'Anarchy, UnAmerican': Christian Leaders Condemn Pro-Trump Mob, Call for Peace
Trump supporters wave flags in front of the Capitol building. Photo from @jerichomarch20 Twitter.
NEW YORK — Tension between pro-Trump evangelicals and others of the faith has been building for months, especially after the president insisted widespread election fraud took place.
Al Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, spoke to the New Yorker in October and wrote a defense of his vote for Trump in 2020, mainly citing Trump’s pro-life actions. Meanwhile, evangelical leader Beth Moore spoke out on Twitter in December about “seductive & dangerous … Trumpism.”
As Trump supporters — some carrying Christian symbols — stormed the Capitol building on Wednesday, this tension came to a head.
The Jericho March, which hosted a rally in December that later turned violent, tweeted a video of protestors waving flags and singing “God Bless America.” Others pushed past police barriers, broke windows and entered the Capitol building, forcing a lockdown.
Many Christian leaders rushed to condemn the violence.
Moore claimed that the Jesus text on the flags of protestors is “not Jesus of the Gospels.”
Megachurch pastor Rick Warren called the protesting “anarchy, unAmerican, criminal treason and domestic terrorism.”
Warren also quoted from Proverbs 29, which says "When the leader is concerned with justice, the nation will be strong, but when he is only concerned with money, he will ruin his country."
Cardinal Wilton Gregory, Archbishop of Washington, issued a statement on Jan. 6 calling the Capitol “sacred ground and a place where people over the past centuries have rightly demonstrated.”
He continued: “As people of faith seeking to bring our Lord into this world by how we live, we must acknowledge the human dignity of those with whom we disagree and seek to work with them to ensure the common good for all.”
Russell Moore, evangelical theologian, pastor and president of the Southern Baptist Church’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, told President Trump in a tweet to “call on these mobs to stop this dangerous and anti-constitutional anarchy” before the president told protestors to go home.
He called the insurrection “immoral, unjust, dangerous, and inexcusable,” and later said “enough is enough” in an article on The Gospel Coalition: going forward, Christians must continue to spread truth, especially to acknowledge that Joe Biden has been elected president.
On Jan. 8, Moore called for the president to “step down” after the events of Wednesday. “There are 12 dangerous days for our country left,” he said.
Archbishop José H. Gomez of Los Angeles, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), said in a statement that he condemned the violence, that “this is not who we are as Americans.”
Franklin Graham, evangelical missionary and open Trump supporter, was one of the few who expressed support for the protests.
He told Religion News Service that “people standing out there peacefully holding flags, and protesting, they have every right to do that… The people who broke the windows in the Capital did not look like the people out there demonstrating. Most likely it was Antifa,” he said. There is not evidence that the protesters were connected to the far-left movement Antifa, but several GOP leaders at least initially claimed the group must be responsible for the chaos that was reminiscent of looting and vandalizing that took place during Black Lives Matter protests around the country in 2020.
Later, Graham tweeted that “Our country is in trouble.”
Mohler told the Houston Chronicle that he didn’t regret his vote in November: “And I stand by the comments that I’ve made at every point.”
“And for most evangelical Christians, voting for Donald Trump was seen as a necessity in a binary system,” he continued.
He noted later in The Briefing from Jan. 7 that “president Trump had incited demonstrators” and called Christians to turn to biblical principles to discuss “the tragedy and the horror” of yesterday’s events.
“We are undoubtedly in an agonizing moment, in which evangelical Christians who supported Donald Trump now find ourselves in the position of being tremendously embarrassed by this most recent behavior,” he said in a Jan. 8 interview with The Atlantic.
Many of the evangelical Christians who have spoken out are openly politically conservative, though whether they have expressed public support for president Trump depends on the individual. If the flags and signs carried by protestors on Wednesday are true, at least some of the evangelical Christians who support Donald Trump condone and are participants in this action.
In the meantime, Black Christian leaders like Jemar Tisby have said law enforcement and churches should discipline those who took part as they are able to.
“They’ll say it’s wrong but never hold the offenders accountable,” he tweeted.
Jillian Cheney is a Poynter-Koch fellow for Religion Unplugged who loves consuming good culture and writing about it. She also reports on American Protestantism and evangelical Christianity. You can find her on Twitter @_jilliancheney.