Many white Evangelicals now value the cultural and political power and esteem of the Christian faith over their religion’s call to internal soulcraft.
Many white Evangelicals have become obsessed with the cultural and political power and esteem of the Christian faith — while neglecting the far more important call to internal soulcraft issued by the Founder of the religion they profess.
I t’s been a tough couple of weeks for the Trump-Evangelical Industrial Complex. On August 25, Jerry Falwell Jr., former president of Liberty University and one of the first on the Christian right to endorse Trump in 2016, was forced to resign from his post after being outed as a cuckold. The whole affair is a case study of the observation attributed to Mark Twain that “the only difference between reality and fiction is that fiction needs to be credible.” If this incident had played out in an anti-Trump work of fiction, critics would rightly roll their eyes at the hackneyed, on-the-nose irony of it all. Donald Trump’s chief Evangelical cheerleader defenestrated as a “cuck”? The willing suspension of disbelief collapses at the very suggestion.
And yet, the predictable fall of Falwell proves that reality remains, in many delightful respects, stranger than fiction. It’s neither charitable nor Christian to glory in the misfortune of others, but few men in the public eye have so richly deserved to be stripped of all moral authority by the humiliating laughter of the masses as Jerry Falwell Jr. He has been plagued for years by complaints from former Liberty University students and staff alleging that the school was run in a dictatorial manner. And his unconditional, boot-licking, self-abasing embrace of Donald Trump in 2016 set the ball rolling for the wider moral capitulation of the white Evangelical world during that election cycle — a capitulation that will probably discredit that particular brand of Christianity in the political sphere for at least a generation. In many ways, Falwell has been the figurehead of the shift among some Christians during the last four years from worshiping Jesus of Nazareth to worshiping political power. The man is a whitewashed tomb, once powerful and influential on the outside, but always filled with dead men’s bones and all uncleanness within. The inner contents of his soul have now been revealed for all the world to see, and both Christians and conservatives are better off for it.
Before his fall from grace, Falwell founded a “think tank” with Charlie Kirk (whose association with any such institution demands that scare quotes be used). The Falkirk Center for Faith and Freedom appears to be plowing on with its work despite its founder’s exploits. One of the Falkirk Center’s fellows is Eric Metaxas, another Evangelical acolyte of the president’s who recently had a below-par week. On August 27, footage emerged of Metaxas sucker-punching an anti-Trump protester on the streets of Washington, D.C., after attending the president’s interminable acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. As the footage shows, the protester cycled past Metaxas quite harmlessly while shouting expletives about the president before the author and radio host assaulted him from behind. Upon discovering that he had not dealt his victim a knockout blow, Metaxas began to run backwards in a cowardly, albeit amusing, manner.
This is the same man who has written a series of propagandistic children’s books over the past few years extolling the virtues of Donald Trump to children who would be much better served by reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. Titles include Donald Drains The Swamp, Donald Builds The Wall, and Donald and The Fake News. They are the kind of books one would expect children in North Korea to be force-fed about the Kim family. Certainly, if an excitable left-wing grifter had published a children’s book circa 2012 titled Barack Takes The Guns, or Barack Beats The Nuns, conservatives would rightly dismiss this person as a deranged partisan. And yet, a specific enclave of white Evangelicals, of which the Falkirk set are only a part, have managed to institute a cult of personality around Donald Trump which the Left rarely, if ever, approached during Obama’s presidency. During his speech at the RNC last week, Charlie Kirk sounded less like a respectable political activist and more like a Stalin-era apparatchik, trying desperately to keep himself out of the gulag with an excessive televised barrage of effusive loyalty. Listening to this particular group of Evangelicals, one is less likely to hear something like, “Donald Trump is more qualified than the Democratic candidate to execute the duties outlined in Article Two of the Constitution” (a defensible position), and more likely to hear something like, “All hail our glorious leader! May he, like Samson, slay a thousand libs with the jawbone of Hillary!”
