Dr. Russell Moore, an evangelical leader, echoed previously stated fears on Friday about former President Donald Trump's effect on Christianity as the current 2024 Republican presidential candidate continues to dominate polling among evangelical Christian voters nationwide.
In an interview with MSNBC host and former member of Congress Joe Scarborough, Moore—a former theologian in the Southern Baptist Church (SBC) and current editor of Christianity Today—expressed concern with Trump's continuously high approval rating with evangelical voters nationwide despite eight years of unseemly public behavior he believed was well out-of-line with Christian values.
Rather than grappling with it, Moore said, people have grown numb to it, whether from Trump ordering federal officers to tear gas protestors in 2020 to advocating for sexual assault in a leaked video in 2016 from the set of Access Hollywood.
"I think there are a lot of people who would say with the asking for forgiveness, 'Well, we don't necessarily need a Christian president.' And of course, that's true," Moore said. "But those same people would say we need somebody with character. And then of course, we've seen everything that we have seen over the past eight or nine years."
He added: "My big fear is that we're at the point right now where it's not even a point of controversy for most people. Most people who would ordinarily argue about this have either made peace with it, or have just stopped talking to people who would disagree with them. And that's one of the reasons why I really don't think 2024 is going to be a repeat of what we saw in 2016 and 2020. It's just numbness. And I think that [says something] really bad about American life and about church life too."
Newsweek has reached out to Trump's campaign for comment.
Among the deeply religious GOP electorate in the early caucus state of Iowa, the former president is currently dominating in polling among a crowded Republican field for president despite recent clashes with top evangelical leaders in the state. Trump holds a 16-point lead in the field in what recent polling by The New York Times and Siena College determined was his weakest state nationally.
According to the poll, approximately half of the white evangelical Republicans in Iowa surveyed said they supported Trump for president while Mike Pence—his former vice president and a long-standing name in evangelical politics—holds just 3 percent of that group.
Meanwhile, Moore, who is currently promoting his latest book Losing Our Religion, has been a vocal critic of the former president since leaving the church over the SBC's embrace of him and myriad sexual abuse allegations lodged against church leadership.
In an NPR interview earlier this month, Moore suggested Trump had degraded the political conversation in the United States to the point some Christian conservatives believed core tenets of their religion's teachings to be too weak and liberal for their liking.
"Multiple pastors tell me, essentially, the same story about quoting the Sermon on the Mount, parenthetically, in their preaching—'turn the other cheek'—[and] to have someone come up after to say, 'Where did you get those liberal talking points?'" Moore asked during his interview at the time.
He added: "When the pastor would say, 'I'm literally quoting Jesus Christ'...The response would be, 'Yes, but that doesn't work anymore. That's weak. When we get to the point where the teachings of Jesus himself are seen as subversive to us, then we're in a crisis."
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Nick Reynolds is a senior politics reporter at Newsweek. A native of Central New York, he previously worked as a ... Read more
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