Donald Trump & Evangelicals -- Response to Michael Gerson's Atlantic Essay | National Review

Donald Trump & Evangelicals -- Response to Michael Gerson's Atlantic Essay | National Review

David French presents a solid critique of Michael Gerson's dismissive criticism of evangelicals, pointing out the genuine threats to religious liberty and American culture from the Left.

The following excerpt refers to the exchange the Obergefell oral arguments between Justice Samuel Alito and the Solicitor General, regarding the implications of same-sex marriage for dissenting Christian universities.

"Culturally, this is the president's lawyer casting traditional Christians outside the boundaries of mainstream American society, placing them in the same category as racists for upholding a biblical definition of marriage. Legally, he's raising the possibility that the schools and institutions educating young Christian kids by the millions could face the choice between compromise and financial crisis.

"And, keep in mind, this statement occurred against a generation-long campaign of elite demonization of Evangelical Christian belief and practice. In my own law practice, I witnessed more than 100 colleges and universities attempt to bar one or more Christian student groups from campus -- mainly on the grounds that it was 'discriminatory' for Christian groups to reserve leadership positions for Christian students. I represented Christian students who were told they had to change their religious beliefs to earn degrees from public universities.

"Moreover, the solicitor general made his statement mere weeks after Christians watched, aghast, as our nation's largest and most powerful corporations gang-tackled the state of Indiana for having the audacity to enact a Religious Freedom Restoration Act that did little more than re-instate traditional legal protections for religious liberty. This corporate gang-tackle featured an absurd media pile-on as reporters on the hunt for anti-gay bigotry fixed their eyes on a previously unknown pizza store simply because it hypothetically wouldn't serve pizza at a gay wedding."

French also objects to Gerson's dismissal of the importance of early 1960s cases driving religion out of schools, Roe v. Wade, and Obergefell: "This is a curiously reductive way of describing a series of legal changes that undermined the traditional constitutional order, cleared the way for the deaths of tens of millions of innocent children, and jeopardized the autonomy and liberty of the institutions Christian parents choose to train and educate their kids."

French didn't address this, but Gerson also pooh-poohed the battle against evolution in the early 20th century, reducing the whole of evolution to the concept of natural selection, and ignoring the evolutionists' assertions that life came about by time and chance (no Creator), that mankind is nothing but big-brained apes (not created in God's image), and that the Bible is an untrustworthy collection of Iron Age myths (not God's Word). The Christian institutions that capitulated to the philosophy of the evolutionists are no longer discernably Christian, and yet Gerson laments evangelicals' refusal to go along.