Category: Church

Dr. Al Mohler doubled down on his criticism and blame on Donald Trump for the raucous events at the Capitol building yesterday, with the Southern Baptist President-elect accusing Trump of inciting rioters to attempt insurrection.

Mohler took to the Briefing to address his role in light of voting for him in November, saying that he did not regret voting for the President at the time, and yet had no idea how bad he would be in his waning days.

“What we saw yesterday was the fact that President Trump had incited demonstrators to come to Washington DC for what was advertised as a Save America March, which we are told was organized in order to support President Trump’s assertions that he had actually won the election, and thus that the Congress meeting in joint session presided over by the vice president, as president of the Senate, should declare that he, rather than Joe Biden, had actually won the election.”

and

I’ll speak bluntly. I voted for Donald Trump for president of the United States. I encouraged others to vote for him too.

Based upon the binary choice we faced on November the third, I believe then that that was the right action to take, and going back to November the third, I would do the same thing again.

And that’s because I do not follow a cult of personality. I am committed as a Christian to certain moral principles, to certain political principles that I believe are derived from biblical Christianity, and faced with the same decision, and knowing what I knew, then I would have to take the same actions in support of those policies, principles, indeed, even the platform of the respective parties. In this case support for the Republican platform rather than the Democratic platform.

But what we saw in Washington, what we heard from the president, the United States, not just yesterday, but in recent days is an attempt to subvert the very constitutional order that he took an oath of office to defend. 

In an interview with Robert Downen of the Houston Chronicles, Mohler was pressed on some of the particulars of his points, saying that if he could do it differently, he would. When asked what sort of role he and other #BigEva leaders (our word) had in endorsing Trump, Mohler was contemplative but defensive.

I fully expect the question, but I’ve tried to be extremely clear from the beginning of the Trump phenomenon in terms of my judgment.

And I stand by the comments that I’ve made at every point. If I could rewind history, and know then what I know now, we’d be talking about a different kind of judgment.

But we have to live life in a temporal line and seek to be faithful in those moments. And for most evangelical Christians, voting for Donald Trump was seen as a necessity in a binary system.

Now, there have been some who have just openly celebrated Trump. But I think there will be a great deal of embarrassment for that now.

and

But what we have seen is the is the true character of Donald Trump come out in a way that I do find not — that I don’t accept was merely inevitable.

He bears full responsibility for his actions and his words. And he bears full responsibility for encouraging what amounted to an attempted insurrection against the United States government.

Mohler finishes off with words of regret, it seems. You can picture him looking past the interviewer, with an unresponsive and unfocused gaze and a far off look of horror in his eyes, seeing what only he can, as he hoarsely whispers:

I don’t believe that there is any inevitability to Donald Trump’s actions, for which he is responsible, over the last several weeks. I did not believe that he was going to go quietly into any potential defeat. But what we have seen is something beyond what, frankly, I would have imagined in an American nightmare.