I think his supporters would say it is limited to Trump. But I will say that some of his closest followers are, in a sense, being discipled by him. Mr. Trump’s typical response to a critic is to frame the entire conversation as a competition between success and failure. When the editorial published, the first response coming out of the mouth of some leading evangelicals was “That’s Christianity Yesterday” or “You’re a dying magazine.” They’re taking their cues on how to react in the public square from Donald Trump, whose basic response is to denigrate people.

What’s next for you? Do you plan to engage more with politics?

I’m planning to take advantage of the benefits of retirement: more time with my grandchildren, more time on the stream to do fly-fishing. If I can use religious language to talk about this, it does seem like providence has intervened in my life and made sure I’m not going to relax for the next few months.

I was planning to continue to write and comment, and this just put an exclamation point on it. I feel like I need to keep talking about things on my website and I’ve already been invited to write for The Los Angeles Times and The Guardian and I’m going to do that. I’m going to write as honestly and as charitably as I can about the movement that I’ve been a part of for 50 years.

Have your views about Mr. Trump changed since 2016? And who did you vote for then?

Like many, I was not happy with either candidate, and so I voted for a third-party candidate. And you’re about to ask me who that is, and I don’t remember. The most important thing is, I didn’t want to vote for Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump.

We published one hard-hitting editorial in 2016 asking if voters had fallen into the sin of idolatry. After Trump was elected, I spent the first three years of his administration just trying to understand why conservatives and why very conservative evangelicals would vote for him and support him so enthusiastically.

The right and the left clearly wanted to excommunicate each other from the movement, so whenever I had the opportunity, I tried to get evangelicals on the left, center and right to have a reasonable conversation. I wanted to continue that when I sat down to write the editorial, but something in me clicked and I thought: That approach doesn’t work anymore. Given what we now know about what the president has done, we need to speak out more directly about this.

Do you view politics or religion differently than you did before Mr. Trump’s presidency?

I’m actually not a political person. I don’t follow political reporting too much. I find it caustic, both to the culture and to one’s own heart. I often say the most political things Christians do is, every Sunday, go to church and say “Jesus Christ is Lord.”