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Trump gets rebuked by a Christian newspaper--in Sweden [1]
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Date: 2025-06-01
During Trump’s first run for president, one of the few evangelical luminaries who didn’t rush to grab a MAGA hat was Erick Erickson. In September 2016, he made clear that Trump’s unwillingness to repent for his depravities or ask forgiveness showed that he didn’t understand “Christianity 101”—and suggested that Trump could “poison the church from within.”
Granted, Erickson supported Trump’s other bids for president. But he has been remarkably prescient about evangelicals twisting themselves into a pretzel to support The Messiah, Lord Donald Trump, The Most Merciful. For instance, in 2019, Mark Galli, editor-in-chief of Christianity Today—the magazine founded by Billy Graham—called for Trump to be impeached and removed over his shakedown of Ukraine. In response, a who’s who of evangelical leaders slammed the piece as a swipe at “tens-of-millions of believers who take seriously their civic and moral obligations.”
To its credit, Christianity Today didn’t join other evangelicals in bowing and praying to the orange god that the religious right made. In 2022, it named one of the more prominent evangeliical never-Trumpers, Russell Moore, as editor-in-chief. Just a year later, Moore decried the growing tendency among some evangelicals to denounce pastors who quote the Sermon on the Mount for peddling “woke liberal nonsense.”
Fortunately, at least one Christian publication outside this country sees things more clearly, as I note at my Substack. Recently, Dagen, a Christian newspaper in Sweden, ran an op-ed calling Trump out for the manner in which he peddled the shibboleth of white genocide in South Africa. In so doing, it made an argument that, on paper, shouldn’t be even remotely controversial—it’s incumbent upon Christians to call a lie a lie.
A few years ago, I got in touch with Pentecostals and Charismatics for Peace and Justice, a collection of charismatics and Pentecostals with a social conscience. It may seem like an anomaly in this country, where tongue-talkers are invariably associated with the rich and powerful. But a significant number of charismatics and Pentecostals outside North America tilt progressive. I’m friends on Facebook with one prominent PCPJ member, Swedish Pentecostal evangelist and self-described “charismactivist” Micael Grenholm. When he shared this Dagen article on his Facebook feed, the title almost jumped off my phone when I translated it in Google Chrome—“Be careful, little Trump, what you spread.”
The article’s author, Dagen editor Erik Helmerson, came away from watching Trump peddle the “white genocide” baloney before South African president Cyril Ramaphosa shaking his head. In case you missed it, Trump played a video purporting to show a leading Black South African politician calling for whites to be slaughtered, then cut to a field supposedly showing the graves of “more than a thousand white farmers.” As we know by now, the politician was actually Julius Malema, who has gone from ANC youth leader to the leader of a fringe party akin to the old Black Panthers. And those weren’t the graves of a thousand people, but only two—Glen and Vida Rafferty, who really were killed in 2020.
For Helmerson, this brought to mind a Sunday School song that formed the basis of his headline—“O Be Careful, Little Eyes.”
Helmerson thought that Trump would do well to remember that song. After all, we find ourselves rolling our eyes once again at how, as he puts it, “the world’s most powerful man continues to lie with pictures.”
In the social media era, we frequently make our arguments with memes and videos. Trump takes that to an extreme—a disturbing one, in Helmerson’s view.
Donald Trump represents a type of politician who doesn't care about being right as long as he gets it right. Creating a meme, planting an image to gain a loud opinion for himself in the short term, this becomes the be-all and end-all of his political work.
Helmerson argues that Christians shouldn’t stand for this behavior if they really believe that “there is an absolute truth and that it is that which will set us free.” For him, it’s not partisan, but simply “living as we teach.” As he sees it, “a true word speaks louder than a thousand fake pictures.”
Imagine something like this running in a Christian publication on this side of the Atlantic. Based on the reaction to that CT piece calling for Trump’s impeachment, heads would explode. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t raised in the evangelical world, but I don’t understand how it’s even remotely controversial for Christians to stand up against alternative facts and blatant lies. Obviously, our friends in Sweden have a better understanding of “Christianity 101” than we do.
For more like this, head over to my Substack, Loud, Liberal, Christian. A paid subscription would be much appreciated, as it helps support my work as I settle into my new life in West Michigan.
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