How US evangelicals could affect the entire world
Martyn Whittock
Date posted: 1 Mar 2024
So, ‘Super Tuesday’ has happened – and Donald Trump looks on track for the Republican Party nomination in the US presidential elections.
A lot could happen between now and the actual vote, of course – but currently polls show Trump leading Biden, and so we could well be facing a second presidency from the businessman and former TV host. The role that US evangelicals play could affect the entire globe – and should be viewed, as I will explain below, with some concern.
Reflecting theologically on war in the Middle East
Dave Burke
Date posted: 19 Mar 2026
It is rare that theology features in the decision making of great nations, but there are reports of US military commanders referencing the Biblical end-times narrative of writers such as Tim LaHaye and Hal Lindsay. One officer is quoted by an NCO as saying, “President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark His return to Earth.”
If you want to weigh up the rights and wrongs of the latest war in the Middle East you need to go further back than those writers or even the Victorian clergyman, John Nelson Derby, who inspired them with his dispensationalist theology. Great Christian thinkers like Augustine of Hippo and St Thomas Aquinas developed principles to restrain Christian princes from unnecessary military action. The intention to wage war was justified only if it passed certain tests. Here are three of them:
Comment USA
Prayer in schools?
Tony Bennett
Date posted: 26 Aug 2026
When I attended state schools in Derby from the mid-1950s to the late-1960s, every school day began with an act of Christian worship which included a hymn, a Bible reading, and prayers always concluding with the Lord’s Prayer. All this was a requirement of the 1944 Education Act. I gather things are somewhat different today. Most British schools don’t feel comfortable any more “doing God”, let alone Jesus.
That’s the reverse of what’s happened in the USA. It’s all very different over there where such things are decided not by legislation but by the Constitution as interpreted by the US Supreme Court. Let’s start with the Constitution. The First Amendment to the Constitution states that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion.” From the 1960s through to 2000, the Supreme Court interpreted that prohibition on a nationally-prescribed religion to declare unconstitutional a host of Christian practices in public (i.e. state-run) schools.
What on earth did Jesus mean by ‘judge not’?
Dave Burke
Date posted: 25 Jul 2026
When it was revealed that Donald Trump, in the first year of his second term, had increased his personal fortune by 2 billion dollars I posted my views on Facebook. Within minutes, I was firmly rebuked for criticising him. “The Lord told us not to judge people!” someone said. “Shame on you!” chimed in an irate supporter, “Pastors like you are ruining the church!”
The Lord’s command that we refrain from judging people is a sacred calling; an essential principle for every pastorally active Christian. We should refuse to judge when the answers seem easy to us, but impossible to those we try to support.
Should UK Christians go to Franklin Graham’s rallies?
Tony Bennett
Date posted: 2 Jul 2026
Charles Colson was a senior member of President Nixon’s White House Staff who was sentenced to prison for his role in the Watergate cover-up. But having come to saving faith in Christ, he tells in his autobiography of what he witnessed when he would bring visitors to meet Nixon.
Colson would gather guests in a room near the Oval Office, where they would talk about what they were going to tell the President when they were face to face with him. ‘But it was always the same,’ Colson writes. ‘In the reception room they would rehearse their angry lines.’ But once they were in the Oval Office, ‘it was as if they’d suddenly sniffed some intoxicating fragrance. For invariably, the lions of the waiting room became the meek lambs of the Oval Office. And none were more cowardly than the religious leaders.’
As one ‘rules-based order’ passes, another abides
John Stevens
Date posted: 4 Feb 2026
Events since the beginning of 2026 have suggested the collapse of the “rules-based world order” that has held sway since the end of the Second World War.
US president Donald Trump ordered the seizure of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, threatened Columbia and Iran, and reasserted his determination to take control of Greenland. He has claimed American hegemony in Western Hemisphere, and seems prepared to allow other nations, including China and Russia, to have control over their own geographical spheres of influence. It feels as if the world is returning to the era of competing empires, with great powers forcing their will on smaller vassal nations. Britain feels especially vulnerable to this change because we are no longer the world power we were in 1945.
Donald Trump unleashed
Well, we are roughly a month into the Trump presidency and the character of the new White House is becoming very clear.
Although I have a track record of sounding the alarm regarding Donald J. Trump, in the New Year of 2025 I was trying to be quite balanced on a number of occasions. In one column I pondered whether we would get ‘Trump unleashed’ or ‘Trump lite’? That I even suggested the latter was a sign that I thought it might be possible: lots of aggressive noise but not the political meltdown that many (myself at times) feared. A few weeks in, I would like to amend that brave optimism on my part. It is ‘Trump unleashed.’