Current is grateful for P&R Publishing’s permission to serialize Marvin Olasky’s memoir, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment.
ACT 5: Turbulence and Contentment, 2015-2023
Chapter 19: What Trumps Trump?
Now, after chapters on good times, here’s a brief look at what goes wrong. A foretaste comes in September 2012, when King’s College president Dinesh D’Souza is the keynote speaker at a Christian apologetics conference in Spartanburg, South Carolina. He’s married but attends the conference with a woman not his wife. He introduces her as his fiancée. They apparently share a hotel room.
When World reporter Warren Cole Smith hears about this from a friend who is a conference organizer, he brings the story to me. I haven’t written about or talked with reporters about D’Souza since leaving King’s twenty months earlier, but the conflict of interest is obvious, so I recuse myself from having anything to do with this story. Other editors decide it’s newsworthy, given D’Souza’s prominence as a college president and $10,000-per-speech talker to Christian groups that should know about his semi-private life before they engage him publicly.
The uproar is enormous, as are guffaws when D’Souza says, “I had no idea that it is considered wrong in Christian circles to be engaged prior to being divorced.” World’s board is not amused. I’m at a regularly scheduled board meeting right after the news breaks. Several directors say World should not have published the story since it will hurt the reputation of one of Barack Obama’s sharpest critics and thus help the president’s reelection effort.
I defend the decision, but the usual smiles have turned to frowns. Then my phone buzzes with news that I immediately read to the World board: “The Board of Trustees of The King’s College in New York City has accepted the resignation of its president, Dinesh D’Souza, effective immediately.” Had not that decision come then, vindicating World’s approach, I’m not sure what would have happened. On that day, God mercifully delivers us from an impasse, and the directors and I go on our merry ways.
Three years later, the disagreement is more intense. The backstory: Ralph Reed in 1999 says the United States needs “leaders who can set a moral example for our children.” Polls of other “white evangelicals” show agreement with that sensibility: a poll in 2011 finds only 30 percent of them saying an immoral person could be a good president. That year, though, Reed begins promoting Donald Trump, and others also work behind the scenes. A poll in 2015 shows opinions have flipped: now 72 percent of white evangelicals say immorality is not a disqualifier.
In the early 2016 primaries, Trump doesn’t get most evangelical votes—but then he becomes the front-runner and many run with him. Some say Trump shares their faith, since he feels “cleansed” when during the Lord’s Supper he drinks “my little wine” and eats “my little cracker.” Others see him as “God’s anointed” in a special way, a modern King Cyrus of Persia (who permitted a rebuilding of the temple in Jerusalem). Some turn Trump negatives into positives. Southern Baptist megachurch pastor Robert Jeffress does not want a president “who’s going to turn the other cheek. . . . I want the meanest, toughest SOB I can find.”
In September 2016, while Trump is soaring, Susan and I fly to Sydney, Australia. One reason is to interview and profile Lyle Shelton, the steadfast head of the Australian Christian Lobby. By maintaining a civil public presence he earns respect even from those who disagree with his views. It’s our first time in Australia. We’re charmed by our temporary home and its surrounding palm trees flush with ibises and other birds unfamiliar to us.
During the sixteen-hour flight from Sydney to Los Angeles, I think of Shelton’s trustworthiness and consider the just-released Access Hollywood tapes of Trump crudely bragging about wielding power and money to force himself sexually on women. At night on the plane as other passengers sleep, I pace the aisles, keeping up my string of ten-thousand-step days and trying to figure out what World should do.
This presidential campaign is the hardest one in my experience since 1972, when I vote for George McGovern in the Oregon primary and spend November’s election day in Moscow. Since then I’ve always voted for the Republican presidential candidate. In early September 2016, World staffers are split. The more pragmatic don’t like Trump but reluctantly support him. The more idealistic plan to vote third party or stay home. I’m not aware of any Hillary Clinton supporters at World.
Until September, World covers the presidential campaign issue by issue, showing rather than telling. Readers don’t object when we run a cover story about Clinton’s pro-abortion voting record and pair it with an illustration of the Grim Reaper wearing an “I’m with Her” button. Then come the Access Hollywood tapes. While pacing the airplane, I remember how in 1998 World’s cover story says Bill Clinton should resign. How can we do anything less now? If we fail to treat the scandals similarly, it will show that we are Republicans first and Christians second, a tempting pivot but one I’ve been fighting my whole adult life.
On the flights from Los Angeles to Atlanta and on to Asheville, I write a statement noting that “a Clinton resignation would have been good for America’s moral standards in 1998. A Trump step-aside would be good for America’s moral standards in 2016.” My column concludes, “We don’t know if God will rescue our nation from the pit into which our politics have fallen. We don’t know if He will rescue World from the ire some Trump supporters will feel. We hope and pray that He will—but if He doesn’t, He is still God, holding the future of individuals and nations in His hands.”
It’s a personal column, but after several days of discussion and editing, all World’s senior journalists want in on it—so we run it near the beginning of the issue with a “By Marvin Olasky & The Editors” byline. I give a heads-up to World’s business executives so they can prepare for the financial consequences. We know reader reaction will be more severe than World experienced in 2006 after riling Jim Dobson. The execs acknowledge it’s my
decision to make. We go to press.
The reaction of World’s board members is ferocious. One says we should destroy all the printed issues. We do not. The next week board members arrive in Asheville for Joel Belz’s seventy-fifth birthday party and a board meeting. It’s a happy occasion, but the mood is tense. I interview Joel onstage in front of the audience. He notes that editorial independence is integral to World’s reputation for integrity and fairness.
At the next day’s meeting, complaints reflect two general concerns. First, board members say we’ve handed the election to Hillary Clinton. Second, some people—including friends and colleagues of board members—will think our editorial reflects the views of the whole organization. I offer a simple
fix to correct the second problem: the vice chairman can write a column supporting Trump, and we’ll print it.
The first concern does not have an easy resolution. Board members truly fear that a Clinton win is an existential threat to the United States. And yet, many of the members hear from their adult children that they are proud of World’s stand. That softens some board opposition. The board resolves that future columns should return to our pattern of representing the views of individual writers. That’s fine with me. I text Susan midafternoon: “Meeting adjourned, still employed, no huge problems.”
After leaving the meeting it’s time to respond to the two thousand emails, calls, and letters piling in, five times as many as with any previous story. Four-fifths are like this: “Trump is our only chance of getting our nation back on the course our Constitution delineates. . . . This race is about the survival of our country as a free nation. . . . We are not electing a religious leader, we are electing a political leader that will change the United States of America FOREVER. . . . You should be spanked.”
One of five has this kind of comment: “With all of the Evangelicals diving off like lemmings to support Trump at all costs, it was such a relief to find you all crying loudly against the tide when remaining silent would have been easier.” Other notes are poignant: “I’ve subscribed for twenty years. You’ve been like a member of the family. We talked about your columns around the dinner table. But now, cancel my subscription.
I respond to this reader, and others who write similarly, with what Abraham Lincoln wrote in a letter to a secessionist friend: “I am loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.” I continue, “His plea did not work, but I understand his ending with its poetic note about ‘the mystic chords of memory’—so please go in peace, and we’re glad to have been of service for so many years.”
