I don't mean that I haven't changed. Of course I have. My theology has changed in some significant ways over the years. I hope my character has changed too. But when I look at the things that increasingly separate me from American evangelicalism, I keep finding that many of them are values evangelicalism itself taught me.
Tell the truth. Keep your word. Admit when you are wrong. Don't bear false witness against your neighbor. Don't spread gossip. Don't excuse dishonesty simply because the dishonest person is on your side. Character matters. Integrity matters. Truth matters because God is a God of truth.
None of that was controversial when I was growing up evangelical.
And this is where this post connects with the others in this series.
Whether I am writing about racism, violence, war, human dignity, care for the vulnerable, or now truthfulness, I keep finding myself in roughly the same place: trying to hold onto things I learned from the conservative evangelical tradition while watching influential parts of that tradition make accommodations I was once taught Christians should never make.
This time, the issue is truth.
Every president in my lifetime has exaggerated, shaded the truth, misrepresented opponents, and sometimes simply lied. This isn't an argument that dishonesty began with Donald Trump, nor is it an argument that Democrats are uniquely truthful.
Something different has happened, though. Donald Trump's (lack of) relationship with truth is extraordinary in its frequency, brazenness, and persistence. Even more troubling to me has been the willingness of so many evangelical Christians—people formed by a faith that commands us not to bear false witness—to minimize, defend, repeat, or simply stop caring about it.
That change matters to me, because I remember when we said truth mattered.
For me, Sharpiegate is the poster child. In September 2019, Trump used an official White House press conference to display an altered National Hurricane Center map of Hurricane Dorian’s projected path. The map appeared to have been manually drawn on with a black Sharpie to include Alabama in the storm's potential trajectory, despite earlier official warnings. Why? Because Trump had earlier said Alabama was included, and he refused to acknowledge he was wrong.
This time, the issue is truth.
Every president in my lifetime has exaggerated, shaded the truth, misrepresented opponents, and sometimes simply lied. This isn't an argument that dishonesty began with Donald Trump, nor is it an argument that Democrats are uniquely truthful.
Something different has happened, though. Donald Trump's (lack of) relationship with truth is extraordinary in its frequency, brazenness, and persistence. Even more troubling to me has been the willingness of so many evangelical Christians—people formed by a faith that commands us not to bear false witness—to minimize, defend, repeat, or simply stop caring about it.
That change matters to me, because I remember when we said truth mattered.
* * * * *
For me, Sharpiegate is the poster child. In September 2019, Trump used an official White House press conference to display an altered National Hurricane Center map of Hurricane Dorian’s projected path. The map appeared to have been manually drawn on with a black Sharpie to include Alabama in the storm's potential trajectory, despite earlier official warnings. Why? Because Trump had earlier said Alabama was included, and he refused to acknowledge he was wrong.
This kind of brazen challenge against reality has become normal.
He wildly exaggerated the crowd size on his first inauguration day, though photo evidence clearly shows he is incorrect.
He keeps claiming the election Biden won was stolen when it was not. Of the 62 lawsuits filed to prove his claim, 61 failed.
He claimed many times that he wouldn’t start any new wars in his 2024 campaign. In his election night victory speech, he said, “"They said, 'He will start a war.' I'm not going to start a war. I'm going to stop wars." After he attacked Iran, he said he hadn’t made those claims. (“Trump claims he ‘didn’t guarantee’ no US wars. Here’s what he’s actually said.”
Donald Trump repeatedly stated during his 2023 and 2024 campaign trails that he could end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, asserting that his relationships with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin would allow him to broker an immediate deal. (“Trump said at least 53 times he would end Ukraine war within 24 hours.”) We are now a year and a half into his presidency, and the war is ongoing.
Trump has repeatedly stated that his mass deportation campaign targets "the worst of the worst" dangerous criminals. A 2026 review of government records found that 77% of people entering deportation proceedings for the first time had no criminal convictions, and 60% faced no criminal charges at all. (“Trump says he wants to deport ‘the worst of the worst.’ Government data tells another story.”)
He keeps claiming the election Biden won was stolen when it was not. Of the 62 lawsuits filed to prove his claim, 61 failed.
He claimed many times that he wouldn’t start any new wars in his 2024 campaign. In his election night victory speech, he said, “"They said, 'He will start a war.' I'm not going to start a war. I'm going to stop wars." After he attacked Iran, he said he hadn’t made those claims. (“Trump claims he ‘didn’t guarantee’ no US wars. Here’s what he’s actually said.”
