Cliff Sims, Yellowhammer News founder and advisor to former President Donald Trump, joined conservative personality and former U.S. Rep. Trey Gowdy in a Fox News podcast Tuesday.
Sims and Gowdy’s main topic of discussion hinged on the intersection of faith and politics.
Gowdy asked Sims, who comes from a long line of preachers, how he got into the political arena to begin with.
“I’m in Enterprise, Alabama, and my Sunday school teacher is a man named Barry Moore,” Sims said. “Barry, at the time, would call himself a garbage man. All he had done was run a small businesses and you know a waste management company. Now, of course, we know Barry by his title, congressman.”
“But then he had nothing to do with politics and it was really a time in my life where I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. Barry decided in 2010, that he was going to run for the state legislature and he and I had started some businesses together and just kind of got to know each other.
“He (Moore) said, I know you don’t know anything about politics, and I’ve never run for office so I don’t know much about this. But I’m betting that if we do it, we can kind of figure it out together. And so I helped manage his campaign in 2010.
“Six years later, I had an office in the West Wing.”
As a man of faith, since entering politics, Sims said he has been led by scripture. From that vantage point he published a book, “The Darkness Has Not Overcome: Lessons on Faith and Politics from Inside the Halls of Power.”
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“This is, by all accounts, a pretty difficult, brutal, very pessimistic time in American politics, and really, in American culture in general,” Sims said. “But the title comes from the Gospel of John 1:5 which says, ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.’
“And so that’s a promise that I think that we can lean on in a time like this.”
Sims told Gowdy that American society today places too much emphasis on politics rather than spirituality.
“I think it’s also worth remembering that when we think about this being such a dark, brutal time in American life, it’s often because we have placed politics too high in the hierarchy of things that we should care about,” he said. “Don’t get me wrong, I’ve devoted a lot of my adult life as you reference to getting Republicans elected, advancing conservative causes, fighting for a vision of government that I think is most in keeping with God’s vision for justice and righteousness in in the public sphere.
“But politics has risen way too high in our hierarchy of things we care about.”
Austen Shipley is a staff writer for Yellowhammer News.
