How to deal with Trump’s second coming
Review of "Scandalous Witness" by Lee C. Camp.
Scandalous Witness
Lee C. Camp
Eerdmans, 2026.
For the last decade, I, like many, have tried to make sense of what’s going on across the border and have been dumbfounded by Christians gleefully signing on to MAGA. We need fresh theological insights.
Happily, Lee Camp’s book Scandalous Witness, first published in 2020 during Trump One, is newly re-released and is more relevant than ever. Camp, a professor at Lipscomb University, does not fit into tidy conservative/right or liberal/left niches. He rejects such divides, not because he’s neutral, middle-of-the-road or wishy-washy. Rather, he is unconvinced by assumptions behind much political pontification. Camp argues that both the liberals “hankering after a sexuality with no boundaries” and the conservatives “hankering after a market with no boundaries, [are] as naïve as the little boy who insists gravity does not pertain to him.”
Camp’s cantankerousness is rooted in a robust understanding of Jesus Christ’s message. Christianity is deeply political, just not the way the world does politics. He writes, “the fundamental claim of God as three-in-one maintains that it is through the gracious initiative of God’s redemption, the suffering love of Christ, and the resurrecting power of the Spirit that the triumph of life over death has begun. We live . . . in a time of hopeful anticipation of the consummate triumph of life over death.”
Camp worries that American Christianity has “become a joke” and Christian witness has suffered “grave damage.” He counters gospel misinterpretations: our faith is not meant to be otherworldly; revivalism undermines Christianity more than secularism; there is no such thing as a Christian nation. He pleads against partisanship: “A right-wing conservative and a leftist radical sitting at the same table sharing bread and wine together is . . . a foretaste of the reconciliation of all things.” Amen to that, say I.
I’m glad our church celebrates the Lord’s Supper every week. Such celebrations remind us of what is most real: “the power of God revealed in one who suffers in love and trusts that right has been made right not through might but through mercy, repentance and resurrection.”
