Justin Welby, archbishop of Canterbury. Photo by U.S. Department of State, Courtesy of Wikipedia.
The primate of the Church of England said over the weekend he can’t understand why evangelical Christians in the United States support President Donald Trump.
Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, was asked about this connection on an interview show in England, and he not only answered the question, but let us all know how brave he was for doing it.
“There’s two things going through my mind: do I say what I think, or do I say what I should say?” the Most Reverend said.
(This distinction, by the way, is correct – and more so than the archbishop thinks.)
“And I’m going to say what I think,” he continued. “No, I don’t understand it. I really genuinely do not understand where that is coming from.”
But Trump can be relieved about one thing: if he visits Britain as president, Archbishop Welby would deign to attend a state dinner even with Trump there.
“I meet lots of other people as well,” Welby said. “I spent years and years involved in conflict stuff around the world where I met people who had killed many, many people.”
So Trump, the president of the United States, not only isn’t worthy of the support of Christians, he’s in the category of, say, Idi Amin?
What is CNN International feeding these people?
Let’s be charitable and assume that Welby doesn’t know much about Trump or about the United States. He’s possibly aware that 80 percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump in November 2016, according to exit polls.
Is there a chance they might know something about Trump that Welby doesn’t?
Is there a chance that they might know something about Christianity that Welby doesn’t?
Most evangelicals in America oppose abortion. (So does Welby’s Church of England, sort of. You can wade through the “conditions” and “rare occasions” here, if you want to.) In 2016, Hillary Clinton was the pro-abortion candidate. Donald Trump was the pro-life candidate. (And, so far, has delivered.)
The interviewer apparently didn’t ask about another group of Christians in America, Roman Catholics, but they too had religious reasons to be concerned: Hillary was all set to continue the Obama Administration’s war on the Little Sisters of the Poor, and some of her key staff members talked privately about the need for a “Catholic Spring,” as if Church leaders were like Arab or Communist dictators.
Then there were other issues, like borders, taxes, and national defense, on which committed Christians may also have been attracted to Trump for non-religious reasons.
These matters are well known to American voters, and don’t come as a surprise.
What is surprising is Welby’s response about a committed Christian in his own country who ran into trouble earlier this year for refusing to walk away from his faith.
Tim Farron is a left-wing politician in England who was the leader of the Liberal Democrats, a center-left political party in the United Kingdom. As leader he supported the left-wing agenda, even unto civil same-sex marriage. But he had an Achilles heel: people knew he was an evangelical Protestant. So he got asked not only about public policy, but whether he believed that feeling sexually attracted to members of the same sex is a sin. No, he said.
“Being gay is not a sin. And as a committed Christian, I believe: judge absolutely nobody,” Farron said during a television interview in April.
But that wasn’t good enough. He also got asked whether he thought sex acts between members of the same sex is a sin. (A la Leviticus, Corinthians, Romans …)
To that he wouldn’t answer, saying it was irrelevant to public policy. But even silence wasn’t acceptable to some in his party, who forced him out.
Farron, announcing his resignation in June, said: “The consequences of the focus on my faith is that I have found myself torn between living as a faithful Christian and serving as a political leader. … To be a political leader – especially of a progressive, liberal party in 2017 – and to live as a committed Christian, to hold faithfully to the Bible’s teaching, has felt impossible for me.”
Sound shocking?
Not as much as this one. For Farron, as he himself pointed out, isn’t a religious leader. What would a man of the cloth say?
ITV hasn’t released the video of its Sunday interview with Archbishop Welby. But according to ITV’s write-up, the interviewer asked the archbishop about Farron.
Welby, according to ITV, said he had “sympathy both for Mr. Farron and for people that took offen[s]e to his comments.”
“I think it’s one of those push-button issues which is really, really difficult to deal with,” Welby said.
Keep in mind that there were two sides here: The persecutors, who wanted Farron to say he personally believes that same-sex sex acts aren’t sinful, even though the Bible says they are; and the persecutee, who supported the pro-homosexuality agenda publicly but didn’t want to say what he personally believes about same-sex sex acts.
And to that, Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, could only say he sympathizes with both the Christian and the lions.
The question isn’t why Christians in America support President Donald Trump. The question is:
Does Archbishop Justin Welby support Christians in England?
Matt McDonald is Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of New Boston Post. Read other articles by him here.
Justin Welby, archbishop of Canterbury. Photo by U.S. Department of State, Courtesy of Wikipedia. 