Donald Trump repeatedly stated during his 2023 and 2024 campaign trails that he could end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours, asserting that his relationships with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin would allow him to broker an immediate deal. (“Trump said at least 53 times he would end Ukraine war within 24 hours.”) We are now a year and a half into his presidency, and the war is ongoing.
Trump has repeatedly stated that his mass deportation campaign targets "the worst of the worst" dangerous criminals. A 2026 review of government records found that 77% of people entering deportation proceedings for the first time had no criminal convictions, and 60% faced no criminal charges at all. (“Trump says he wants to deport ‘the worst of the worst.’ Government data tells another story.”)
Trump and his administration have insisted the voter fraud by undocumented immigrants is a huge problem. It’s not. The very conservative Heritage Foundation tracks voter fraud. It has found 100 cases of noncitizen voting (proven) between 1982-2025. During that time roughly 3-4 billion ballots were cast in primary/general elections. That's 1 noncitizen vote for every 30-40 million citizen votes cast (0.000000025 - 0.000000033%).
Trump and Vance, among others, insisted that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating cats and dogs – an oft repeated lie even after it was thoroughly debunked – which ended up causing over 30 bomb threats in the city.
They claim immigrants as a group are terrible danger to us physically and economically. That’s not true - see my post on immigrants and refugees.
Trump stated multiple times that other nations are sending immigrants here from prisons and insane asylums. They aren’t. ("Fact-checking Over 12,000 of Donald Trump’s Quotes About Immigrants.")
He told reporters that “probably billions of votes” had disappeared in the Los Angeles mayor’s race. California has roughly twenty-three million registered voters.
He claimed that prescription drug prices had come down “four hundred to five hundred to six hundred percent” under his leadership. A price cannot decline more than one hundred percent.
DOGE claimed to save 2 trillion dollars. It did not even come close. Its own "Wall of Receipts" website claimed $215 billion in savings, but even that's an exaggeration. [1]
Trump and leading Republicans insisted that they would not touch Medicare and Medicaid. They are, significantly. "The OBBB cuts over $1 trillion from health programs – the largest rollback of federal support for health care in American history. These cuts will result in an estimated 10 million people losing their health insurance coverage."
As reported by Heather Delaney Reese, "Concerning the conflict between the Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, Trump said, 'I settled after fourteen years and about fifteen million people had their heads chopped off.' Fifteen million people did not have their heads chopped off. Not in Rwanda. Not in the Congo. Not anywhere on Earth, in any era of recorded history. Fifteen million is roughly the entire current population of Rwanda. The broader Congo conflicts, spanning three decades, killed an estimated five to six million people, overwhelmingly from disease, displacement, and starvation. And he called it a settled war, even though his own administration acknowledged in March that the conflict is still ongoing."
In spite of Trump’s insistence that tariffs are paid by other countries, tariffs are paid by importers of foreign goods. They are not paid by the countries that export items to us. See the recent tariff refunds for Walmart ($2.4B), Apple ($2.2B), Ford ($1.3B) and Amazon ($600M). [2] The money the government takes in is from its own people, which is why you so often hear, “Tariffs are taxes.”
For all of this administration’s insistence that the war with Iran is justified, the Iran is not a Just War in the classic Augustinian Christian tradition.
QAnon is full of lies, and always has been. The evangelical following boggles the mind. as does the president’s reposting of Qanon accounts.
Trump said in March 2026 that "only Trump" can save the Great Lakes from Asian carp. Then he ordered a work stoppage on the only project designed to do that. “The Brandon Road Interbasin Project near Joliet is a $1.15 billion barrier being built to stop invasive carp from entering the Great Lakes through the Illinois River. Contractors had $2 million in materials on site. Trailers were set up. Drilling was scheduled for September. Then came the stop order. No explanation. No timeline.The Army Corps of Engineers didn't even respond to press inquiries.”
Trump announced that Giant Eagle was lowering prices on 300 items because of him. That’s not true. That’s their ‘On Sale This Season’ promo which is a rerun of the same sale from fall 2025.
Walmart announced widespread summer price cuts for hundreds of grocery and household items. Trump posted on social media that the retailer was lowering prices "by a lot" at his administration's request to celebrate the country's 250th birthday. Walmart described them as “summer seasonal rollbacks” and did not mention the administration in its press conference before the President’s post. [3]
He claims to have ended eight wars. That depends how you define “wars,” and “ended.”
