Swedish Christian magazine calls out Trump's gaslighting
A Christian magazine in Europe had the courage to call Trump's tactics for what they are.
During Donald Trump’s first run for the White House, a number of prominent Christian conservatives didn’t hesitate to rally to his side even when it was obvious that he was a boor, a bully, and a gangster. One notable exception was conservative talk show host Erick Erickson. In a September 2016 column, he wrote that one big reason he wasn’t willing to support Trump was that he feared Trump could “poison the church from within.” He was particularly concerned with Trump’s refusal to repent or ask forgiveness—evidence that Trump hadn’t even begun to understand “Christianity 101.”
Erickson reversed himself and supported Trump in 2020 and 2024, presumably while holding his nose. But anyone who has been paying attention would find it hard to disagree that he has been very prescient about the extent the church has gone to embrace Trump. No doubt when Erickson penned this that he was thinking about how Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, told the Dallas Observer in April 2016 that wanted a president who would be “the meanest, toughest son of a gun I can find,” not a “Casper Milquetoast.”
In hindsight, this take from Jeffress was a harbinger of how the nation’s moral guardians reacted to the Access Hollywood tapes. Rather than cast Trump aside as morally unfit, they circled the wagons around him. And they have continued to do so for the better part of a decade, even after it was amply established that Trump was not only a boor, a bully, and a gangster, but also a traitor.
If that wasn’t enough to prove Erickson was on to something, any doubt should have been put to rest in 2023, when Russell Moore, the former head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, made a breathtaking revelation on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Moore said that a number of pastors had told him that whenever they quoted Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, they were accused of pushing “woke liberal nonsense.” Worse, when said pastor points out that he’s quoting Jesus, a frequent response is, “Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.”
Suddenly, it makes sense why Mark Galli, editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, came under heavy fire when he called for Trump to be impeached and removed for trying to shake down Ukraine. It was to be expected that Trump would go into one of his trademark Twitter meltdowns. However, Galli was also sharply rebuked by a who’s-who of evangelical leaders who claimed his op-ed was an attack on “tens-of-millions of believers who take seriously their civic and moral obligations.”
In an appearance a few days later on CBS News’ “Face the Nation,” Galli was befuddled at what the fuss was over his piece. Watch here.
In hindsight, the explanation is stark—to borrow Erickson’s words, the people who clutched their pearls over this piece seem to need a refresher in “Christianity 101.”
Fortunately, Christianity Today hasn’t bent the knee to Trump. It named Moore, one of the more vocal never-Trumpers in the evangelical world, as its editor-in-chief in 2022. But it says something about the state of American evangelicalism that there should even be a debate about whether Trump is worth supporting, even when there is no doubt who he really is.
At least one major Christian publication outside this country has no such concerns. Namely, Dagen, a Christian newspaper based in Sweden. One of its editors, Erik Helmerson, watched Trump sit down with South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, and spread the shibboleth that white South Africans were being targeted by genocide. Like most of us, Helmerson walked away shaking his head. But he stopped shaking his head long enough to tell his audience exactly what we saw—Trump was reverting to his old habit of loudly and shamelessly lying.
When I hit the “Translate” button on Google Chrome, Helmerson’s headline almost jumped off the screen of my phone—“Be careful, little Trump, what you spread.” It was a nod to “O Be Careful, Little Eyes,” a Sunday school ditty dating from the mid-1990s.
Helmerson believes that song is very appropriate since we are in an age when a meme or a video has become “an argument in itself.” He thinks Trump, in particular, would do well to remember that song. After all, just like in his first term, “it is depressing how the world’s most powerful man continues to lie with pictures.”
In case you missed it, when Trump told his people to “turn off the lights” in the Oval Office, he showed a video purportedly depicting a leading Black South African politician chanting, “Kill the Boers, kill the farmer!”—then a field depicting crosses marking the graves of “more than a thousand white farmers.”
But there was one problem. It was ripped several miles out of context. While the crosses depicted a memorial to murder victims, it wasn’t in memory of a thousand victims, but two—Glen and Vida Rafferty, who really were killed in 2020. The speaker wasn’t a political heavyweight, but Julius Malema, the former youth leader of the African National Congress who now leads an outfit that is essentially a South African version of the Black Panthers.
Helmerson pointed out something that has become all too familiar to us in the States in the decade since Trump came down the escalator.
Donald Trump represents a type of politician who doesn't care about being right as long as he gets it right. Creating a meme, planting an image to gain a loud opinion for himself in the short term, this becomes the be-all and end-all of his political work.
Helmerson believes Christians should call out this kind of talk, and loudly. After all, he points out, if we really believe “there is an absolute truth and that it is that which will set us free,” then we shouldn’t hesitate to speak out against blatant lies from our leaders “even if they happen to be on the same side of ourselves.” He doesn’t think that’s partisan, but simply “living as we teach.” Part of that entails remembering that “a true word speaks louder than a thousand fake pictures.”
Imagine something along the lines of Helmerson’s piece running in print or online here in the States. The odds of such a piece passing without howls of protest from pro-Trump evangelicals are slightly higher than finding a needle in a haystack. That’s a shame, because there is nothing even remotely controversial about “living as we teach.” Perhaps our counterparts across the Atlantic have a better understanding of “Christianity 101” than we do.
I was pointed to this article by Swedish Pentecostal evangelist and self-described “charismactivist” Micael Grenholm, an editor at Pentecostals and Charismatics for Peace and Justice, a collective of charismatics and Pentecostals who believe Holy Spirit fire and a social conscience aren’t mutually exclusive. When he shared this article on his Facebook feed, Grenholm noted, and rightly, that as Christians, we have “a special responsibility to counteract the culture of lies and manipulation.” Again I ask—how is that even remotely controversial? If we as Christians are to stand up for truth, part of our witness should be to call out lies, deceit, and alternative facting.
Unfortunately, a significant number of evangelicals here in this country seem willing to excuse Trump’s fast and loose relationship with the truth because he’s given them what they want and then some on their pet issues. For instance, a poll by Pew Research in late April found Trump’s overall approval rating deep underwater, at 40 percent approval to 59 percent disapproval. But even that low figure may have been inflated, since a whopping 72 percent of white evangelicals approved of how Trump was doing.
Even more disturbing, at a time when we were seeing a rash of controversies over the ethics of Trump administration officials, only 38 percent of all respondents rated the ethics of Trump officials as “excellent” or “good.” But a whopping 62 percent of white evangelicals gave Trump’s officials high marks on ethics. This, friends, is the constituency that thinks the Sermon on the Mount is librul pablum. Perhaps if they had the same understanding of “Christianity 101” as our friends in Sweden, they’d probably see things differently.