Donald Trump’s conviction on 34 felony counts should not disqualify him from being elected president of the United States, Religious Right leader Ralph Reed said in a June 5 interview with the Washington Post.
Reed, who leads the Faith and Freedom Coalition, told Michael Scherer, national political reporter for the Post, he did not support Bill Clinton’s impeachment in 1998 and he likewise doesn’t believe Trump should be disqualified for moral failures.
Reed, who at that time was head of the Christian Coalition, vigorously opposed Clinton on political and policy grounds.
Ralph Reed speaks at a campaign rally for Georgia Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker November 30, 2022, in Dalton, Ga.. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)
In 1995, Reed said, he wrote, “If Bill Clinton is a sinner, then he is no worse than you and I, and has the gospel become so politicized that we can no longer extend grace to someone just because we disagree with them politically?”
“I opposed impeachment, did so publicly, urged censure, and said that we should stick to the issues in the campaign, which were welfare reform, budget, spending, taxes and our desire to have a federal ban on partial-birth abortion. That was always my position. It was my position in the Clinton years, it was in the Bush years, the Obama years, and it remains my position.”
Regarding Trump, who is a documented serial liar and has been accused by multiple women of sexual assault, Reed said: “Individual voters are going to assess the character and the integrity of these candidates on their own, as they well should, and those are going to be highly subjective decisions and judgments that they’ll arrive at on an individual basis.”
A few moments later in the same interview, Reed said: “Character does matter, and individual voters will make those assessments. But I think that the idea that either voters of faith or all voters disqualify someone because of moral failings in the past is just out of step with who the American people are. I think it misapprehends and misunderstands the very forgiving and gracious character of the American people.”
Reed called Trump “the most pro-Israel, the most pro-life, the most pro-family, and the most pro-religious freedom candidate in the history of our movement. And we supported him in ’16 and ’20, and I’ll do so again in ’24.”
Reed called Biden corrupt and cited debunked accusations that the Biden family has taken millions of dollars in money from foreign interests.
Russell Moore
“I think voters make a very nuanced and very complicated differentiation between private character and public character, and in the case of Donald Trump, if he kept his promise to appoint conservative judges, which he did, if he kept his promise to be pro-Israel and move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, which he did, if he kept his promise to defund Planned Parenthood and be the most pro-life president in U.S. history — voters are very sophisticated beings. They look at it and they go, ‘You know what? I’m not voting for this person to be my daughter’s husband or to be my pastor. I’m voting for president. He’s eminently qualified. He’s eminently capable. He shares my values. He will advance my public policy views.’”
Russell Moore, former head of the Southern Baptist Convention Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and now editor of Christianity Today, took strong exception with Reed’s viewpoint when asked about it during an interview with CNN over the weekend.
“That’s not an argument that I accept and it’s not an argument that we as evangelical Christians have made over the last 50 years,” Moore said. “Instead, what we’ve always said is that if you can’t trust someone with your daughter or your wife you shouldn’t trust that person with the nuclear codes.
“The the sort of argument that we hear there I’ve heard before but I heard it from the left in the Clinton era. I never would have imagined then that I would be hearing it now from us.”
Related articles:
He may be slick, but Ralph Reed is as wrong as ever | Opinion by Mark Wingfield
Politics, faith and mission: A conversation with Russell Moore | Opinion by Greg Garrett