As regular readers know, I am no fan of most organized religions, including Christianity. That's not to say I am not a proponent of Christ's gospel, especially the social gospel aspect of it. Rather, my dislike arises from the total distorion of that gospel message and organized religion's focus on hatred and division. Centuries of history of Christianity is filled with the fostering of hatreds, violence and death typically fueled by church leaders focused on power, control and wealth rather than Christ's message (Islam suffers a similar perversion and bloody history). Here in America it seems no group has discarded Christ's gospel and New Testament teachings than evangelicals who have embraced a politicized form of religion that places bigotry, white nationalism and hatred of others first and foremost while merely giving lip service to the true message of Christ. Now, it is as if evangelicals have establised a new idol or high priest in the person of Donald Trump - a man who is the antithesis of Christ's message - and his equally toxic and hate-filled acolytes. A very long piece in
looks at this growing perversion of Christianity among evangelicals. Here are highligts:
“A small group of
people, inside and outside this church, coordinated a divisive effort to use
disinformation in order to persuade others to vote these men down as part of a
broader effort to take control of this church,” David Platt, a 43-year-old
minister at McLean Bible Church and a best-selling author, charged in a July
4 sermon.
Platt said church
members had been misled, having been told, among other things, that the three
individuals nominated to be elders would advocate selling the church building
to Muslims, who would convert it into a mosque. In a second vote on July 18,
all three nominees cleared the threshold. But that hardly resolved the
conflict. Members of the church filed a lawsuit, claiming that the conduct of
the election violated the church’s constitution.
Platt, who is
theologically conservative, had been accused in the months before the vote by a
small but zealous group within his church of “wokeness” and being “left
of center,” of pushing a “social justice” agenda and promoting critical
race theory, and of attempting to “purge conservative members.” A Facebook page and a right-wing
website have targeted Platt and his leadership. For his part, Platt,
speaking to his congregation, described an email that was circulated claiming,
“MBC is no longer McLean Bible Church, that it’s now Melanin Bible Church.”
What happened at McLean
Bible Church is happening all over the evangelical world. Influential figures
such as the theologian Russell
Moore and the Bible teacher Beth
Moore felt compelled to leave the Southern Baptist Convention; both were
targeted by right-wing elements within the SBC. The Christian Post, an
online evangelical newspaper, published
an op-ed by one of its contributors criticizing religious conservatives
like Platt, Russell Moore, Beth Moore, and Ed Stetzer, the executive director
of the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center, as “progressive Christian figures”
who “commonly champion leftist ideology.” In a matter of months, four
pastors resigned from Bethlehem Baptist Church, a flagship church in
Minneapolis. One of those pastors, Bryan Pickering, cited mistreatment by
elders, domineering leadership, bullying, and “spiritual
abuse and a toxic culture.” Political conflicts are hardly the whole reason
for the turmoil, but according to news
accounts,
they played a significant role, particularly on matters having to do with race.
“Nearly everyone
tells me there is at the very least a small group in nearly every evangelical
church complaining and agitating against teaching or policies that aren’t
sufficiently conservative or anti-woke,” a pastor and prominent figure within
the evangelical world told me. (Like others with whom I spoke about this topic,
he requested anonymity in order to speak candidly.) “It’s everywhere.”
Michael O. Emerson,
a sociology professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago, told me that he
and his research team have spent the past three years studying race and
Christianity. “The divisions and conflicts we found are intense, easily more
intense then I have seen in my 25 years of studying the topic,” he told me.
What this adds up to, he said, is “an emerging day of reckoning within
churches.”
The aggressive,
disruptive, and unforgiving mindset that characterizes so much of our politics
has found a home in many American churches.
The coronavirus
pandemic, of course, has placed religious communities under extraordinary
strain. . . . . Not being in community destabilized what has long been a core
sense of Christian identity.
But there’s more
to the fractures than just COVID-19. After all, many of the forces that are
splitting churches were in motion well before the pandemic hit. The pandemic
exposed and exacerbated weaknesses and vulnerabilities, habits of mind and
heart, that already existed.
The root of the discord
lies in the fact that many Christians have embraced the worst aspects of our
culture and our politics. When the Christian faith is politicized, churches
become repositories not of grace but of grievances, places where tribal
identities are reinforced, where fears are nurtured, and where aggression and
nastiness are sacralized. The result is not only wounding the nation; it’s
having a devastating impact on the Christian faith.
How is it that evangelical Christianity has become, for
too many of its adherents, a political religion? The historian George Marsden
told me that political loyalties can sometimes be so strong that they create a
religiouslike faith that overrides or even transforms a more traditional
religious faith. The United States has largely avoided the most virulent
expressions of such political religions. None has succeeded for very long—at
least, until now.
The first step
was the cultivation of the idea within the religious right that certain
political positions were deeply Christian, according to Marsden. Still, such
claims were not at all unprecedented in American history. Through the 2000s,
even though the religious right drew its energy from the culture wars—as it had
for decades—it abided by some civil restraints. Then came Donald Trump.