Trump is sticking with the vandals lie that he made up on June 20th concerning the Reflecting Pool. Jeanine Pirro, who brought charges against a man, withdrew it because it was clear it was an installation issue, not vandalism. This was stated in court documents. Trump kept posting that it was vandalism. [4]
HYPOCRISY
Senator Rick Scott, whose company earned the largest healthcare fraud settlement in American history ($1.7 billion in fines and 14 felony charges for ripping off Medicare) personally pleaded the Fifth 75 times under oath. In August of 2026, Rick Scott voted to hold Dr. Fauci in contempt of Congress and demanded criminal charges for pleading the Fifth.
Trump, who received both the vaccine and booster shots, and who once pleaded the 5th more than 440 times while under oath, is in favor of Fauci being prosecuted.
This administration has been decrying the supposed rise of Communism in the Democrat Party. Meanwhile, “Two years ago the federal government held zero equity stakes in private companies. Today it holds stakes in 30. $26.7 billion of taxpayer money invested in private corporations in 13 months. Intel. US Steel. MP Materials. Westinghouse. Quantum computing firms. Semiconductor companies. Mining companies. Six more added just last week. The Cato Institute, a conservative think tank, said what should alarm everyone: 'Perhaps most striking is how unremarkable government ownership is becoming.'” (Chelsey Hockett) To be clear, the government control of the means of production is a core tenant of communism.
in August of 2026, while criticizing remarks made by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky regarding Hungarian leadership, J.D. Vance said, "You should never have a foreign head of state threatening the head of government of an allied nation. It's preposterous; it's unacceptable." I believe Canada and Greenland would like a word.
* * * * *
Eventually, this becomes about something much bigger than Donald Trump. It becomes a question of Christian formation and public witness.
What happens to us when we learn to excuse a lie because it helps our side? What happens when we repeat something because we want it to be true rather than because we know it is true? What happens when evidence no longer changes our minds, when correction becomes betrayal, or when admitting that our leader was wrong feels like helping the enemy? [6]
Our repeated choices shape our character. We become truthful by practicing truthfulness. We become humble by admitting when we are wrong. We become trustworthy by refusing to manipulate reality for our own advantage.
We Christians have an additional reason to care about this. We follow Jesus, who told his disciples to let their yes be yes and their no be no. We worship the one who called himself “the truth.” We are forbidden to bear false witness against our neighbors—even neighbors we dislike, fear, or oppose politically.
So my concern is not merely that Donald Trump says things that aren't true. My concern is what evangelical Christians have had to become comfortable with in order to keep defending him.
Once again, I find myself looking backward at the faith that formed me. It taught me that character matters. It taught me that integrity matters. It taught me that truth does not become false because it hurts my cause, and a lie does not become true because it helps it.
The evangelicalism that refuses to practice and demand truth has lost its way, and I will not be lost with it.
UP NEXT:
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[1] “The GAO examined $110 billion of that figure tied to contracts, grants and leases — and found serious problems. Among the findings: 108 of 264 leases DOGE claimed credit for were already in the process of being terminated before DOGE existed. Of 13,476 contracts DOGE said it had terminated, nearly 2,000 actually were not, and of $61 billion in claimed contract savings, more than half — nearly $35 billion — was either not actually terminated or couldn't be verified because DOGE's data lacked sufficient detail… Roughly $27.4 billion in claimed cancellation savings came from contracts that were never terminated at all.” (“DOGE claims unravel in scathing new government report.”)
[2] These companies raised their prices to offset the loss from the tariffs they paid to our government. We absorbed the cost; thus, the argument that tariffs are a tax. But…the refund for these illegal tariffs does not go to the consumer. It goes to the supplier. And so the rich get richer. Tariffs are a financial windfall for wealthy business owners, and a burden for the average person.
[3] This kind of stolen credit happens a lot.
In November of 2019, Trump toured a Flextronics manufacturing site in Austin, Texas, alongside Apple CEO Tim Cook. He posted, “ “Today I opened a major Apple Manufacturing plant in Texas that will bring high paying jobs back to America.” It had been assembling Mac Pro computers since 2013.
Trump took credit for Toyota's major U.S. plant investments, such as a major upgrade in Kentucky. However, company executives and fact-checkers clarified that the investments were part of long-term operational revamps that predated his administrations.
Trump touted keeping Lincoln production in Kentucky and saving American manufacturing, but Ford had never planned to shutter the plant or cut those jobs.
When General Motors announced a $1 billion investment that would create or retain thousands of jobs "over the next few years," their January 2016 announcement was one of the first investments that Trump took credit for, despite GM's insistence that their decision dated back to 2014.
