On Jan. 20, the newly inaugurated 47th president of the United States of America issued a presidential pardon to about 1,600 individuals who, on January 6, 2021, illegally broke into the U.S. Capitol, mercilessly beat Capitol police, threatened Congress members and staff, and attempted to overturn the will of the American people who elected Joe Biden as president.
On hearing news of the pardons for the “hostages,” formerly known as rioters and insurrectionists, as well as the voices of certain religious leaders defending the action, these verses came to mind:
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like water
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. (Amos 5:23-24)
Yahweh has told you, O mortal, what is good,
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice and to love kindness
and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8)
Bill Leonard
Why those verses? Because on Nov. 7, 2024, PBS reported that President 47 “once again won the support of about eight in 10 white evangelical Christian voters, according to AP VoteCast, a sweeping survey of more than 120,000 voters.” Many of those voters strongly believe the Holy Bible is infallible and inerrant, “without mixture of error, for its matter.” Their statements of faith offer theological and moral admonitions that are “biblically based” and ethically demanding.
And therein lies a rapidly expanding theological-ethical-political predicament for many contemporary American evangelicals. Are their biblically mandated dogmas about to re-form politics, law and ethics in a radically “Christianized” America, or are those dogmas themselves being implicitly secularized in support of a newly impowered MAGA ideology? Is “what the Lord requires” of American evangelicalism becoming a gospel of secularized revisionism?
Case in point No. 1: The current speaker of the House of Representatives, responding to the J6 pardons, remarked: “The president’s made a decision, I don’t second guess those, and yes, it’s kind of my ethos, my worldview. We believe in redemption, in second chances.”
Yet if the speaker, a prominent Baptist who often refers to himself as a “Bible-believing Christian,” had read that sacred text a bit more closely, he might have discovered another Baptist, this one named John, who “prepared the way” for Jesus of Nazareth by shouting, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. … Therefore, bear fruit worthy of repentance.”
“Pardon without repentance isn’t redemption; it’s secularized cheap grace.”
Biblically speaking, real redemption requires repentance, not, as one pardoned inmate declared: “I’m happy that the president’s focusing not on retribution and focusing on success, but I will tell you that I’m not gonna play by those rules. The people who did this, they need to feel the heat.”
Pardon without repentance isn’t redemption; it’s secularized cheap grace, mocking the integrity of pardoner, and pardoned alike.
Unrepentant pardon is dangerous, the Fraternal Order of Police says, because: “When perpetrators of crimes, especially serious crimes, are not held fully accountable, it sends a dangerous message that the consequences for attacking law enforcement are not severe, potentially emboldening others to commit similar acts of violence.”
Evangelist Franklin Graham delivers an invocation during the inauguration ceremony of Donald Trump at the U.S. Capitol Rotunda on January 20 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Saul Loeb – Pool/Getty Images)
Case in point No. 2: And what about evangelical responses to lying, misinformation, disinformation and “alternative facts,” an increasingly “normative” activity and art form in the American public square?
Franklin Graham, scion of one of the country’s most widely known evangelical families, offered this assertion as reported by BNG:
Trump stands with truth. As president, if Trump tells you something, he’s going to do it. You know, the media tried to make him out as a liar. He’s not a liar. He doesn’t wake up in the morning and think, “I’ll see how many lies I could tell today.” No, he may get some wrong information from a staffer, he may get some facts twisted up sometimes but he’s not purposely out there lying or misleading people.
“They have lied so long that they no longer can distinguish between the truth and a lie.”
Responding to that astounding commentary, we might simply remember that “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor” remains in the Decalogue (see Exodus 20:1-17); that Barack Obama was not born in Kenya; that the 2020 election was neither “stolen” nor “rigged;” and that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, did not eat the dogs and cats of their neighbors.
The late revered evangelist Billy Graham offered this cautionary word to us all: “I have met men who are habitual liars. They have lied so long that they no longer can distinguish between the truth and a lie. Their sensitivity to sin has been almost completely deadened.”
Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde delivers a sermon during the National Prayer Service at Washington National Cathedral on January 21 in Washington, D.C. . (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Case in point No. 3: At a Jan. 21 special service of prayer in the National Cathedral, Mariann Edgar Budde, Episcopal bishop of Washington, told the audience, including President 47: “Let me make one final plea, Mr. President. Millions have put their trust in you and as you told the nation yesterday you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and independent families who fear for their lives.”
Critics rushed to condemn the sermon and the preacher, many with a complementarian biblicism that denied her gospel right to stand behind the “sacred desk” in the first place. As one man of God declared: “Women’s ordination is a cancer that unleashes untethered empathy in the church (and spills over into society).”
In Congress, an Oklahoma representative, and 19 of his House colleagues, presented a resolution charging that the bishop, “used her position inappropriately, promoting political bias instead of advocating the full counsel of biblical teaching.”
When did God’s mercy become “political bias?”
“When did God’s mercy become ‘political bias?’”
They asked the House approve their claim that: “(1) It is the sense of the House of Representatives that the sermon given at the National Prayer Service on January 21, 2025, at the National Cathedral was a display of political activism; and (2) the House of Representatives condemns the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde’s distorted message.”
Had the legislators themselves exercised their own “full counsel of biblical teaching,” they might have read of the “Canaanite woman” in Matthew 15:
Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.”
He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly.
Jesus learned from that “foreign woman” whose plea for mercy for herself and her disabled daughter became a teachable moment for the very Word made flesh. The congressional Christians dismissed their own teachable moment in the Cathedral, preferring legislative censure, not merely for Bishop Budde, but for a supposedly free pulpit in an increasingly Christian nationalist state.
“Woman, great is your faith!” Isn’t that the heart of an evangelical gospel? Lord, have mercy.
Bill Leonard is founding dean and the James and Marilyn Dunn professor of Baptist studies and church history emeritus at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C. He is the author or editor of 25 books. A native Texan, he lives in Winston-Salem with his wife, Candyce, and their daughter, Stephanie.
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