Growing up in a small Pentecostal church in rural Arkansas provided me with a biblical education that emphasized the more spectacular elements of Scripture. Fire from heaven. Giants falling. Kings rising and collapsing. The Old Testament was where we lingered most. Those stories became the formative bedrock of our spiritual maturation.
That created complications.
In books like Judges and the accounts of Israel’s kings, nuance was often flattened into clean lines between right and wrong. The adults in our church were certain about who the heroes were. We followed their lead. Never mind that in Judges “every man doing what was right in his own eyes” culminates in a dismembered woman’s body being distributed throughout the land. Never mind that Bathsheba was taken and her husband sent to the front lines by the king described as a man after God’s own heart. There are interpretive frames for every troubling passage, ways to make them more digestible for modern evangelical palates. I understand that.
But here is the issue. The way we were taught to view power, always embodied by men in these narratives, prepared us to accept unchecked authority that is cruel, dehumanizing, and sometimes plainly evil as a vehicle for God’s purposes. Anyone divergent from what we see exemplified by Jesus could still be justified if the outcome aligned with what we believed God wanted. That imagination did not stay in Sunday School. It matured with us.
The Theology of Flawed but “Anointed” Leaders
We heard about Saul, David, Solomon, Jehu, Hezekiah, Josiah. We learned that power in the hands of God’s chosen was complicated. Sometimes violent. Often morally compromised. Yet still sanctioned.
David is the clearest example. The shepherd boy who kills Goliath becomes the king who arranges Uriah’s death. Adultery. State abuse of power. A cover up. Yet the lesson that lingered was not disqualification but usefulness. God still used him. The covenant endured. The kingdom survived.
That logic settles deep in the bones.
Then there is Cyrus in Isaiah, a pagan ruler called God’s anointed because he accomplished divine purposes. God can use anyone, we were told. Even the outsider. Even the strongman. Even the one who does not share our piety.
Jehu offers another pattern. Commissioned to eradicate Ahab’s line, he leaves blood in his wake. The text does not sanitize it. Heads are piled at city gates. Whole families are slaughtered. In our retellings, the violence became zeal. The brutality became obedience. Idolatry was destroyed, so the excess felt justified.
Story after story shaped a template. If a king defended the covenant, tore down the high places, aligned with the right prophets, then his moral failures were secondary. Regrettable perhaps. But necessary.
Why Many Evangelicals Embraced the Trump Administration
Fast forward.
When Donald Trump emerged, many evangelicals did not experience moral shock. They experienced recognition. A Cyrus figure. A David with rough edges. A Jehu unafraid to strike. The imagination had already been catechized.
The arguments were familiar. God uses imperfect vessels. We are electing a president, not a pastor. Look at the judges. Look at the policies. Character was reframed as incidental if the outcomes were correct.
Supreme Court appointments became the modern equivalent of tearing down idols. Executive orders were cast as acts of restoration. If abortion were restricted, if religious liberty were defended, if cultural enemies were confronted, then cruelty in speech or conduct could be absorbed into the larger narrative. The ends justified the means because the means were folded into providence.
Add an apocalyptic edge, and the stakes feel ultimate. If we are in the last days, if the culture is collapsing, then extraordinary leaders seem necessary. A strongman feels ordained.
Recovering the Prophetic Witness Over Political Power
Yet the Old Testament does not romanticize its kings. Nathan confronts David. Elijah confronts Ahab. Consequences follow. The sword never leaves David’s house. Kingdoms fractured. Dynasties crumbled. Power without righteousness corrodes what it claims to defend.
We were often quicker to emphasize divine sovereignty than prophetic accountability.
That imbalance matters. Because when a leader’s cruelty is excused in the name of a greater good, we are not inventing a new theology. We are drawing on an old, selectively remembered one.
The question now is not whether God can use flawed leaders. Of course he can. The deeper question is whether we have allowed that truth to eclipse the equally biblical insistence that power is accountable, that justice is not optional, and that ends do not cleanse means.
For those of us formed in small churches with big stories, the scaffolding was already in place. We inherited an imagination where kings could wound and still be called anointed.
Perhaps it is time to recover the prophets with the same intensity we once reserved for the kings. And to ask whether the Jesus we claim to follow, who refused coercive power, might be the corrective we have long ignored.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
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