ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Quit putting evangelicals into a box.

If anything could sum up a proper response to all the media gaggles going on about Christians and evangelicals and their continued support of President Donald Trump it’s this: Stop trying to stuff Jesus believers into a tight little box.

Christians aren’t simply interested, say, in halting abortion. Evangelicals aren’t looking for the perfect leader — one already exists, in Jesus.

So media, take a memo. Headlines like this only show the failure of the secular press to properly understand the Christian faith: “The Trump evangelicals have lost their gag reflex,” as the Washington Post wrote.

Not true.

Fact is, Christians don’t like adultery; evangelicals don’t support divorce. Christians and evangelicals also hate lies, deceit, corruption, selfishness, theft, abominations against Christ — well, pretty much all the wicked goings-on in Washington, D.C., by members of both parties, by humans of all backgrounds and beliefs.

Yet Christians and evangelicals vote, yes?

Fact is, too, Christians and evangelicals happen to like America — a safe, strong America, a country that doesn’t sell out its constitutional freedoms for globalist interests; compromise its moral compass for leftist, progressive and socialist special interests; degrade its Judeo-Christian DNA for watered, wrong history that paints the United States as an enemy of good.

Under Republican and Democratic leadership in recent decades, this is what’s happened.

So here comes Trump, with bold and even brusque talk about returning the nation to these times of less inner turmoil. And his words resonate; they strike a nerve; they awaken a subdued and cowed constituency.

They promise to break the godless and secular chains wound tight by the previous administration — the previous administrations.

This is what Christians voted for in Trump; this is what evangelicals continue to support in Trump.

The media wants it front and center, a question that goes like this: O ye Christian of hypocritical faith, how can you still support Trump?

But a better question can be found in this.

“Matt K. Lewis says newspapers need to hire more Christians: ‘Media outlets who want to understand America should at least have a few journalists hanging around who share — or at least, aren’t hostile to — the Christian faith.’ … [A] 2007 Pew study [showed] 8 percent of journalists at national publications and 14 percent of those at local publications reported attending worship services weekly, compared with 39 percent of the general public,” Poynter reported back in 2013, citing The Week.

Not much has changed. And that right there is the root of the negativity from the press against Christian and evangelical Trump supporters.

If members of the media truly want to know why Christians and evangelicals continue to support Trump, maybe they should go where the Christians and evangelicals go. Maybe they should do what the Christians and evangelicals do. Maybe they should read what the Christians and evangelicals read.

Cheryl Chumley can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter, @ckchumley.

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