Donald Trump has been positioning himself as a guardian of Christianity since fueling outrage over Starbucks' plain red cups last holiday season. "If I become president," he said last November, "we're all going to be saying 'Merry Christmas' again. That I can tell you."
Now that WikiLeaks has released hacked emails in which an aide to Hillary Clinton dismissed Catholicism as "the most socially acceptable, politically conservative religion," conservative news outlets are casting the Democratic presidential nominee as hostile to religion. Trump is doing the same, telling the crowd at a rally in Panama City, Fla., on Tuesday that "it's just the latest evidence of the hatred the Clinton campaign has, really, for everyday Americans."
But while Trump and his media allies have been condemning Clinton this week, two major Christian publications have been denouncing the Republican presidential nominee as a man who "views power as a means to gratify himself" and "the very embodiment of what the Bible calls a fool."
Those are the words of World and Christianity Today, respectively, amid the fallout from The Washington Post's publication of Trump's "do anything" to women tape. As Trump tries to cast himself as the candidate who will stand up for Christian values, some faith-based news organizations are telling their readers that he is actually the antithesis of what they believe in.
Andy Crouch, executive editor of Christianity Today, wrote of Trump on Monday that "there is hardly any public person in America today who has more exemplified the 'earthly nature' ('flesh' in the King James and the literal Greek) that Paul urges the Colossians to shed: 'sexual immorality, impurity, lust, evil desires and greed, which is idolatry.' "
"To indulge in sexual immorality is to make oneself and one's desires an idol," Crouch continued. "That Trump has been, his whole adult life, an idolater of this sort, and a singularly unrepentant one, should have been clear to everyone."
On Tuesday, World editor-in-chief Marvin Olasky called on Trump to step aside and let another Republican lead the party's ticket, noting that the magazine also called for then-President Bill Clinton's resignation in 1998 during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
"Our call for a different Republican candidate will lose us some readers and donors," Olasky predicted. "But standing before God, we cannot say that what World argued concerning a Democrat in 1998 should not apply to a Republican in 2016."
Other Christian media outlets have criticized Trump, too — and not only since the release of his 2005 hot-mic chat with TV host Billy Bush. The Christian Post strongly opposed Trump during the GOP primary; since then, it has published opinion articles for and against Trump, but even the pieces advising Christians to vote for him are mostly unfavorable and based largely on disapproval of Clinton.
"Mr. Trump will in all probability not be a good president," Christian Post executive editor Richard Land wrote in August. He added that "with sadness of heart, I will cast my vote for Donald Trump and pray that God will have mercy on him and on my beloved country."
General-election polls have consistently shown that many Christians plan to do the same, but that was before the extremely lewd tape prompted harsh editorials from World and Christianity Today.
There are still 27 days in the election, and the real estate mogul still has the notable support of such prominent Christians as Jerry Falwell Jr., Ralph Reed and Tony Perkins, along with one-time rival Ben Carson. But remarks about kissing and groping women without consent seem likely to turn off others, and have put Trump in an unusual position for a Republican nominee. He now finds himself being undermined in the Christian media, as he tries to attack his Democratic foe on religious grounds.