Dear Editor,
I agree with Keith Jowitt’s letter in the April en, pointing out the unbalanced nature of Martyn Whittock’s attack on Trump and his supporters. One might have hoped that en would provide a more nuanced article in response. Instead, in the April issue we find a piece by Dave Burke joining in the fashionable trend of Trump-bashing.
Burke suggests that Christians who support Trump are ‘being played’. How patronising it is to imply that Trump supporters do not understand what they are voting for. It’s not far off Hillary Clinton’s infamous 2016 description of Trump voters as ‘deplorables’.
The American Christians I know who vote Republican are all too aware of Trump’s personal failings but they regard the alternative as worse. The Democrats have consistently pursued policies that marginalise and even criminalise evangelicals, to say nothing of promoting the ever-increasing slaughter of babies before birth.
Burke’s statement (presumably anticipating a Trump victory): ‘The result may well be chaos, a destabilised world, and an unstable president’ is puzzling in the extreme. Has Burke forgotten that the world was relatively stable from 2016–2020 when Trump was president? Has he not noticed that 2020–2024 has been the most dangerous period since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962? Biden’s inept and chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan gave the green light to Putin to invade Ukraine. Biden has poured funding into Iran, leading directly to the current situation in the Middle East.
Whenever Christians vote we have to choose between evils, and it is usually complicated and difficult to discern the right course of action. Dave Burke is in no position to lecture American fellow-Christians about their voting choices.
Yours sincerely,
Alison Carter
Musselburgh
