Attacking Pope Francis I Probably Bad Strategic Decision for Trump

It stands to reason that the Republican primary contests, especially South Carolina and the Super Tuesday Southern primaries, would be an arena for posturing by candidates as exemplars of Christian values.  In this respect, it is worth conceding that there is no universal set of characteristics that definitively exemplify Christianity, an evident fact whether we accept the definitions of particular contemporary Christian religious figures or we dig through the Christian gospels or the Pauline epistles for an unequivocal statement on what makes a person a true Christian.  A textual analysis of the Acts of the Apostles, the Letter to the Hebrews, and various Pauline epistles (e.g. Romans, Galatians, etc.) testify to the reality that the first generations of the Judaic/Messianic cult of Christianity weren't even sure what it meant to be Christian or whether someone could legitimately call himself a Christian if he wasn't ritually circumcised in accordance with Mosaic law!  That said, I think it suffices to say that Donald Trump is perfectly at liberty to define the terms that constitute a good Christian, even if those terms appear to bear little resemblance to the various gospel renderings of the Beatitudes.  Moreover, millions of evangelical Christian Republican voters, in the Southern and Midwestern states will invariably decide whether Trump is credible in suggesting that true Christian love and brotherhood demands the construction of a wall, at Mexico's expense no less, to keep Latin American migrants, especially from drug related violence in Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador, out of the U.S.  On the other hand, Trump is probably outmatched in defining the virtues of Christianity against Francis I, if only in view of the Pontiff's relative strength in speaking for 1,900+ years of generally continuous ecclesiastical tradition on the behalf of Christianity's largest sectarian body.  What seems critical to me, in this regard, is the degree to which this Pontiff, for all of his apparent leftist political slant in advocating openness toward migrants fleeing poverty and violence, criticizing the global distribution of wealth in advanced industrial/post-industrial economies and the reproduction of abject poverty in developing economies, and calling for a serious global response to climate change, can command the moral reprobation of Trump by American Christians, particularly evangelicals, as an innate transgressor of true Christian love.  If, on the one hand, a fair number of Trump's faithful supporters will simply disregard any detractors, no matter what ecclesiastical authority they muster, then, on the other hand, who else do Christian voters in the Republican primaries get to turn to?  Ted Cruz, an evangelical who wants to carpet bomb Syria and also wants to build a border wall, supplemented by "bio-metric tracking?"  Ben Carson, an evangelical who believes that the Founding Fathers never intended to enable a Muslim to serve as President and argues that the Jewish Holocaust could have been prevented if only German Jews had armed themselves?  What about Marco Rubio, a Catholic who also apparently attends evangelical Baptist services and rejects Francis' Papal indictments of the evils of rampant economic inequality as statements external to the Pontiff's authority to speak on matters of moral and spiritual significance?  In the end, Republican Christian voters will, in a spirit befitting of the individualistic overtones of the Reformation, have to decide for themselves whether any of these candidates adequately reflects their own understandings of what Christianity stands for, regardless of what a Catholic Pontiff has to say on the subject, and, for that matter, whether authentic Christian values constitute an important criterion in deciding who should represent their party in the general election.