A Southern Baptist Convention leader says evangelical voters will face a tough choice if the 2016 presidential election boils down to a race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
Albert Mohler
Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., said in podcast briefing March 2 that Clinton and Trump winning the Democratic and Republican nominations is not inevitable, but nothing happened on Super Tuesday to decrease its likelihood.
“We are not there yet, but nothing happened yesterday that would indicate that that is less likely a prospect,” Mohler said. “Indeed, as of yesterday, it’s incredibly more likely.”
Mohler, named recently to an advisory board on issues concerning the dignity of human life for the Marco Rubio presidential campaign, said one thing complicating the race is that as former First Lady, senator and Secretary of State, Clinton runs as a “Democrat of Democrats.”
As a political outsider best known as a businessman and television personality, Mohler said Trump, by contrast, has not in the past been committed to positions representative of the GOP in recent election cycles.
“The impending crisis in the Republican Party is one of basic conviction, vision and partisan identity,” Mohler said. “The Republican Party is going to have to face some very difficult questions about what exactly it intends to represent in the fall campaign if Donald Trump is the standard-bearer for that party.”
Mohler said the challenge faces not only voters, but Republican office holders across the country who will have to decide what to do if Trump ends up being the party nominee.
Mohler said an increasingly likely head-to-head confrontation between Trump and Clinton “is going to raise a host of new world view issues with incredible urgency for confessing Christians.”
“At the very least this is going to require of conservative Christians in America a fundamental rethinking of what we believe about the purpose of government and the character of political leadership,” Mohler said. “We are going to have to be thinking through and praying through how Christian faithfulness, biblical fidelity, gospel faithfulness, can be channeled into very real but finite political choices that are going to be presented to the American people on the presidential ballot form this coming November.”
“As Christians wake up in America this morning, one thing is clear,” Mohler said. “We’re going to have to spend a great deal of time thinking and praying together about what faithfulness will look like in a way we never have before in terms of recent American presidential cycles; indeed, in a way that has never been true in this sense before in American political history.
“We’re also about to find out if biblically minded Christians in this country are up to that task.”