It looks like there is going to be some division in evangelical MAGA-land over some of Trump’s cabinet appointments. More than 80% of evangelicals voted for Trump and the president is “rewarding” them with an attorney general nominee who was under a House ethics investigation for sex trafficking and a Health and Human Services Secretary who is a vaccine denier and supports abortion until viability.
The Gaetz appointment as attorney general is not going to bother too many evangelical Trump voters. After all, they voted for a convicted sex-abuser for president. But the RFK Jr. pick is bound to divide conservative evangelical Trump voters. As we see below, the hard-core MAGA gang–Eric Metaxas, Charlie Kirk, Sean Feucht–don’t really care about RFK’s views on abortion. (Imagine if Harris had won the election and appointed a person to HHS secretary with the same views as RFK Jr.? All hell would break loose.) This wing of MAGA evangelicalism seem most happy about “owning the libs” and getting access to power. But the more old-school (if you will) Christian Right seem concerned about the RFK pick. This is especially the case with Southern Baptists. We’ll keep an eye on this in the coming days.
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Some evangelicals are now weighing-in on what they want from a second Trump term. Robert Jeffress wants Trump to protect “the religious freedom of all Americans.” For Jeffress, “religious freedom” is the right to promote political candidates from the pulpit and pray at football games. Apparently these are both ways of advancing the Kingdom of God. Franklin Graham wants an end to the war in Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza conflict. Samuel Rodriguez wants Trump to champion parental rights when it comes to transgender issues in schools. And most of them want Trump to champion a national abortion ban. That is not going to happen. Trump is pro-choice. He wants to leave abortion up to the states.
Jack Jenkins has the story at Religion News Service.
As Jake Meador pointed out the other day, evangelicals have been a pretty cheap date.
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Latino evangelicals in Harrisburg helped put Trump over the top in Pennsylvania. Over at NPR, Sarah McCammon covers the First Bilingual Christian Church. Here is a taste:
Raul De La Cruz worries about the economy. He’s an electrician, and he says his family is feeling the effects of inflation. Their grocery budget isn’t going as far as it once did.
De La Cruz, who’s in his mid-30s, immigrated from the Dominican Republic as a young child and later became a citizen. He says he didn’t pay much attention to politics until the past couple of presidential election cycles.
“I didn’t know about politics. I was told Republicans are racist; Democrats is where you gotta be,” he said.
But De La Cruz says he often doesn’t like what he hears from Democrats, and says the Republican Party, including Trump, has been speaking to his concerns as Christian.
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The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission has asked Trump to consider the following five policies in his first 100 days. Four of the five have to do with abortion:
- Reinforce policies that ensure the government does not fund abortion.
- Withhold government funding for abortion providers, domestically and abroad.
- Revoke President Biden’s executive order directing agencies to implement radical gender and sexuality policies.
- Rescind the anti-life, anti-religious liberty, and pro-gender ideology policies advanced by the Biden administration.
- Reverse the Biden administration’s actions that expanded “access” to the abortion pill.
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Here is Jewish Telegraph Agency on Pete Hegseth’s tattoos. Hegseth is Trump’s pick for Secretary of Defense:
One of Hesgeth’s most prominent tattoos is a large Jerusalem cross on his chest, a symbol featuring a large cross potent with smaller Greek crosses in each of its four quadrants. The symbol was used in the Crusades and represented the Kingdom of Jerusalem that the Crusaders established.
Crusader symbols have also grown popular on the far-right, which sees the imagery as a nod to an era of European Christian wars against Muslims and Jews. The shooter who committed the 2019 New Zealand mosque massacre had adopted symbols of the Crusades, and a crusader symbol also appeared at the Jan. 6, 2021, riot in the U.S. Capitol as well as at the 2017 far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Hegseth has said his tattoo kept him away from President Joe Biden’s inauguration just two weeks after Jan. 6.
“I was in the National Guard during the inauguration of Joe Biden, so I served under Bush, served under Obama, served under Trump, and now was going to guard the inauguration because I was in the D.C. guard,” he told Fox in June. “Ultimately, members of my unit in leadership deemed that I was an extremist or a white nationalist because of a tattoo I have, which is a religious tattoo. It’s a Jerusalem cross. Everybody can look it up, but it was used as a premise to revoke my orders to guard the inauguration.”
Hegseth also has “Deus Vult,” Latin for “God wills it,” tattooed on his bicep. The phrase was used as a rallying cry for the First Crusade in 1096. It is also the closing sentence of Hegseth’s 2020 book, titled “American Crusade.”
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One prominent member of the Christian Right is speaking up. Mat Staver of the Liberty Counsel, a Christian Right religious liberty organization, opposes Trump’s pick of Matt Gaetz as attorney general:
Mat Staver, founder and chairman of the Christian legal ministry Liberty Counsel in Orlando, fired off a blistering takedown the congressman on Thursday in a statement titled, “Matt Gaetz is not qualified to be U.S. Attorney General.”
