Alabama's largest Christian denomination working to bridge internal divides after contentious election season

After Donald Trump’s surprising victory over Hillary Clinton in the general election, the top policy spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention is apologizing for earlier criticism of Trump’s supporters. In a Christmas-themed post on his personal blog, Dr. Russell Moore called for understanding and healing after a divisive election.

I remember one situation where I witnessed a handful of Christian political operatives excusing immorality and confusing the definition of the gospel. I was pointed in my criticisms, and felt like I ought to have been. But there were also pastors and friends who told me when they read my comments they thought I was criticizing anyone who voted for Donald Trump. I told them then, and I would tell anyone now: if that’s what you heard me say, that was not at all my intention, and I apologize. There’s a massive difference between someone who enthusiastically excused immorality and someone who felt conflicted, weighed the options based on biblical convictions, and voted their conscience. In a heated campaign season focused on sound bites, this distinction can get lost in the headlines, so it bears repeating.

According to the post, Moore did not vote for Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. While he does not specifically say who he pulled the level for, he wrote “to vote for either candidate, I felt, would be to sin against my own conscience.” However, he added that “many Christians, including some of my very best friends and closest ministry partners, approached the ballot box conflicted but felt compelled to cast a ballot for the ‘lesser of two evils,’ hoping for the best with a less than ideal president.”

Moore appeared on Yellowhammer Radio with Cliff Sims last fall and forcefully argued that Trump was scamming Christians.

“It’s a scam,” Moore said last September of Trump’s overtures to evangelicals. “You have somebody who has left two wives for other women; somebody who brags about all of the, as he puts it, ‘top women in the world’ that he gets to sleep with; somebody who speaks of women in ugly and degrading ways; that fits into that kind of Hugh Hefner sort of understand of women’s worth being in their sexual attractiveness and availability to men; somebody who has said, for instance, when we had evangelical missionaries with Ebola, that they shouldn’t be treated because they ought to pay for going overseas in the first place… And then somebody who has made a significant amount of his living in a gambling industry that destroys families, destroys communities, destroys lives, and at the end of all of this says, ‘I don’t have anything to ask forgiveness for.’ That’s a significant character issue.”

At the time, he was particularly upset with the public opinion polling which correctly showed evangelicals supporting Trump in droves. “As I talk to evangelical leaders and pastors across the country, I’m not finding anyone among that group who is supporting Donald Trump, but the opinion polling tells us that a lot of people are,” he said in the interview. “What that means is that we have a serious problem within evangelicalism in terms of those who would say ‘character matters,’ rightly, when it applies to, say, Bill Clinton, but aren’t willing to say ‘character matters’ when it comes to someone like Donald Trump. I think that’s a problem within evangelicalism.”

Southern Baptists represent the largest Christian denomination in Alabama. The SBC lost 200,000 members from 2014 to 2015, but the denomination still has over 15.3 million members. In Alabama, over one million Southern Baptists worship in over 3,300 active churches.