These are only a few of the many conservative white Evangelicals who can’t seem to disentangle the interests of the Christian God from those of the Republican Party. This confusion appears to have taken hold even in the very heart of the Republican establishment. In a feat of rank idolatry toward the end of his RNC speech last week, Mike Pence amended a verse from the Book of Hebrews that speaks of believers fixing their eyes on Jesus and replaced the name of the Christian Messiah with “Old Glory,” an affectionate nickname for the American flag. Even more egregious was the decision of the Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo to host a campaign raising money for the legal fees of Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old charged with murdering two people in Kenosha, Wis., during last week’s riots. That Rittenhouse has become a lightning rod in the culture wars seems to have been enough for the website to view his cause as a “Christian” one.
All this goes to show that a significant plurality of white Evangelicals in the United States have become obsessed with the cultural and political power and esteem of the Christian faith. In doing so, they have neglected the far more important call to internal soulcraft issued by the Founder of the religion they profess. From its earliest days, Christianity has consistently undermined the notion that salvation, or really anything good at all, can come from the coercive power of the state. The reports that constitute the central claims of the faith are of the Savior of the world being put to the most ignominious and cruel death imaginable by such agents. In many ways, the crucifixion narratives in the four canonical Gospels are the most graphic and bracing exposition of Friedrich Hayek’s knowledge problem ever written. Has there ever been more conclusive evidence of the fact that when we human beings turn the violent machinery of the state upon others that we “know not what [we] do?” In that sense, the Christian attitude toward civil magistrates should always be one of critical distance and suspicion. The authors of the New Testament knew that if you give any human being enough power, they’re liable to murder the Son of God. The belief that the condition of the faith itself can be bettered or improved in any way by a political party or by political actors runs fundamentally against the grain of the New Testament.
“But what about abortion?” comes the inevitable reply from many conservative Christians who have thought long and hard in good faith over the state of American politics before deciding that Trump’s pro-life policies are enough to warrant their admiration and support. The truth is that if there were a direct correlation between abortion rates in the country and which party holds the White House, there would be an excellent case for supporting Trump, warts and all. However, as David French has long pointed out, that simply isn’t the case. The number of abortions perpetrated each year in the United States has been declining at a steady rate for almost 40 years. Republicans and Democrats have traded occupation of the White House many times during that period. The credit for this decline belongs to pro-life activists on the ground in their local communities saving lives one baby and one relationship at a time.
That’s not to say Christians shouldn’t pursue their interests and their aims in the political sphere. But can these interests be separated from the very substance and fabric of the faith? It’s common to hear enthusiastic Christian Republicans say that while Trump’s internal moral fiber may be lacking, his external actions and policies redound to the benefit of the Church. But this kind of partition between the internal state of a person’s soul and the moral value of their external actions is explicitly excluded and condemned by Jesus in the New Testament (Matthew 5:21-22, Matthew 5:27-28, Matthew 5:33-34). If Jesus is correct, which should not be that difficult for Christians to believe, then the moral shortcomings of a man or woman’s internal character will always eventually triumph over any feigned noble action. To put it in less theological terms, character is destiny.
Philip Sherrard has further noted that Christianity is uniquely ill-suited to function as a political religion because, alone among the Abrahamic faiths, it has no body of legislation intended to function as civil law. The Christian Church is set up to facilitate communion between the human and the divine. This is obviously a process from which the coercive sanction of positive law and coercive violence is excluded. If the Church is conceived of as a voluntary assembly of believers in communion with God, then no political party can claim to be a part of either its successes or its failures; politics is, after all, nothing more the organized use of violence. It’s true that some politicians and political parties are more interested in making practice of the Christian faith easier than others are. But there is nothing anywhere in the Christian intellectual tradition — Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox — that suggests Christians should allow themselves to be held ransom by morally destitute civil magistrates who threaten them with the prospect of a less friendly ruler. The response to such a magistrate should be to point out that it is God who sets the conditions for the worship of the Church, not princes, potentates . . . or presidents.
