Please don’t compare Trump to the Apostle Paul

Today, I’m going to pause from planning my New Orleans vacation to react to the news that Donald Trump recently asked Jesus into his heart.

In a recorded interview earlier this week, James Dobson, the evangelical psychologist and founder of Focus on the Family, described the experience of joining 1,000 other Christian leaders to vet Trump in New York City.

Dobson said he came away impressed. “He did accept a relationship with Christ,” he told Pennsylvania pastor Michael Anthony. “I know the person who led him to Christ. And that’s fairly recent.”

Since then, Dobson has gotten ripped by just about everybody for declaring Trump a true believer, and he responded by releasing a statement in which he said, “Only the Lord knows the condition of a person’s heart,” and “I can only tell you what I’ve heard.”

Dobson really, really wants Trump to be born again, and he’s not alone.

In the aforementioned interview, Dobson talked about how Trump doesn’t know the “language” of Christians, noting that he used “the word hell” in front of pastors.

“I’m sure Saul when he became Paul didn’t know much of the language either,” Anthony said.

This reminded me of a conversation I overheard this spring between grandfathers at a youth baseball game.

“So what do you think about the presidential race?” one of them asked.

“Well, I hate to say it,” the other said, “but a lot of what Trump says makes sense.”

“Yeah,” the first grandfather said. “He reminds me of Saul before he became the apostle Paul.”

I almost fell off my bleacher.

But now, months later, it makes sense as a political strategy.

You’ve got a presidential candidate who’s actually been compared to Adolf (“Make Germany Great Again”) Hitler. How do you rebound from that?

Well, you help him have a dramatic conversion experience.

And no conversion was more dramatic than that of Saul of Tarsus.

Talk about an evil guy. He hunted down early Christians and had a hand in the stoning of Stephen. As you may have learned in Sunday School, that all ended on the Damascus Road when Saul heard the voice of Jesus and was blinded by a light from heaven.

The thing that has always struck me about Paul is that he didn’t want to be saved — or for other people to think he was saved, or for other people who were saved to like and accept him.

When he met Christ, the other Christians didn’t believe it and were afraid to be in his presence.

And from a worldly perspective, Paul’s conversion did little to benefit him. He didn’t become the president of anything. He was shipwrecked, bitten by vipers, thrown into prison and, according to many scholars, beheaded by Nero.

Sure, many of the letters he wrote to churches made it into the Biblical canon, but he didn’t get any book royalties or movie rights.

Trump has bigger things in mind, and so do his partisan religious advisers.

“If anything,” Dobson said of Trump in his statement, “this man is a baby Christian who doesn’t know how believers think, talk and act. All I can tell you is that we have only two choices, Hillary or Donald. Hillary scares me to death.”

Bingo.

Hillary scares some people to death. Trump scares some people to death. Both of them scare some people to death.

So why are evangelicals trying to save the soul of only one of them?

This story was originally published July 1, 2016 at 4:45 PM with the headline "Please don’t compare Trump to the Apostle Paul."