“President-elect Donald Trump has quickly named many good choices to serve in his cabinet. But Matt Gaetz is not one of them,” Staver wrote.
“The nomination of Matt Gaetz as Attorney General is shocking and disappointing to those who have followed this man and the lurid scandals and serious allegations of sex parties and drugs during his tenure in the U.S. Congress. The resignation of Gaetz immediately after his name surfaced for Attorney General is inexplicable except for the fact this resignation now ends the U.S. House Ethics probe.
“Obviously, Gaetz does not want America to know the result of the Ethics investigation. Matt Gaetz has neither the experience nor the moral character to serve as the highest law enforcement officer of the United States of America. Gaetz should do President Trump and all of America a favor and withdraw his name from consideration. This will save him considerable embarrassment. America deserves better.”
More on this story here.
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Here is Albert Mohler on the Matt Gaetz nomination for attorney general. At no point does Mohler oppose the pick:
President Trump has not yet indicated his pick for Treasury secretary, again, one of the big four positions, but he did announce yesterday that he will be nominating Matt Gaetz, congressman from Florida, as the Attorney General of the United States. Now, of all the appointments, the President-elect has announced this one is likely to get the most interesting coverage and frankly, to face the most scrutiny in the United States Senate. Matt Gaetz, let’s just state the obvious, and I think he would take this as a compliment rather than a criticism and that tells you something, he has been one of the most controversial figures in the U.S House of Representatives on the Republican side. That’s a role he has played because it is a role he has chosen. Now in a normal state of affairs in the United States, that would be a disqualifying factor when it comes to serving in the Cabinet in a high presidential appointed position, much less than one of the big four of these positions in the Cabinet.
But President Trump is a disrupter, and this is a disruptive appointment. It is one that is going to bring a great deal of opposition, not just based upon Matt Gaetz and his policies, but based upon all kinds of things, including the fact that he has faced charges of misconduct, although a federal investigation did not move forward, which means he should be presumed innocent just like anyone else, which means in a general sense, he moves forward with the presumption of innocence, but he’s a controversial figure, and he has courted that controversy. And that’s why Donald Trump likes him, but it’s going to be very interesting to see how that fares, how the nomination fares in the United States Senate. And so you look at these big four positions, we’ll take the Treasury secretary and put it in a separate category because President Trump has not yet made that announcement.
But as you look at a proposed Secretary of State Marco Rubio and then a proposed Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and then a proposed Attorney General of the United States Matt Gaetz, we just need to note you are looking at almost sure to be confirmed in Marco Rubio, likely to be confirmed with a little more attention when it comes to Pete Hegseth, and well, likely to be confirmed because of the Republican majority in the Senate and the strength that President Trump support, likely to be confirmed Matt Gaetz, but that one is going to be a lot more colorful. And that’s because this is a political reality, which is to say that even though most Republicans are likely to go along with this, the reality is that the Democrats are going to make as much political hay out of this process as they possibly can.
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Let’s see what is going on at X:
Ryan Helfenbein of Liberty University’s Standing for Freedom Center reflects on Trump’s cabinet appointments. In the midst of his references to the “Deep State,” the “Washington cabal,” and the “Washington uni-party,” he seems concerned about some of these appointments, but he won’t say who they are. (My guess: Matt Gaetz as Attorney General and Robert F. Kennedy as Health and Human Services secretary.)
Apparently Vivek is NOT one of the appointments Helfenbein is worried about:
It looks like the Faith & Freedom Coalition is going to ignore RFK’s views on abortion and, instead, publicize this:
Faith & Freedom Coalition is all in:
Lance praises God for a pro-abortion nominee:
The “tide is turning”:
Lance has been praying for the “George Soros of the Right”:
Is this a prophecy or just un-Spirit-led political commentary?:
Lance seems more interested in “owning the libs” than the quality of Trump’s appointments. He loves his enemies:
Charlie Kirk is all in on pro-choice RFK:
Eric Metaxas loves RFK Jr. Something tells me that abortion doesn’t matter any more to these MAGA evangelicals:
Thank God for Elon!:
Now Metaxas appears to like Biden:
I have no idea what this means. If this tweet was submitted by one of my students I would tell him to go back and rewrite for clarity:
Tony Perkins’s guest does not think recess appointments are a good idea:
“God is at work”:
Apparently “biblically informed wisdom” means electing a guy who appoints to his cabinet a Fox News host with combat experience, a former congressman under ethics violations for sex trafficking, and a vaccine-denier who is pro-choice.
No word yet on what Owen thinks about the pro-choice RFK nomination for HHS secretary:
Denny Burk will not be swayed by the RFK-love in some sectors of MAGA evangelicalism:
Ditto for Tom Buck:
Andrew T. Walker, a Trump voter and Project 2025 fan, is not happy about the Gaetz pick:
If they are MAGA, Sean Feucht doesn’t care about abortion:
Christianity Today podcaster Mike Cosper sees clearly:
Balls and strikes:
Thanks to Emma Bell for her assistance with this roundup