President of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, Albert Mohler, has urged confessing Christians to prayerfully consider how to approach a likely general election between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, warning that it is inevitably "going to raise a host of new worldview issues with incredible urgency."
During a podcast briefing on March 2, Mohler, who was named recently to an advisory board on issues concerning the dignity of human life for the Marco Rubio presidential campaign, stated that Clinton and Trump winning the Democratic and Republican nominations is increasingly likely given the results of Super Tuesday.
However, the upcoming race poses an unusual challenge, as Clinton is running as a "Democrat of Democrats" while Trump has not, in the past, identified with Republican ideals.
"The impending crisis in the Republican Party is one of basic conviction, vision and partisan identity," Mohler said, Baptist News reported. "The Republican Party is going to have to face some very difficult questions about what exactly it intends to represent in the fall campaign if Donald Trump is the standard-bearer for that party."
Mohler said the challenge faces not only Christian voters, but Republican office holders across the country who will have to decide what to do if Trump ends up being the party nominee.
"[The race between Clinton and Trump] is going to raise a host of new worldview issues with incredible urgency for confessing Christians," he said. "At the very least this is going to require of conservative Christians in America a fundamental rethinking of what we believe about the purpose of government and the character of political leadership."
He added, "We are going to have to be thinking through and praying through how Christian faithfulness, biblical fidelity, gospel faithfulness, can be channeled into very real but finite political choices that are going to be presented to the American people on the presidential ballot form this coming November."
"As Christians wake up in America this morning, one thing is clear," Mohler said. "We're going to have to spend a great deal of time thinking and praying together about what faithfulness will look like in a way we never have before in terms of recent American presidential cycles; indeed, in a way that has never been true in this sense before in American political history.
He concluded: "We're also about to find out if biblically minded Christians in this country are up to that task."
Another prominent religious figure, Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, recently penned an op-ed criticizing evangelical leaders who support of Trump despite the GOP frontrunner's use of profanity, affairs, and courting of white supremacists.
He also condemned other evangelical leaders for "looking the other way" in regards to Trump.
"Why are many evangelical leaders, including some who pontificate on nearly everything else, scared silent as evangelicalism is associated with everything from authoritarianism and bigotry to violations of religious freedom?" he asked. "How can they look the other way in silence when politicians praise Planned Parenthood and demur about white supremacists and neo-Nazis?"
The pastor lamented that "secular progressives" had been right in suggesting that contemporary evangelicals merge religion and politics simply to gain power.
"For years, secular progressives have said that evangelical social action in America is not about religious conviction but all about power," Moore wrote. "They have implied that the goal of the Religious Right is to cynically use the 'moral' to get to the 'majority,' not the other way around. This year, a group of high-profile old-guard evangelicals has proven these critics right."
