(OPINION) Pastor Ray Ortlund of Immanuel Church in Nashville, Tennessee, deleted a social media post endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president after receiving backlash Sunday.
“I have deleted a post from earlier today because it was being misinterpreted. I should have foreseen it. My fault,” Ortlund wrote on Threads, which is a part of Instagram.
A screenshot of Ortlund’s deleted post showed that the pastor had written, “Never Trump. Sometimes Harris. Always Jesus.”
While New York Times columnist David French congratulated Ortlund for his endorsement, writing, “This is the way,” others were less enthusiastic.
One user took issue with the longtime Christian leader and president of Renewal Ministries endorsing the Harris-Walz ticket given their liberal abortion views, writing, “How can you vote for Harris/Walz as a believer? Do you think that killing babies is something Jesus would support?”
“Put your personal views on the person aside and vote for the party that is going to support your morals and religious beliefs. I believe that any party that has ANY association with murdering children of GOD should be immediately out of the question,” the user added.
Responding to the user, Ortlund appeared to suggest that Trump poses an evil that outweighs abortion.
“Abortion is a horrible evil. But the evils on the other side have risen to levels that jeopardize the foundational rule of law in our country. I am thinking long-term and voting for us to have a national renewal in the future,” he replied.
Many on social media were critical of Ortlund’s line of reasoning.
Vice President of Discovery Institute John G. West wrote that if Ortlund “is truly concerned about not jeopardizing the rule of law in America, one has to wonder where he has been during the past nearly four years.”
“Politically-motivated prosecutions of one’s electoral opponents, government-encouraged censorship of dissenting voices on social media, prosecutions of peaceful pro-life protestors, executive orders that have no basis in laws passed by Congress, the refusal to enforce laws already on the books,” he continued.
“This only a short list of what has been happening. But Ortlund assures us that in order to protect the rule of law we must vote for the same people responsible for these things. His comments are exceptionaly [sic] revealing about the echo chamber in which some leading evangelicals live.”
