Contributors to an online symposium on why conservatives shouldn’t support Donald Trump included SBC agency head Russell Moore.
The Republican National Committee disinvited the National Review from moderating an upcoming pre-Super Tuesday debate after the conservative magazine carried an online symposium with messages denouncing Donald Trump, including one by a Southern Baptist Convention official.
Publisher Jack Fowler reported Jan. 21 that after asking the National Review to help moderate a debate to be held Feb. 26 in Houston, the RNC withdrew the invitation because of the magazine’s “Against Trump“ editorial and symposium that appeared online Jan. 21.
“We expected this was coming,” said Fowler, publisher since 1983 of the magazine founded by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1955. “Small price to pay for speaking the truth about The Donald.”
The takedown began with an editorial explaining why the billionaire business mogul and television personality is not deserving of conservative support in the upcoming GOP caucuses and primaries.
“Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones,” the magazine said.
Russell Moore
Symposium writers included conservative voices Glenn Beck, Brent Bozell, Mona Charen, Erick Erickson, William Kristol, Michael Medved, Edwin Meese and Cal Thomas, along with Russell Moore, head of the SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.
Moore, top public-policy spokesman for the nation’s second-largest faith group behind Roman Catholics, questioned Trump’s abortion stance, personal life and recent call to temporarily ban Muslim immigration in a 500-word column.
“Trump can win only in the sort of celebrity-focused mobocracy that Neil Postman warned us about years ago, in which sound moral judgments are displaced by a narcissistic pursuit of power combined with promises of ‘winning’ for the masses,” Moore wrote. “Social and religious conservatives have always seen this tendency as decadent and deviant. For them to view it any other way now would be for them to lose their soul.”
Fowler said its original debate partner was NBC, but the network was suspended because of the performance of CNBC moderators in a previous debate. A new main host — CNN — will now partner with Salem Radio and Telemundo in a debate rescheduled for Feb. 25.