I wrote first about this here:
Because my story last week elicited substantial interest among Daily Kos readers I thought I should post this follow-up today.
Now it turns out that there is a debate going on in The Christian Post between the Christian psychologist Chris Thurman (website) and someone else who prefaces his name with “doctor” even though his PhD is in Near Eastern Languages and Literature from NYU. Dr. Michael Brown has a website called Ask Dr. Brown. He has an earned PhD. I have no problem with his referring to himself as Dr. Brown, but I do when an article he writes about psychology may be read by those who mistakingly think he is writing as someone with a PhD in a mental health field.
Wikipedia describes him as
Michael L. Brown (born March 16, 1955) is a radio host, author, professor and noted proponent of Messianic Judaism, Christian Zionism, and the Charismatic Movement. His nationally syndicated radio show, The Line of Fire, airs throughout the United States. He regularly contributes articles to the Christian news platform The Stream as well as to the news site Townhall, and serves as head of the Coalition of Conscience, a Christian organization in the Charlotte, North Carolina area.
There have been controversies involving him as well:
In the past Brown has been criticized in Charlotte by the local LGBTQ community for holding a rally in protest of their 2009 Charlotte Pride Festival. The Southern Poverty Law Center has profiled him for his promotion of "junk science" on topics connected to sexual orientation, such as in his regular claims that homosexuality is caused by childhood trauma and his support for conversion therapy. In September 2012, the organization named him in their list of "30 New Activists Heading Up the Radical Right." In March 2014, Brown traveled to Peru to promote anti-gay laws. He has also defended Uganda's criminalization of homosexuality. He has said gays should be treated with respect and dignity.
Brown was criticized for citing the white supremacist website Stormfront in an article "asking whether it was time for another Jesus Movement among Jewish millennials". He apologized, saying he was not aware what the site was.
Here’s a quote from the Christian Thurman OpEd, You foolish evangelicals, Trump has bewitched you, which led to this exchange of OpEds: (my emphasis added)
President Trump’s mental and moral condition are only going to worsen over time. Please, don’t think for one minute that he is ever going to turn a corner and become a more psychologically and morally healthy president. Not only is he unlikely to improve, Trump’s various forms of mental and moral pathology almost always deepen and become more intractable. The primary reason why this is true is that Trump doesn’t believe there is anything wrong with him. Consequently, he doesn’t believe he has anything to change. It’s why Trump never apologizes and frequently doubles down after having done something wrong. If you are hoping for a new and improved version of Donald Trump in the future, you are fooling yourself. As a country, we simply cannot afford to give Trump another four years to further take a sledgehammer to our democracy.
I want to end with a quote from one of the mental health professionals who contributed to The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, psychologist John Gartner. This is one of many of the statements in the book that evangelicals would be wise to listen to and act on:
Trump is a profoundly evil man exhibiting malignant narcissism. His worsening hypomania is making him increasingly more irrational, grandiose, paranoid, aggressive, irritable, and impulsive. Trump is bad, mad, and getting worse. He evinces the most destructive and dangerous collection of psychiatric symptoms possible for a leader. The worst-case scenario is now our reality.
You foolish evangelicals, Trump has bewitched you. Stop calling him good when he is evil, light when he is darkness. Have nothing to do with him.
In When a Christian Psychologist Makes Trump into a Monster Brown writes in response:
Dr. Chris Thurman is a Christian psychologist who claims that President Trump has no strengths and that any evangelical who supports Trump is a fool. Personally, I was not familiar with Dr. Thurman or his work before last week, but his article, “You Foolish Evangelicals, Trump Has Bewitched You,” got my attention, prompting me to write a response. Now, he has challenged my response with a follow-up article, issuing a direct challenge to me. I’m quite happy to respond.
In my rebuttal to his first article, I claimed that Thurman was as guilty as the hyper-zealous Trump supporters. He completely demonized the President while his over-zealous supporters make him into a saint. Now, in his second article, he has laid out a challenge: “I would like to challenge Brown and the others who criticized the op-ed I wrote to come up with one positive character trait Trump possesses. Just one.”
Consider it done!
(Ed note: click the links above to catch up on the debate between these two Christian Post contributors.)
Until I came across this I had no idea that Chris Thurman had caused something of a stir in The Christian Post.
Here’s is why Brown says that he is going to vote for Trump:
- First, he has kept his word to evangelical leaders, showing consistency and faithfulness. Surely these are good character qualities.
- Second, despite his playboy past and his narcissistic ways, he seems devoted to his wife and children. Friends of mine who have gotten to know him personally, also spending many hours with his adult kids, tell me how deeply they respect and love him.
- Third, he is determined to do everything in his power as president to “rescue the perishing,” to borrow a phrase from Proverbs 24, applied here to the unborn. And once again, people who have walked with him closely assure me that he really believes abortion is wrong. Is not that a positive character quality as well?
- Fourth, his heart for prison reform and rehabilitating our inner-cities also seems genuine. Bear in mind that when Jared Kushner’s father was in prison, Jared saw the tremendous inequities of the prison system, and his concerns have now become his father-in-law’s concerns. Minority leaders have also attested to his genuine concern about impoverished Americans.
- This too is a positive character quality in God’s sight.
He goes on to write:
Of course, I can hear the retort already, namely, “None of this is genuine! The man is a sociopathic narcissist whose goal is to destroy America.” To quote Dr. Thurman directly, he is “doing the best he can to tear our country down for selfish and malevolent reasons.”
My response is simple: Dr. Thurman, you know the man from a distance and you have judged him severely, going over and above the righteous judgment God calls for.
A couple of days ago Thurman responded: Yes, evangelicals, it is foolish to su[port Trump.
He begins:
I found Michael Brown’s response to my op-ed, “Are Evangelicals Who Support Trump Fools?” further proof that evangelicals who back Trump are foolish when it comes to how they view the President.
According to Merriam-Webster, foolish means “having or showing a lack of good sense, judgement, or discretion” and fool means “a person lacking in judgement or prudence.” Whether you say someone is being foolish or acting like a fool, Brown’s op-ed gave me no rational or biblical reason to think evangelicals who support the president are being anything other than both when it comes to their perception of the most powerful man in the world.
I read and re-read Brown’s op-ed, thinking the whole time about the old Wendy’s commercial, “Where’s the beef?” What is Brown’s beef with what I wrote? The best I could come up with is when he says, “Thurman seems blind to his (Trump’s) strengths and his potential to help America greatly.” I assume this is Brown’s main problem with what I wrote — that I’m blind to what’s good about Trump. From there, he goes on to call me out for being hypocritical about the whole matter given that I criticize evangelicals for being blind to Trump’s defects as president. Brown’s criticism is disconcerting on two levels.
First, why is Brown talking about me given that my op-ed was about evangelicals who foolishly support Trump in spite of the fact that he is a deeply mentally and morally disturbed person? This is a common tactic employed by many Trump supporters — go after the accuser rather than the accused. Continued
Since the poll I posted in my story about Christian Thurman showed that hardly any readers considerer themselves to be Christian evangelicals I thought it would be interesting to let you know that there is a debate about Trump’s mental fitness for office going on in that community.