Last week, I spoke at a purportedly evangelical Christian college in Vancouver, Canada, where I encountered, to my utter and complete surprise, the worst forms of hate.
Knowing I had written columns supporting Donald Trump, the faculty and some students protested my speaking and lambasted my lecture.
This was despite my efforts to write the editorials supporting Trump from a moderate and reasoned perspective. Perhaps my mistake was to think that my writing could persuade by suggesting the need for a more inclusive and less elitist political process.
The topic for the lecture at Regent College addressed the question of how we can go about building good, ethical corporations. My focus, I believed, was about morals, values and culture – not about politics, although that is how the protesting faculty and students chose to interpret my purpose in being there, as well as the lecture content I delivered.
On the day of my lecture, the college newspaper, named “&c,” whatever that means, had a front-page article attacking my speech and views.
The article read as follows:
We imagine some of you are astonished by the political debacle taking place to your south. Donald Trump, whose electrifying demagoguery has garnered a frenzy of support from people – many of whom are professing Christians – in the USA appalls us.
Like some notorious politicians and dictators before him, Donald Trump had galvanized his followers by playing to people’s fears and channeling their anger toward easy targets like ethnic minorities and immigrants, whom he, among other things, accuses of taking American jobs.
Put simply, Trump, playing the strong man, is providing scapegoats to people who want someone to blame for personal and societal disappointments, and they love him for it.
In everything he is doing, he is fueling the narrative that we live in a dog-eat-dog world and that he is the alpha dog that can ensure that his constituents have enough. Trump’s self-aggrandizing power is idolatrous: it depends upon the denigration of the powerless. He is robing himself in falsehood to appear as one with authority, but ultimately, this emperor has no clothes.
Now, I was treated rudely, disregarded and accused of hate – but let’s unpack the rhetoric in this logic a bit to see who the real haters are.
The idea that my editorials on Trump might be fairly argued and moderately written appears to be antithetical to the far-left Bernie socialists, including former weathermen and now the overtly aggressive Black Lives Matter radicals who populate today’s protest marches, mixed together with anarchists from the Occupy movements, as well as those being paid by wealthy socialist forces like Soros to disrupt free speech and cause harm to the very fabric of civility.
First, be clear, Christians are overwhelming supporting Trump in spite of his many shortcomings because they see what has happened to the spiritual capital in America, a country they love.
This is why Trump has consistently won the vast majority of the evangelical votes in every single state. Personalities like Jerry Falwell Jr., Rev. Robert Jeffress and Mike Huckabee, among others, have endorsed Trump.
What the student and faculty slamming my presence on campus fail to realize is that the radical far left has worked for decades to obliterate any semblance of Christian values in an America the far left desperately wants to secularize.
Second, Americans are angry and have a right to be so, just as Christ upset the tables in the Temple in Jerusalem run by the moneychangers.
The political elite, along with the mainstream media increasingly controlled by the far left has disabused American middle-class citizens for too long.
Trump supporters see him as a Washington outsider who has not built his career as a professional politician.
Trump supporters agree America is not a sovereign nation as long as the southern border with Mexico is left open and largely unguarded.
This is why in the United States we have 12 million illegal immigrants and more on the way, not to mention a drug war.
Would Canada allow such a travesty?
Third, a majority of Americans may end up voting for Trump because he represents placing traditional American values above interest-group politics and crony capitalism.
Trump might also be right that globalists have stacked a free-trade world economy in favor of multinational corporate profits, at the expense of exploiting low-cost labor and exploiting natural resources anywhere and everywhere either can be found.
In the face of free-trade globalism, Trump has made it clear he intends to defend the national interest to bring jobs back by negotiating better trade deals – a formula Trump believes has the best chance of ensuring American prosperity.
Isn’t that what Americans expect of a leader?
Is it authoritarian or hateful to suggest and enforce real policies, or is it the responsibility of a leader who truly wants to serve his people?
In the great tradition of Western civilization, the notion of a servant leader, expressed in Christ, is a model to follow and uphold not decry.
Lastly, aside from all the trite language in the editorial that parades as a front-page news article in the Vancouver college newspaper, Trump is no emperor.
Trump may better be portrayed as a gladiator in the arena who will fight for the common person, who will defend freedom, who will build and rebuild American infrastructure and who will in his own theme: Make America Great Again.
Is this unappealing to Canadians and others who for decades have depended on American largesse, on our military shield, on our nuclear deterrence, on our charity, on our economic engine of growth?
Or does the world prefer a weak America, rudderless in a multi-polar world, possibly led by a spineless world government?
Trump is no hater, and it is wrong to assume all Trump supporters are haters.
What do Trump supporters want? The answer involves the restoration and perpetuation of America as “a city on a hill.”
Trump supporters want America to be the beacon and light it once was.
Trump supporters want America to be respected once again.
Increasingly, this election is all about freedom – not about the hate we are hearing today from business and political leaders, pastors, university faculty and students who appear to hate Trump as much as they hate the idea of a traditionally moral Christian America dedicated, as our Founding Fathers understood, to Christian morals that supported profitable business founded with an understanding of spiritual capital.