ExxonMobil announced a $20 billion investment and 47,000 jobs in 2016, Trump said in a video, “"This is something that was done to a large extent because of our policies and the policies of this new administration." But spending the $20 billion began in 2013, and one of the projects was already done.
When Fiat Chrysler announced in early January 206 that they’d invest $1 billion in plants in Warren, Ohio and Toledo, Ohio, adding 2,000 jobs, Trump took credit. Chrysler said the deal emerged from talks with United Auto Workers in decisions made in 2015."I wish I could give him credit for this," Fiat Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne told reporters recently. "But the thinking was in place beforehand."
Trump has appeared at ribbon-cuttings and praised numerous bridge, highway, broadband, and water projects as evidence of his administration's accomplishments. However, the funding for many of these projects came from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021).
Trump has argued that semiconductor factories returning to America demonstrate the success of his economic policies. Reality is more complicated. Large investments by companies such as TSMC, Micron, Intel, and Samsung were heavily tied to incentives in the CHIPS and Science Act (2022) and related Biden-era industrial policy. Many factories are opening during Trump's second administration simply because these are multi-year construction projects begun earlier.
[4] Historian Heather Cox Richardson gives a rundown of the timeline that is worth reading in its near entirety.
“On June 19, U.S. Park Police officers arrested 67-year-old Hearn, a former Olympic canoe racer, who had stopped by the pool on a 52-mile bike ride and reached into the water to feel what the detached material felt like, for destruction of public property. “I didn’t vandalize anything,” Hearn told David J. Lynch and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington Post. “I didn’t destroy or break or peel anything. By the time I realized what was going on, I was being put in handcuffs.”
That night, Trump blamed “Radical Left Lunatics, most likely Dumocats [sic], who have spent their lives trying to ruin our Country,” for “some real problems with Vandalism at the beautiful Reflecting Pool.” By the next day, he was blaming “multiple individuals for vandalizing our Nations magnificent Reflecting Poll [sic]. Who would do such a thing? These are very serious crimes having to do with the destruction of National Monuments. Years in jail! Work will begin immediately on its repair.”
Minnesota governor Tim Walz commented: “Found an imaginary problem, said only they could fix it, didn’t listen to experts, hired buddies who grifted millions, failed miserably, bragged how great it went. The entire Trump presidency in a nutshell.”
Administration officials insisted that the problems with the reflecting pool renovations were entirely the fault of vandals. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed back on Walz’s statement, saying “The vandalism is very real.” Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, scoffed at the idea that there had not been vandalism, telling Jesse Watters of the Fox News Channel that she had just been at the pool and “someone was intent on doing incredible damage to the pool.”
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Dana Bash of CNN that the contractors had nothing to do with the problems; it was “vandalism.” He insisted the government could prove there were vandals and suggested there were “photographs.” When Bash pressed him over whether the government actually had “photographs of a person or people cutting a 300- or 350-foot gash in the bottom of the reflecting pool,” he deflected, saying: “I'm not sure why you and others in the media think that you want to keep trying to question” the president’s version of events.
On June 29, Trump posted: “The Reflecting Pool, which suffered great damage due to the Vandals and Radical Left SCUM that hate our Country, has been, for the past two days, in full operation. It looks beautiful! After July 4th, we will release the water, fix the damage done to the very expensive waterproof matting, with the use of sharp knives and muscle, including the 350 foot gash along its right side, and have it looking as good as it was two weeks ago, when it was absolutely PERFECT!”
Now, of course, the Department of Justice’s filing proves that the idea of vandals was always a lie. The problems with the renovation of the reflecting pool were exactly what critics said all along: a hasty, expensive, ill-thought-out project failed. This case is so bad, Chris Geidner of LawDork noted, that Pirro went out of her way to blame the Interior Department for the misguided indictment.
The disparity between the fantasy Trump and his cronies sold to their supporters and the reality of the situation when they were forced to prove their allegations in court matters. Administration officials insisted before the media that the project had been a great success, hurt only by “Radical Left SCUM that hate our Country.” In order to prove their lie, administration officials used the power of the government to harass, indict, and threaten a random individual whom they could blame for their own failures. Then, when forced to prove their allegations in a court of law, they withdrew the claim entirely...
Even as reality makes it clear that his claims are a fantasy, Trump continues to spin his yarns, seeming to have little else to convince voters to support him. Today he doubled down on his insistence that vandals caused the problems with the reflecting pool. “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool. I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM…. There may have been some contractor difficulty, but the major damage was caused by VANDALS! President DJT” (August 1, 2026 newsletter)
[6] I have only scratched the surface.
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