A more honest evangelical defense of Trump

Jerry Falwell Jr. says he's never spoken to Trump about faith. Wait, what?

President Trump.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images, Digital Vision ii/Alamy Stock Photo)

Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. is among the loudest public champions of President Trump, touting himself as the voice of the 81 percent of white evangelicals who voted for the president in 2016. Yet Falwell also says he's never spoken to Trump about faith: "I've never talked to him about that in particular," he said in an interview with The Ringer.

This is a curious honesty, a markedly different strategy than is typically employed in evangelical defenses of Trump. Yet, in a strange way, it is far preferable to the unconvincing affects of piety we more often encounter.

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.