The only real allure that a Faustian bargain with a morally bankrupt politician can hold for Christians is the allure of religious power. If you really care about the outward forms of religious devotion; if you miss a time when politicians felt the need to pay lip service to Christian piety even when they didn’t believe a word of it; if you wish that your church had the same kind of pull in the corridors of power that it had 40 years ago; if you really care whether the signs at the White House say “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays” — then of course the Republican Party will seem inseparable from Christianity. But if you care that much about popularity and power, you probably shouldn’t have picked a poor, despised, crucified man to be the object of your religious devotion.
In fact, polling from the Cato Institute suggests that many of Trump’s Evangelical supporters fit this category. The president’s most loyal supporters in the 2016 primaries were voters who identified as Evangelical Christians but were not necessarily frequent churchgoers. Positive attitudes toward the president fell off a cliff among voters who attend church once a week or more. We don’t know if the same will hold true in the 2020 election, but I suspect not. Trump has consolidated his support among Evangelicals over the past four years, and Evangelical leaders have, over the same period, built a permission structure for Trump support that didn’t exist en masse in 2016. Expect white Evangelicals to mobilize in a more or less monolithic way for the president in November. Expect the living witness of their faith to atrophy and wither because of it.
Many Christians do not know that their faith, though not a political ideology (or party!), had controversial political implications right from the start. In the ancient world, a “gospel” was traditionally an announcement of military victory. A messenger would be sent into a town or city in disputed territory to read it out in the town square. It would usually start something like, “The beginning of the gospel of Caesar, Son of the divine Augustus” (because all of the emperors had their dead forebears declared divine to solidify their reign). So when Mark the evangelist wrote, “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God,” he was making a deeply subversive political statement. Essentially, if Jesus was the Son of God, then Caesar wasn’t. In ancient Rome, politics and religion were melded together as mutually reinforcing pillars of the social structure. The religious cults of the empire, by avowing their allegiance to the emperor, clothed the imperial polity in a mystical and divinely ordained legitimacy. This is the primary use most rulers and politicians have had for religion for most of human history. Christianity stripped the imperial polity of its claim to divine supremacy by setting Christ over and against Caesar, claiming that God is revealed not in the constitution of the state but in the voluntary association of Christian believers. The divine pretensions of the Roman political order were revealed to be just that. Caesar was demystified, stripped of all of his divine splendor, and the Romans could sense it. As the theologian David Bentley Hart writes:
To hear that tone of alarm in its richest, purest, and most spontaneous registers one really has to repair to the pagans themselves: to Celsus, or Eunapius of Sardis, or the emperor Julian. What they saw, as they peered down upon the Christian movement from the high, narrow summit of their society, was not the understandable ebullition of long-suppressed human longings but the very order of the cosmos collapsing at its base, drawing everything down into the general ruin and obscene squalor of a common humanity.
The earliest days of Christianity involved the repossession of the sacred from the stewardship of politics, with all its lordly pretensions, into the hands of community in the form of the Church. White Evangelicals need to move forward with a similar attitude toward the Republican Party, divesting themselves of any starry-eyed sentimentality or mystical reverence for the GOP and its policy aims. They are not identical to those of the Church, and they never will be, because the Church does not conquer by violence, which is ultimately the only tool that politics has. This is not to say that Christians cannot enjoy a healthy transactional relationship with the Republican Party when their interests intersect. But the practice of politics should never command the affections of a Christian. We are not dealing with the great Wizard of Oz but with a man behind a curtain who writes laws enforced by confiscating property at gunpoint and threatening to throw people into cages. That’s politics; necessary, to be sure, but with little to recommend affection or loyalty. One of my favorite stories about the original Christian repudiation of the old Roman order concerns the Christian noblewoman Serena, wife of Stilicho. One day, in 389, she entered the Palatine Temple of the Great Mother Cybele. Admiring the necklace that adorned the statue of the goddess, Serena removed it from the idol, placed it around her own neck, and walked with cheerful ease out of the temple as the last, lonely priestess of the cult peppered her with insults and curses. This is pretty much the attitude I think Christians should take toward political parties, the vapid cults of our own day. Take what you can get from them, but don’t flatter them with tributes of honor or reverence that they don’t deserve.