The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

by John Dickerson

A year later, reports surfaced that hundreds of migrant children were being detained at a Texas border facility in “perilous conditions.” Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, tweeted, “The reports of the conditions for migrant children at the border should shock all of our consciences. Those created in the image of God should be treated with dignity and compassion, especially those seeking refuge from violence back home. We can do better than this.”25 The plaintive cry received a klaxon blast in return from Jerry Falwell, Jr., the president of Liberty University. Falwell’s endorsement had helped Trump build support in the evangelical community during a crucial turn in the primaries. He asked: “Who are you @drmoore? Have you ever made a payroll? Have you ever built an organization of any type from scratch? What gives you authority to speak on any issue? I’m being serious. You’re nothing but an employee—a bureaucrat.”26 One did not need a seminary degree to recognize that this was a secular, not religious, denunciation. Moore is an ordained Southern Baptist minister who has been the head of a church. Falwell was trying to cancel Moore’s right to speak from a religious perspective because he lacked secular qualifications. “It has caused us to call evil good and good evil,” wrote the evangelical author Nancy French of the affection for Donald Trump. “Very quietly, the ‘lesser of two evils’ edict morphed from ‘op...