session in the White House. Watch here.
The session took place the previous day, and was led by worship leader and right-wing provocateur Sean Feucht. Watch Feucht talk about it here.
When I saw freelance Christian journalist Rick Pidcock share this on his Facebook wall, my first thought was that anyone who has followed recent events would know that the video’s caption was a misnomer. These men and women of God came to the White House a week after Trump’s deranged display on social media. If anyone believes that Jesus was at all present in a White House whose occupant found it acceptable to rant about “Radical Left Lunatics” and “WEAK and INEFFECTIVE Judges,” then promote said rant on the official White House social media feeds, there’s a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell them. At best—AT BEST—they’ve told themselves so often in the last decade that Trump’s fruit isn’t rancid that they believe it themselves.
But there are things far worse than unhinged social media behavior that should make it obvious that there was no real “presence of Jesus” in the White House. This worship service happened in the wake of the Trump administration doubling down on its blatant lying about the status of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. According to The Atlantic, the Department of Homeland Security was initially trying to quietly correct the “clerical error” and “administrative error” that resulted in Abrego Garcia being wrongfully deported to El Salvador despite being on what amounted to a permanent parole for entering the United States illegally. However, as criticism mounted, Trump and his acolytes started smearing him as an MS-13 member—even though he had fled El Salvador to AVOID gang violence.
It’s entirely possible that no one in that room knew about The Atlantic’s reporting on initial efforts to bring Abrego Garcia home. But it’s hard to believe that they didn’t know that the White House went from claiming there was no way to correct its “clerical error” to smearing him as a thug who deserved to be run out on a rail. Their presence in the White House is a tacit endorsement of such depravity.
But then again, the nation’s so-called moral guardians have proven time and again that they have no qualms about standing behind Trump despite knowing that he is a boor, a bully, a criminal, a traitor. Worse, they are actually willing to enable him. All of this is why my heart hurt when I saw this video. It hurt even more so considering that on paper, as a charismatic Christian, I should have been overjoyed to see worship in the White House. But remembering what the current occupant in the White House represented made what should have been a beautiful display look downright ghastly.
Looking at this, I’m reminded of the moment that, in hindsight, completed my education about in-your-face evangelicalism. As many of you know, during my freshman year at Carolina, I was suckered into joining a hypercharismatic campus ministry called Waymaker Christian Fellowship. It took me six months to get out of there even though I had a hunch almost from the start something was off, but they played with my mind so much that I was afraid in case I was doing the wrong thing by walking out. It was only when they tried to guilt-trip me into doing a philosophical 180, turning from a liberal Democrat into a Christian Coalition Republican, that the scales started falling off my eyes. Even then, it took until a week after my 19th birthday to finally walk out.
Early the following year, I discovered by accident that their church, King’s Park International Church in Durham, had once been the Carolina chapter of Maranatha Campus Ministries, a notorious campus cult from the 1970s and 1980s that came under fire from both the public and from college administrators for abusive tactics. The network of which KPIC was a member, Morning Star International—now known as Every Nation—was at the very least a linear descendant of Maranatha. And yet, KPIC’s founding pastor, Ron Lewis, never saw fit to share this detail with us. But when I told my former compatriots in Waymaker about it, their response was basically, “So what? People are being saved through this ministry.” Hearing that made how they lectured me about not condoning abortion and LGBT rights ring hollow—even more so when I saw that they were not only willing to condone “Pastor Ron’s” deceit, but be complicit in it.
This discovery was fresh on my mind on National Coming Out Day, with prominent gay Christian pastor Mel White on hand. I was out in the Pit, the central gathering area of campus, and happened to run into three of my former friends in Waymaker—Barbara Dean, Adena Cooper, and another girl whom I’ll call Allison. When they recalled how someone chalked anti-gay messages to counterprogram National Coming Out Day, I wondered what the big hooey was. Barbara whipped out her Bible and peddled the usual line about homosexuality being a sin. Allison and Adena chimed in, saying that I shouldn’t condone the gay lifestyle.
I’ve replayed this conversation fairly often in my head over the years, and I always find myself wondering how I didn’t blow a gasket right then and there. Remember, I had shown them, and my other Waymaker compatriots, that Ron Lewis had been lying to us almost from day one, and had no defensible reason to lie. That information should have led any reasonable person to conclude that Pastor Ron was a bad guy. And yet, they were still willing to do his bidding. And here they were, lecturing me about supporting gay rights? What nerve they all had.
It was at that moment that I saw the extent to which Pastor Ron had warped the Waymakers’ moral compasses. Going ballistic over comparatively picayune matters while being willing to condone behavior that any reasonable person would consider wrong and unethical? More than a quarter-century later, the thought I could have sounded like that makes me want to retch—even more so considering how fast and far my former friends went in Every Nation. Barbara, now Barbara Fisher, co-pastors Second City Church in Chicago, an Every Nation church, alongside another one of my former Waymaker compatriots, her husband Rollan. Adena is now Adena Syfrett, whose husband Eric is KPIC’s executive pastor. Another one of my former compatriots, Reggie Roberson, is now nominally KPIC’s lead pastor, though Pastor Ron, as “bishop,” still calls the shots.
It’s why when the religious right went all in for Trump in 2016, I felt a sense of déjà vu. They knew or should have known Trump was a bad guy—just like my friends in Waymaker knew Pastor Ron was a bad guy. And yet, they were willing to overlook it all because he made clucking noises they liked on the issues dearest to their hearts—just like my former friends overlooked Pastor Ron’s deceit in the name of “bringing the good news of Jesus to UNC,” in the words of Waymaker’s motto. A decade later, they still are willing to do so. And even after, to paraphrase Liz Cheney, Trump trampled on his oath and the Constitution in a way that no president has done, ever.
For all the talk that Trump is exposing the liberal elite, he has actually exposed a feature in evangelicalism, not a bug. And it’s a feature that has no place in any civilized society. This so-called worship service is yet more proof.
TDS is alive and well
I guess I'm donating my Chris Tomlin collection to the Good Will. I liked his songs, well in my range, too.