One of the nation's influential Christian evangelical leaders said Tuesday that the meeting Donald Trump held with evangelical leaders in New York marks "the end of the Christian right."
"While I don't question the motives of those who are trekking to the Tower, I strongly dissent from the wisdom of their chosen path," Michael Farris, chancellor of Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Va., wrote in an op-ed in
The Christian Post.
Farris is also chairman of the Home School Legal Defense Association.
He was referring to a meeting Trump held with as many as 1,000 evangelical leaders at Trump Tower in Manhattan. The presumptive presidential nominee
raised questions about Democrat Hillary Clinton's faith.
Farris, who attended the first meeting of the Rev. Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority in 1980, said that he had not been invited to the session because "I had been too vocal in my antiTrump views.
"The obvious implication of the meeting was to rally support for Trump," he said.
In 1980, the Moral Majority brought together Republican under the premise that "only candidates that reflected a biblical worldview and good character would gain our support," Farris said.
"Today, a candidate whose worldview is greed and whose god is his appetites (Philippians 3) is being tacitly endorsed by this throng.
"They are saying we are Republicans no matter what the candidate believes and no matter how vile and unrepentant his character," he said.
Those leaders, he said, were "are not a phalanx of God's prophets confronting a wicked leader, this is a parade of elephants.
"In 1980 I believed that Christians could dramatically influence politics," Farris added. "Today, we see politics fully influencing a thousand Christian leaders.
"This is a day of mourning."
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