David French on ‘Tying Your Cruelty to the Christian Cross’
In a New York Times opinion piece titled “Selfishness Is Not a Virtue,” conservative political commentator David French also took issue with Ernst’s approach. Being humble after the town hall dustup could have worked to her benefit, he wrote. Instead, Ernst followed the “new normal,” French wrote, which means “tying your cruelty to the Christian cross.”
“Ernst’s fake apology was something different—and worse—than simple trolling,” French explained. “It exemplified the contortions of American Christianity in the Trump era…Trumpists think it’s good to be bad. But why bring Jesus into it?”
The problem, French argued, is that “too many Christians are transforming Christianity into a vertical faith, one that focuses on your personal relational with God at the expense of the horizontal relationship you have with your neighbors.”
He compared that to the attitude of slaveholders who denied that vertical faith “carried with it a series of horizontal earthly obligations to love your neighbor as yourself, to do justice to the oppressed, and to care for the vulnerable.”
When sick people approached Jesus for healing, French noted, Jesus didn’t say, “Depart from me, for thou shalt die anyway.”
The commentator also referenced the trend of evangelical Christians vilifying empathy. That amounts to “a frontal attack against the very value that allows us to understand our neighbors, that places us in their shoes and asks what we would want and need if we were in their place,” French wrote.
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According to the commentator, “Trump’s rise has revealed the extent to which the will to power has always lurked in Christian hearts.” French concluded by warning that Ernst’s callousness is a weather vane indicating “a foul wind blowing out of parts of American Christianity.”
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