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Sunday, December 22, 2019

Is there such a word as "theosniper?" The reason I ask, ...

Strib carrying an AP feed titled, "Evangelical tussling over anti-Trump editorial escalates," featuring coverage of one camp of true believers sniping at another, with fire back, leading to the headline question. Of note in the report:

100 conservative evangelicals closed ranks further around Trump on Sunday.

In a letter to the president of Christianity Today magazine, the group of evangelicals chided Editor-in-Chief Mark Galli for penning an anti-Trump editorial, published Thursday, that they portrayed as a dig at their characters as well as the president’s.

“Your editorial offensively questioned the spiritual integrity and Christian witness of tens-of-millions of believers who take seriously their civic and moral obligations,” the evangelicals wrote to the magazine’s president, Timothy Dalrymple.

The new offensive from the group of prominent evangelicals, including multiple members of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, signals a lingering awareness by the president’s backers that any meaningful crack in his longtime support from that segment of the Christian community could prove perilous for his reelection hopes.

[...] “We're not looking for saints. We do have private sins, ongoing patterns of behavior that reveal themselves in our private life that we're all trying to work on,” Galli said Sunday. “But a president has certain responsibilities as a public figure to display a certain level of public character and public morality.”

Galli referred comment on Sunday’s evangelical letter to Dalrymple, who on Sunday published his own strongly worded defense of the magazine's anti-Trump commentary.

Countering Trump's suggestion that the magazine had shifted to favor liberals, Dalrymple wrote that the publication is in fact “theologically conservative” and “does not endorse candidates.”

“Out of love for Jesus and his church, not for political partisanship or intellectual elitism, this is why we feel compelled to say that the alliance of American evangelicalism with this presidency has wrought enormous damage to Christian witness,” Dalrymple wrote.

Asked about the editorial’s indictment of Trump by “Fox News Sunday,” Marc Short – chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, himself a prominent evangelical Christian – cited some of the policy positions that have helped endear the president to many in that voting bloc.

“For a lot of us who are celebrating the birth of our Savior this week, the way that we look at it is that this president has helped to save thousands of similar unplanned pregnancies,” Short said Sunday, adding that “no president has been a greater ally to Israel than this president.”

Short might consider a sincerity session with an agent of his "Savior." Throwing the little embryo snake onto the Trump\impeachment discussion podium ought to be counseled as an overreach. As a grotesquely insane thing to interject into an already strange situation. If he wants to talk about the embryos I want to talk about casino bankruptcies, hush money, bonespurs and flying monkeys of the one witch in the Wizard of Oz. In going off point, go way off point.