WASHINGTON (DC)
The Hill
Nov. 4, 2019
By Aris Folley
Former megachurch pastor and evangelical author Joshua Harris said in a recent interview that he believes some of the massive support President Trump has enjoyed from the evangelical community has been “incredibly damaging to the Gospel and to the church.”
Harris, an influential evangelical teacher and writer during the late 1990s and up until he announced he’d abandoned his faith earlier this year, added that having “a leader like Trump I think is in itself part of the indictment” of Christians.
Evangelicals have been staunch supporters of Trump since his 2016 election, with his job approval higher than average among white evangelical Christians throughout the three years of his presidency, according to Pew Research Center data. In a poll earlier this fall conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, about 77 percent of evangelicals approve of the president’s job performance, compared to an average 43 percent in other polls.
But Harris told Axios’s Mike Allen that he’s concerned about the end result of the church becoming “identified with President Trump.”
“I don’t think it’s going to end well,” Harris said in a clip of an interview on “Axios on HBO” released Monday.
“And I think, you know, you look back at the Old Testament and the relationship between the prophets and really bad leaders and kings, and oftentimes it was, it’s not something you unwind because it’s, it’s actually in the scriptures presented as God’s judgment on the False Religion of the day,” Harris said.
“You think Christians today who are embracing President Trump are due for a judgment?” Allen asked.
“I think it is the judgment,” Harris responded. “I think it is part of the judgment.”
“What do you mean by that?” Allen asked.
“To have a leader like Trump I think is in itself part of the indictment, that this is the leader that you want and maybe deserve,” Harris answered. “That represents a lot of who you are.”
Harris, who served as the senior pastor at the Covenant Life megachurch Gaithersburg, Md., for more than a decade before resigning from his post in 2015 amid controversy over the church’s handling of a child sexual abuse scandal, rose to prominence shortly after the 1997 publication of “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” at age 21. The book was once highly influential to evangelical youth group teaching.
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