Former Reagan Adviser Peter Wehner Says Evangelical Leaders Who Support Trump Do More Harm to Christianity Than Atheists

During a Saturday interview on CNN, Republican political adviser Peter Wehner voiced his criticism of evangelical Christian support for President Donald Trump, telling host Michael Smerconish that the powerful voting block remains in Trump’s corner out of a misguided sense of pragmatism.

“The bottom line is that he will fight for them,” Wehner said, referring to Trump. “Not that he himself is of Christian faith. Not even he himself is a manifestation of Christian virtues, but they feel like they’re involved in an existential struggle against a malicious enemy that they consider to be the American Left. And Trump will try and vanquish that enemy.”

He later added: “They feel like he’ll bring a gun to a cultural knife fight…that he hates the same people that they hate. And that he’ll employ means that’ll get it done.”

Wehner, who previously advised Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush during their stints in the Oval Office, has been a Trump critic in the last few years. Now a prominent commentator and author, Wehner said it was “painful” to watch his fellow Christians support this president.

“I think it’s been tremendously discrediting to the Christian faith,” Wehner said, referring to those who back Trump. “I think it’s shown to a watching world a tremendous amount of hypocrisy. After all: this ‘character counts’ and ‘personal integrity’ and political leadership was central to what a lot of evangelicals argued when Bill Clinton was president. And now that it’s Donald Trump, they’ve decided to push it aside, which means for them that reality is a means to an end, not an end. It was something to be used as a political weapon.”

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SOURCE: Newsweek, Gillian Edevane