A top evangelical Christian magazine on Thursday called for President Trump’s removal from office over a lack of morality and the action he took as part of the Ukraine pressure scheme, which is at the center of the impeachment inquiry.
Christianity Today editor Mark Galli admitted that he believed Democrats “have had it out for him from day one” and condemned the impeachment process in the House, which he felt didn’t give Trump “a serious opportunity to offer his side of the story.”
“But the facts in this instance are unambiguous: The President of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the President’s political opponents,” he wrote. “That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.”
Galli republished a portion of an editorial the magazine published back in the 1990s when former President Bill Clinton was on trial for impeachment, arguing that Clinton’s lie about his affair “rips at the fabric of our nation.”
“Unfortunately, the words that we applied to Mr. Clinton 20 years ago apply almost perfectly to our current president,” Galli wrote. “Whether Mr. Trump should be removed from office by the Senate or by popular vote next election—that is a matter of prudential judgment. That he should be removed, we believe, is not a matter of partisan loyalties but loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments.”
Galli wouldn’t say whether Trump should be removed from office by a Senate trial or if he just shouldn’t be reelected in 2020, but he argued that not speaking out on the issue damages evangelicals’ reputation.
“To use an old cliché, it’s time to call a spade a spade, to say that no matter how many hands we win in this political poker game, we are playing with a stacked deck of gross immorality and ethical incompetence,” he wrote. “And just when we think it’s time to push all our chips to the center of the table, that’s when the whole game will come crashing down. It will crash down on the reputation of evangelical religion and on the world’s understanding of the gospel. And it will come crashing down on a nation of men and women whose welfare is also our concern.”
The editorial clearly didn’t sit well with Trump, who called the magazine “far left,” a laughable retort given the magazine was founded by the late evangelical icon Billy Graham and remains one of the most respected evangelical publications available.
….have a Radical Left nonbeliever, who wants to take your religion & your guns, than Donald Trump as your President. No President has done more for the Evangelical community, and it’s not even close. You’ll not get anything from those Dems on stage. I won’t be reading ET again!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 20, 2019
Franklin Graham, the son of Billy Graham, responded to the editorial in a Facebook post, saying his father would be “disappointed” in the piece and finally sharing that his father did, in fact, vote for Trump before he passed away.
