Should A Christian Vote for Donald Trump?

I was visiting one of our church shut-ins the other day. He’s one of my favorite people.  A special and Godly 95 year old man who scoots around just fine without the help of a cane or walker and is still quite bright.  We talk about a lot of things but at one point when our conversation started to come to a lull I figured I would venture into some new territory.  So I asked him if he’s been following politics this year and if he had caught any of the debates.  The next words out of his mouth were “boy that guy sure is a blowhard!”  This was the harshest thing I’ve ever heard him say about anyone.  The funny thing is Donald Trump’s name had not been mentioned yet and it didn’t need to be for me to know exactly who he was talking about.  I’m quite sure as you read this you knew exactly who he was talking about as well.

Now this is my blog and not the church pulpit so I’m willing to talk at least a little politics when it seems appropriate and now seems to be an appropriate time.  As a pastor I would never tell anyone who I think they should vote for, but for at least this year I think I’ve become comfortable with the idea of telling you who not to vote for.  Needless to say, this if just a personal opinion, but here it goes.  If you are a Christian (someone who chooses to follow Jesus and His teachings) please don’t vote for Donald Trump.  Perhaps that’s putting the cart before the horse because many of you may not have the opportunity to.  If you are a registered Democrat you can’t vote in the Republican primary and my strong feeling is he won’t win the nomination and no one will have a chance to vote for him as our next president anyway.  So to re-word my premise; if  you take your Christian faith seriously, and you have the chance to vote for the Donald, please don’t.

I base this request on one qualification I do my best to look for in any candidate running for any office.  That is, is he or she Christ-like?  Obviously none of us are perfect and measure up to Jesus in that sense but I think we can look at candidates and tell which ones are trying to be Christ-like, and for that matter which ones even have a clue about what it might mean to be Christ-like.  On that front Trump has no clue.  We often think of Jesus as modeling servant-leadership.  Trump on the other hand is considered by most as an ego-maniacal narcissistic manipulative leader.  Jesus truly cared about the least of these and the poor and the oppressed.  Based on his blanket generalizations of immigrants and his childish name calling it would seem that Trump cares very little about the least of these.  I say that believing there are other candidates who may have a tough on immigration stance but the still care about immigrants.  I just don’t think Trump is one of them.  Jesus taught dignity for all people.  All we have to do is look at how Trump has treated women and the things he has said about them both in personal relationships and from afar to know he fails the “treat others with dignity test" miserably. 

I could go on but I think you get the idea.  I don’t necessarily expect any of you who may be planning to vote for Trump to follow my advice, but I sure feel better having got it off my chest.