Is Donald Trump a blessing in disguise?

Each week, The World and Everything in It features a “Culture Friday” segment, in which Executive Producer Nick Eicher discusses the latest cultural news with John Stonestreet, president of the Chuck Colson Center for Christian Worldview. Here is a summary of this week’s conversation.

Victory for Donald Trump in Indiana on Tuesday night closed off the last remaining reasonable path for the stop-Trump effort in the Republican Party. So now it’s time to deal with all the implications of that.

Although Trump has enjoyed broad support from evangelical voters, he might not spend much time in the next few months talking about issues they care deeply about.

During his victory speech, Trump thanked Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. for his help and guidance in securing evangelical support.

“Tonight, I see that I won with the evangelicals,” Trump said. “The evangelical vote was for Trump. And, there’s no greater honor. Just no greater honor. We’re gonna work together for many, many years. We’re gonna make it so good. We’re gonna be saying ‘Merry Christmas’ again. We’re gonna be saying, remember. We’re gonna be saying it.”

When he thinks of evangelicals in his coalition, that is what he thinks of. Not pro-life issues, not religious liberty. And I’m concluding from this that in the presidential arena, there’s not going to be much of a conversation about the issues you care most about.

But that might be a blessing in disguise, John Stonestreet said.

“If we thought long-term cultural change was going to come through elections, if we thought that on some of the most important issues of our day—life, marriage, religious liberty—if we think those are primarily political issues, as opposed to political consequences of upstream issues, if we thought this was going to be an election that would help us with those issues when culture wasn’t preceding that, hopefully this kills that illusion,” he said.

In his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Trump pandered to evangelicals, Stonetreet said.

It worked, with some. But it didn’t work for many, and that’s going to shape this election in interesting ways.

Many evangelical leaders are saying this must break any allegiance Christians have with the GOP. That’s a robust dialog we haven’t had to have with other candidates.

“There hasn’t been another election season, that I can remember, that so clearly revealed the character of a nation as this one,” Stonestreet said. “We have a mirror now. We can see ourselves clearly. Hopefully that’s a good thing because the more we’re self-deluded about the moral status of our nation, I think the worse off we are.”

Listen to Nick Eicher’s complete conversation with John Stonetreet on The World and Everything in It.