Wallace Henley asks Trump to stop embarrassing Christians
Wallace Henley, an associate pastor at Houston’s Second Baptist Church, went on TheDove TV’s “Focus Today” program, to discuss an open letter penned to the President. The intent behind the letter being to persuade Donald Trump to start acting more like a Christian, and for others in the religious right to press Trump on his abyssal failure to bear Christian witness.
“I believe its time for President Trump to understand very clearly that he’s in the Oval Office — on the capital of the conservative Christian vote — and I think its time for him to stop embarrassing us and giving a very bad witness to what we stand for with respect to his language, and with respect to his demeanor and many of his public appearances,” Henley said. “He identifies himself as being one with himself, I’ve been in politics long enough to develop a little bit of cynicism. I want to see him act like a Christian. Instead of proposing by his mouth that he is one of us.”
“There have been so many studies done about the relationship of the national mood and the national style with the presidency itself,” Henley continued. “We’ve had some very poor Presidents morally. There’s a whole book on the dark age of Camelot, that talks about the kind of behavior that characterized the Kennedy administration, that the left gets so excited about. They made him a hero. The same thing is true with the Johnson administration, with Nixon, I prayed with Nixon, and was shocked — shocked beyond belief to read the words that were on the tapes in the Oval Office. Now, here’s the way I feel about Trump. Trump is doing things that are very important. He’s standing for life. He made the most eloquent defense of religious freedom before the United Nations. He called it like it is, and I appreciate that very, very, very much. But there are a couple of elements in his style that are really bearing a bad witness. For example, when he used the GD word in one of his speeches, recently. I thought about the fact that we evangelicals, and all conservative Christians, our greatest passion is to help people not be damned to hell.”
“And for the President of the United States, not even Nixon would do that in public; but for the President of the United States to use that kind of language greatly affects the tone in our culture,” he said. “The second item that I have very great concern about, is his ad hominem, in political discourse we talk about ad hominem in contrast to an issue’s focused address, or an issue’s focused speech. Ad hominem attacks the person, and not the issue, and the issue is what needs to be attacked. Not the person. So, when he identifies Schiff, for example, as pencil neck. And he uses these terms that are not presidential its a great concern to me and I think it has an impact on the political discourse of the nation. Now, I understand fully why Trump has to be tough — he’s got to be tough, it is a tough, tough place, and the left is doing everything to bring him down.”
Later in the program Henley was pressed about whether prominent, visible religious right figures would call out Trump, for his language and unchristian-like characteristics — Henley said no.
Prominent televangelist Pat Robertson started to sour on Trump in early October, warning the President not to follow through with his decision to withdraw U.S. troops from northern Syria (he did): “The President of the United States is in great danger of losing the mandate of Heaven if he permits this to happen.”
In mid-September, Right Wing Watch reported Henley said that Adolf Hitler was an example of someone who “rose up by the permissive will of God” as a form of judgment, but that God also makes an “intentional choice [of a leader] who will bring great blessing on a nation.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2mxmEYJzUHQ&feature=youtu.be