
What Would Thomas More Do?
The attack on David French once again sheds light on Christian hypocrisy.

More than 60,000 people have signed a petition denouncing National Reviewās David French for criticizing Franklin Grahamās moral surrender to Trumpism. āThis character assassination by David French is unconscionable and should not go unchallenged,ā declares the petition on the website of the American Family Association.
It is the latest shot fired in the cultural civil war being fought among Christians who are wrestling with the contradictions of the Trump era.
Along with Jerry Falwell Jr., Graham is perhaps the most prominent evangelical figure to embrace a purely transactional approach to politics in which moral values are subordinated to power.
Frenchās heresy was to point out (once again) the hypocrisy of Graham constantly defending Trump while simultaneously denouncing the morals of Democrats like South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Bill Clinton. āItās hard to think of a single prominent American Christian who better illustrates the collapsing Evangelical public witness than Franklin Graham, Billy Grahamās son,ā he wrote at National Review. āHis commitment to the Christian character of American public officials seems to depend largely on their partisan political identity.ā
The petition urges the faithful to stand behind Graham as āa godly man of impeccable integrityā and reject Frenchās āattack.ā Students of theology, psychology, and politics alike will undoubtedly study the document for years as an artifact of our times.
Responding to the petition, David Frenchās wife, Nancy, wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, highlighting the moral inversion that had taken place within evangelical Christianity. Having habituated themselves to defending the ālesser of two evils,ā she wrote, the rationalizers have over time morphed into āattacking good people who question the president.ā
Indeed, good people pose a nagging problem for the rationalizers, because they are witnesses to the hypocrisy. They prick the conscience and so have to be denounced.
Which brings us to Thomas More, courtesy of the uber-Trumpian publication American Greatness.
Responding to both Frenches, Chris Buskirk last week offered up a turgid 2,600-word Trump-as-King-David manifesto, insisting that there was no problem with Christians bending the knee to Trump. The Right Reverend Buskirk plunders the Old Testament and history for examples of moral compromises in the service of less-than-ideal princes.
Was David disqualified from leading Israel because he murdered Uriah in order to take Bathsheba as his wife? Certainly notā¦.
Did Joseph undermine his public witness as a prophet of God by serving Pharaoh even as he held the Israelites in captivity? What about Daniel, who served the fantastically pagan Nebuchadnezzar? Or Esther, who married the murderous, libertine emperor Xerxes? Again, the answer is plainly no. This sort of thing has become boilerplate among Trumpist Christians, but in his zeal to persuade Christians to lay down their principles in the service of bad kings, Buskirk makes an interesting turn.
He cites Henry VIII as an example of a king that Christians could serve in good conscience.
Henry VIII was impetuous, vengeful, and adulterous. He was also a great king who secured Englandās finances and her role as a great European power.
He was also the king who beheaded St. Thomas More, for refusing to surrender his moral principles.
Perhaps inadvertently, Buskirk has raised an interesting question: What would Thomas More do now?
We know what, in fact, he did: Thomas More did not think that Making England Great Again was more important than upholding the law. He did not decide that Henry VIIIās judicial appointments trumped his defiance of the church. He did not believe that power was more important than defending his faith.
And More did not go along with the collective surrender of the church to the imperious whims of the monarch. He understood the price of the bargain he was being asked to make. In Robert Boltās play, A Man for All Seasons, More says to a 15th-century version of Matt Schlapp: āIt profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world, but for Wales?ā
All of this seems timely, especially with the publication of the late Justice Antonin Scaliaās new book, On Faith, which deals at some length with Moreās conscience and his ultimate martyrdom. (I discuss this on today's Bulwark podcast with Christopher Scalia, the justiceās son and co-editor of the new book.)
Scalia so admired Thomas More that he wore a replica of his hat to President Obamaās second inauguration, and he spoke frequently about the man he described as āone of the great men of his age: lawyer, scholar, humanist, philosopher, statesman ā a towering figure not just in his own country of England but throughout Renaissance Europe.ā
Today, More is best remembered for standing up against royal power. But in one of Scaliaās best-known speeches, the justice pointed out that to understand the ādeep significance of Moreās martyrdom,ā we need to āappreciate that the reason he died was, in the view of almost everyone at the time, a silly one.ā
Henry VIII wanted a divorce, but More believed that only the pope could dissolve the union. It was a position on which he could easily have compromised; and almost everyone else caved to Henryās demands. Scalia quoted Hilaire Bellocās account:
Most of the great bodiesāall the bishops except Fisherāhad yielded. They had not yielded with great reluctance but as a matter of course. Here and there had been protests, and two particular monastic bodies had burst, as it were, into flame. But that was exceptional. To the ordinary man of the day, anyone, especially a highly placed official, who stood out against the Kingās policy was a crank.
Scalia noted that Boltās play āputs that point nicely.ā
When More learns that the Convocation of Bishops has voted unanimously (except for John Fisher of Rochester) to adhere to the Kingās demands that they acknowledge his divorce despite the Pope, More decides that he must resign the chancellorship, and asks his wife Alice to help him remove his chain of office. She says: āSun and moon, Master More, youāre taken for a wise man! Is this wisdomāto betray your ability, abandon practice, forget your station and your duty to your kin and behave like a printed book!ā And later along the road, his friend the Duke of Norfolk says: āYouāre behaving like a fool. Youāre behaving like a crank. Youāre not behaving like a gentleman.ā ā[I]tās disproportionate! . . . [W]eāve all given in! Why must you stand out?ā
Sound at all familiar?
Thomas More put the integrity of his faith ahead of place, prestige, and the greatness of the king. Unlike his colleagues, Thomas More did not make a bargain with his soul.
The Franklin Grahams of his time made a different choice. And today, who remembers any of them?