The Grey Lady strikes again, and I was even trying to be nice. Drat. Dang, double dang, triple dang. Whatever. One of The New York Times’ reporters, Laurie Goodstein, wrote an informative bit on the Red Letter Christians, a group of evangelicals who emphasize the words of Christ, the dialogue printed in red in fancier Bibles. This proclivity leads them to push back against The Fantasist in Chief. The article was a corrective against the tendency to consign all evangelicals to the same basket.
Laurie Goodstein, “Confronting the Flock over a Zeal for Trump,” The New York Times, 29 May 2018, A11 (www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/us/anti-trump-evangelicals-lynchburg.html).
It was refreshing and uplifting to meet in Laurie Goldstein’s article a band of Christian evangelicals committed to their faith’s most foundational principle. In a possibly quixotic effort to persuade conservative evangelicals to reconsider their support for President Trump’s most objectional policies, the Red Letter Christians are an embodiment of amor alienum, the absolute love of others, the boundless compassion for the most downtrodden and the least among us. Jesus himself was ultimately a “social justice warrior” of the type now routinely derided by conservatives and misunderstood, perhaps willfully, by Mr. Trump’s more rabid evangelical adherents.