Insurrection At The Capitol: Live Updates : NPR
Members of the audience react as President Trump delivers remarks at an Evangelicals for Trump coalition launch at the King Jesus International Ministry in Miami on Jan. 3, 2020.
Tom Brenner/Reuters
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Tom Brenner/Reuters
Members of the audience react as President Trump delivers remarks at an Evangelicals for Trump coalition launch at the King Jesus International Ministry in Miami on Jan. 3, 2020.
Tom Brenner/Reuters
As fallout continues from the deadly siege on the U.S. Capitol, Ed Stetzer, head of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, has a message for his fellow evangelicals: it’s time for a reckoning.
Evangelicals, he says, should look at how their own behaviors and actions may have helped fuel the insurrection. White evangelicals overwhelmingly supported President Trump in the 2020 election.
Some in the protest crowd raised signs with Christian symbolism and phrases.
“Part of this reckoning is: How did we get here? How were we so easily fooled by conspiracy theories?” he tells NPR’s Rachel Martin. “We need to make clear who we are. And our allegiance is to King Jesus, not to what boasting political leader might come next.”
In the interview, Stetzer also laments that evangelicals seem to have changed their view of morality in order to support Trump.
“So I think we just need to be honest. A big part of this evangelical reckoning is a lot of people sold out their beliefs,” he says.
Here are excerpts from the Morning Edition conversation.
You write that “many evangelicals are seeing Donald Trump for who he is.” Do you really think that’s true? There have been so many other things that Trump has said and done over the past four to five years that betray Christian values and their support didn’t waver. You think this time it’s different?
I think it’s a fair question and I’ve been one for years who was saying we need to see more clearly who Donald Trump is and has often not been listened to. But I would say that for many people, the storming of the Capitol, the desecration of our halls of democracy, has shocked and stunned a lot of people and how President Trump has engaged in riling up crowds to accomplish these things. Yeah, I do think so. I think there are some significant and important conversations that we need to have inside of evangelicalism asking the question: What happened? Why were so many people drawn to somebody who was obviously so not connected to what evangelicals believe by his life or his practices or more.
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