Two weeks after Christianity Today penned an op-ed demanding President Trump be booted from office, Trump will be launching his new "Evangelicals for Trump" coalition. The event, scheduled to be held in Miami, FL, will take place at King Jesus International Ministry, believed to be one of the largest Hispanic churches in the country.
“The event will bring together Evangelicals from across the nation who support President Trump’s re-election,” the Trump campaign said in a press release last week.
In his scathing editorial about Trump, Christianity Today editor-in-chief Mark Galli referred to the president as "a human being who is morally lost and confused.”
Trump responded in a pair of tweets.
....have a Radical Left nonbeliever, who wants to take your religion & your guns, than Donald Trump as your President. No President has done more for the Evangelical community, and it’s not even close. You’ll not get anything from those Dems on stage. I won’t be reading ET again!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 20, 2019
The late evangelical preacher Billy Graham founded Christianity Today in 1953. His son, Franklin Graham, is a Trump supporter and soon after CT published their controversial anti-Trump editorial, he wrote a message of his own to distance himself from the editors, indicating that he barely recognized the "liberal-leaning" magazine.
Franklin Graham insists his father would be disappointed in CT, while others like MSNBC host Al Sharpton think that any evangelical who supports Trump is a sell out.
"The reason they're so offended is it's exposing all of them, that they would take this shameless con man over the principles that they're preaching in the Holy Season as we celebrate Jesus," he claimed recently on MSNBC. "They would sell Jesus out if they felt they could get something from it. That's the inference he's making from his editorial. And that's sad on many levels."
The Christianity Today editorial was followed by a similar controversy over at the Christian Post, where journalist Napp Nazworth resigned after the outlet published a supportive piece about the president. In a tweet explaining his exit, Nazworth said that Christians "sully the name of Christ in their alliance with Trump."
Evangelicals supported Trump by a wide margin in 2016.