Falwell:"A poor person never gave anyone a job. A poor person never gave anybody charity, not of any real volume. It’s just common sense to me."
We have elected a doomsday cult...
Like most of Trump’s evangelical supporters, Falwell has never tried to claim that Trump is a good person. But it’s helpful to see his argument for why that doesn’t matter. The idea of dividing God’s sovereignty into “two kingdoms” comes from the 16th-century reformer Martin Luther, and it generally refers to a kind of separation between church and state: the idea that spiritual righteousness and civil righteousness are two different things, as economist Lyman Stone put it last year in a helpful essay titled “Two Kingdom Theology in the Trump Era.” In more extreme versions, however, the doctrine is used to dismiss the prospect that individual morality is relevant to the ruling of the state. As Falwell put it, “Jesus never told Caesar how to run Rome.” And it’s a “distortion,” he said, to imagine that the country as a whole should love its neighbors and help the poor just because Jesus told individuals to do so. Some interpreters have used the doctrine’s renewed popularity as evidence that Luther paved the way for Trump.
Tyler Huckabee, an editor at Relevant magazine, pointed out that Falwell’s willingness to cleave the personal and the political puts him at odds with his own institution. Liberty University, founded by Falwell’s televangelist father, has a mission statement that promotes “a commitment to the Christian life, one of personal integrity, sensitivity to the needs of others, social responsibility and active communication of the Christian faith.” That’s boilerplate evangelical language, and it implies a kind of natural blending of the spiritual and the political that is hard to square with Falwell’s breezy dismissal of the importance of morality in the public square.
At one point, reporter Joe Heim asked Falwell whether there is anything Trump could do that would endanger his support from Falwell and other evangelical leaders. He answered, simply, “No.” His explanation was a textbook piece of circular reasoning: Trump wants what’s best for the country, therefore anything he does is good for the country.