“When Trump was able to
add open hatred and resentments to the political-religious stance of ‘true
believers,’ it crossed a line,” Marsden said. “Tribal instincts seem to have
become overwhelming.” The dominance of political religion over professed
religion is seen in how, for many, the loyalty to Trump became a blind
allegiance. The result is that many Christian followers of Trump “have come to
see a gospel of hatreds, resentments, vilifications, put-downs, and insults as
expressions of their Christianity, for which they too should be willing to
fight.”
Some of the most
distinctive features of the evangelical movement may have left it particularly
vulnerable to this form of politicization. Among religious believers,
evangelicals are some of the most anti-institutional, Timothy J. Keller, the
founding pastor of Redeemer Presbyterian Church, in Manhattan, told me. The
evangelical movement flourished in this relatively anti-institutional country
at a particularly anti-institutional time. Evangelical ministries and churches
fit the “spirit of the age,” growing rapidly in the 1970s, and retaining more
of their members even as many mainline denominations declined.
At the same time,
Keller argues, that anti-institutional tendency makes evangelical communities
more prone than others to “insider abuse”—corruption committed by leaders who
have almost no guardrails—and “outsider-ism,” in which evangelicals simply
refuse to let their church form them or their beliefs. As a result, they are
unrooted—and therefore susceptible to political idolization, fanatical ideas,
and conspiracy theories.
“The evangelical
Church in the U.S. over the last five decades has failed to form its adherents
into disciples. So there is a great hollowness. All that was needed to cause
the implosion that we have seen was a sufficiently provocative stimulus. And
that stimulus came.”
“Culture
catechizes,” Alan Jacobs, a distinguished professor of humanities in the honors
program at Baylor University, told me. Culture teaches us what matters and what
views we should take about what matters. Our current political culture, Jacobs
argued, has multiple technologies and platforms for catechizing—television,
radio, Facebook, Twitter, and podcasts among them. People who want to be
connected to their political tribe—the people they think are like them, the
people they think are on their side—subject themselves to its catechesis all
day long, every single day, hour after hour after hour.
On the flip side,
many churches aren’t interested in catechesis at all. They focus instead on
entertainment, because entertainment is what keeps people in their seats and
coins in the offering plate. . . . “So
if people are getting one kind of catechesis for half an hour per week,” Jacobs
asked, “and another for dozens of hours per week, which one do you think will
win out?”
But when people’s
values are shaped by the media they consume, rather than by their religious
leaders and communities, that has consequences. “What all those media want is
engagement, and engagement is most reliably driven by anger and hatred,” Jacobs
argued. “They make bank when we hate each other. And so that hatred migrates
into the Church, which doesn’t have the resources to resist it.
For many
Christians, their politics has become more of an identity marker than their
faith. They might insist that they are interpreting their politics through the
prism of scripture, with the former subordinate to the latter, but in fact
scripture and biblical ethics are often distorted to fit their politics. . . . The
reality, however, is that a lot of people, especially in this era, will leave a
church if their political views are ever challenged, even around the edges.
“Many people are
much more committed to their politics than to what the Bible actually says,”
Dudley said. “We have failed not only to teach people the whole of scripture,
but we have also failed to help them think biblically. We have failed to teach
them that sometimes scripture is most useful when it doesn’t say what we want
it to say, because then it is correcting us.”
[T]he early Christians
transformed the Roman empire not by demanding but by loving, not by angrily
shouting about their rights in the public square but by serving even the people
who persecuted them, which is why Christianity grew so quickly and took over
the empire. I also know that once Christians gained political power under
Constantine, that beautiful loving, sacrificing, giving, transforming Church
became the angry, persecuting, killing Church.
How many people look at
churches in America these days and see the face of Jesus? . . . The former
president normalized a form of discourse that made the once-shocking seem
routine. Russell Moore laments the “pugilism of the Trump era, in which
anything short of cruelty is seen as weakness.” The problem facing the
evangelical church, then, is not just that it has failed to inculcate adherents
with its values—it’s that when it has succeeded in doing so, those values have
not always been biblical.
Trump represents the
fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of many of white evangelicals’ most
deeply held values. Her thesis is that American evangelicals have worked for
decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity
and Christian nationalism. (She defines Christian nationalism as “the belief
that America is God’s chosen nation and must be defended as such,” which she
says is a powerful predictor of attitudes toward non-Christians and on issues
such as immigration, race, and guns. . . . conservative evangelicals insist
that they are rejecting cultural influences,” she said, “when in fact their
faith is profoundly shaped by cultural and political values, by their racial
identity and their Christian nationalism.”
“Evangelical militancy
is often depicted as a response to fear,” she told me. “But it’s important to
recognize that in many cases evangelical leaders actively stoked fear in the
hearts of their followers in order to consolidate their own power and advance
their own interests.”
“Much of what is
distinctive about American evangelicalism is not essential to Christianity,”
Noll has written.
And he is surely correct. I would add only that it isn’t simply the case that
much of what is distinctive about American evangelicalism is not essential to
Christianity; it is that now, in important respects, much of what is
distinctive about American evangelicalism has become antithetical to authentic
Christianity. What we’re dealing with—not in all cases, of course, but in far
too many— is political identity and cultural anxieties, anti-intellectualism
and ethnic nationalism, resentments and grievances, all dressed up as
Christianity.
