American Christian leaders did not like former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who resigned the day after the midterm elections at the president’s request. Not just progressive Christians who abhor the Trump administration: Many of President Donald Trump’s staunch evangelical allies, along with more moderate conservative leaders, also found Sessions lacking in his role. This is curious, because Sessions is himself a conservative Christian who promoted a religious-right brand of politics. And he spent much of his time in office supporting conservative religious causes. [...]
Johnnie Moore, the advisory council’s de facto spokesman and a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, told me there was “widespread dissatisfaction across the board from the conservative, evangelical elements of Trump’s base who believed Sessions to be weak and ineffective.” Notably, Moore added, Sessions alienated the “more moderate end of [Trump’s] evangelical base, who were dissatisfied with some of his enforcement actions, his visceral opposition to criminal-justice reform, and the tactics he supported for handling illegal immigration.”
Other Trump advisers had different reasons for their disapproval. He was seen as an obstacle to one of the main goals of the evangelical advisory group: instituting prison reform. And immigration, in particular, made Sessions unpopular among many conservative Christian groups. Sessions invoked the ire of a number of pastors, progressive and conservative alike, when he quoted the Bible to justify his department’s policy of separating families and children at the border.
No comments:
Post a Comment