Christians who opened The New York Times on Easter Sunday were rewarded with a poke in the eye from the front page of the Sunday Review.
At the top, beside a photo of Martin Luther King in a church with a cross prominent in the background, was “Keeping The Faith – We Forgot What Dr. King Believed In,” by Michael Eric Dyson, left-wing professor and commentator, whom the paper carefully identified as “an ordained Baptist minister," -- so he could criticize Christians with credibility, perhaps? Here's Dyson:
In his lifetime, he was disappointed in the complacency of both black and white churches. He would be as disappointed today. The white church largely remains a bastion of indifference to the plight of black people. White evangelicals continue to focus on personal piety as the measure of true Christianity, while neglecting the Social Gospel that enlivens Jesus’ words for the masses....
Even more aggressive was leftist religion writer Amy Sullivan’s “Trump’s Christian Soldiers.” The subhead: “Most white evangelicals would vote against Jesus himself if he ran as a Democrat.”
After opening with the lack of Republican reaction to the Stormy Daniels saga, Sullivan followed up:
As we celebrate Easter Sunday, nearly 18 months after Mr. Trump won the presidency with about 80 percent of the white evangelical vote, surveys show him retaining nearly all of that support....
....
....Mr. Trump owes his continued high standing among white evangelicals to the fact that nearly 40 years after the Moral Majority’s founding, the partisan meld is complete. Decades of fearmongering about Democrats and religious liberals have worked. Eighty percent of white evangelicals would vote against Jesus Christ himself if he ran as a Democrat.
The Times liked that line enough to print it as a text box on the front page, springing not from any actual survey but the fact that Trump won 80 percent of the white evangelical vote.
Sullivan seemed to think it was every Christian’s duty to have voted for (pro-abortion!) Hillary:
[Conservative columnist Michael] Gerson opposed Mr. Trump during the 2016 campaign, calling him a “deeply and defiantly ignorant” man who suffers from “serious moral impairment.” Yet while Mr. Gerson and many of his fellow Never Trumpers -- like the Southern Baptist Russell Moore -- believed Mr. Trump to be dangerously unqualified, they could not bring themselves to the obvious conclusion to vote for Mrs. Clinton.....
Even widely respected evangelical leaders have spent the past few decades insisting that a correct reading of the Bible requires Christians to reject homosexuality, and especially gay marriage....
Sullivan didn't show any scriptural justification to think differently. She also waved away concerns about the abortion-obsessed Democratic Party:
The biggest stumbling block for conservative evangelicals is the scarlet abortion “A” that Democrats wear for their support of abortion rights. Conservative evangelical preachers inveigh against “pro-abortion” forces throughout the country, and the columns of Mr. Gerson and his conservative peers are littered with the rhetorical labeling of Democrats and progressives as “pro-abortion.”
But no one is pro-abortion....
The Times hasn't covered itself in glory on Easter. In 2011, it marked the Easter season by spotlighting anti-traditional, gay rights activism. In 2013 the paper made a mortifying religious error, describing the “resurrection into heaven of Jesus, three days after he was crucified.” The paper eventually corrected the story: “Easter is the celebration of Jesus’s resurrection from the dead, three days after he was crucified, the premise for the Christian belief in an everlasting life.”
