That’s the tension of living by faith and not by sight. How does that apply to something from today like children being separated from their parents at the southern border? We don’t know. “But we know that he brought a bad situation to a good end. “We can’t say that God wanted Joseph to be sold into slavery,” Uwan said. There, he helped the Hebrew people, including his penitent brothers, to survive. God didn’t condone that act but brought the story to a just conclusion by raising Joseph to an important post in Egypt. Jealous of Joseph, his brothers sell him into slavery. To illustrate her point, Uwan cited the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers. That is, what God allows to happen is not the same thing as what God wants to happen. “We can’t say that it’s not God’s will for Donald Trump to be president, because he is the president,” said Uwan.īut Uwan draws a distinction between God’s sovereignty and God’s approval. Still, Uwan is a firm believer in the sovereignty of God, the idea that God is supremely in control of the entire universe, from the smallest atoms to American politics. Uwan took issue with Sanders’ comments, calling them “arrogant and misguided.” “I cried a lot and couldn’t get out of bed.”Ī graduate of Westminster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania, Uwan was named last year by the evangelical magazine Christianity Today as one of 10 “theologians we’re excited about.” Still, it’s worth unpacking some of the spiritual ideas underpinning Sanders’ statement and understanding why some other Christians have such a big problem with them.Įkemini Uwan, a public theologian and a co-host of the podcast “Truth’s Table,” says Trump’s election was not exactly an answer to her prayers. After all, who among us can claim to know the mind of God? To some extent, the question of God’s role in the 2016 election is impossible to answer. Less than half of non-white Protestants (47%) and fewer than a quarter of white mainline Protestants (21%) and Catholics (22%) say God played a major role in the 2016 election, according to the PRRI survey. We had a new president: one we believed God had raised up for such a time as this.”īut if a majority of Trump’s white evangelical base believes that God wanted him to be president, many other Christians do not agree. “It was as if God had answered our prayers and the impossible had happened. “Conservative Christians believed that if Hillary Clinton won this election it would be ‘game over’ for religious freedom,” he writes. Trump, Strang says, was the answer to their prayers. The fullest accounting of this view comes in Stephen Strang’s book “God and Donald Trump,” in which the Pentecostal publisher writes that evangelicals had been praying for deliverance from an overbearing, hostile (and Democratic) federal government. That is, all-powerful and present in all areas of existence. That view is particularly pronounced among charismatic and Pentecostal Christians, a subset of evangelicalism that puts special emphasis on prophecies, believing that God is omnipotent, immanent and extremely active. According to a 2017 survey by Public Religion Research Institute, more than half (57%) say God played a “major role” in the 2016 presidential election. While Sanders’ statement may have raised secular Americans’ eyebrows, many white evangelicals likely agree with her. “And I think he wanted Donald Trump to become president and that’s why he’s there.” “I think God calls all of us to fill different roles at different times,” said Sanders, an evangelical Christian herself. Sanders picked up on Brody’s biblical implication and ran with it. It’s a quotation from the Bible’s Book of Esther, in which an unlikely savior delivers the Jews from persecution. “For such a time as this” is the key phrase in that sentence. “Does it kind of blow your mind that someone like Donald Trump, who is sitting in the Oval Office,” said CBN’s David Brody, “I know you can list the accomplishments, but at the same time just from a spiritual perspective, there are a lot of Christians who believe that for such a time as this …” Earlier this week, the Christian Broadcasting Network’s chief political analyst teed up a question for White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders.
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