The Problem With Political Christianity

Writing in the New Yorker, Michael Luo ponders what he considers to be the wreckage of the minds of so many of his fellow Evangelicals in the Trump years. 

Falsehoods about a stolen election, retailed by Donald Trump and his allies, drove the Capitol invasion, but distorted visions of Christianity suffused it. One group carried a large wooden cross; there were banners that read “In God We Trust,” “Jesus Is My Savior / Trump Is My President,” and “Make America Godly Again”; some marchers blew shofars, ritual instruments made from ram’s horns that have become popular in certain conservative Christian circles, owing to its resonance with an account in the Book of Joshua in which Israelites sounded their trumpets and the walls of Jericho came tumbling down. The intermingling of religious faith, conspiratorial thinking, and misguided nationalism on display at the Capitol offered perhaps the most unequivocal evidence yet of the American church’s role in bringing the country to this dangerous moment.

A recent survey, conducted by the American Enterprise Institute, found that more than a quarter of white evangelicals believe that Donald Trump has been secretly battling “a group of child sex traffickers that include prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites,” a core tenet of the QAnon conspiracy theory. The data suggest a faith-based reality divide emerging within the Republican Party: nearly three-quarters of white evangelical Republicans believe widespread voter fraud took place in the 2020 election, compared with fifty-four per cent of non-evangelical Republicans; sixty per cent of white evangelical Republicans believe that Antifa, the antifascist group, was mostly responsible for the violence in the Capitol riot, compared with forty-two per cent of non-evangelical Republicans. Other surveys have found that white evangelicals are much more skeptical of the covid-19 vaccine and are less likely than other Americans to get it, potentially jeopardizing the country’s recovery from the pandemic.

How did the church in America––particularly, its white Protestant evangelical manifestation––end up here?

He tells a familiar story (familiar in large part from the work of Evangelical historian Mark Noll) of this being baked into the cake of the Evangelical mind since the First Great Awakening. I completely understand Luo’s focusing on Evangelicalism, not only because it’s his own tradition, but also because Evangelicals have certainly been at the forefront of all the crazy stuff surrounding Trump. The December march with the shofar, the pillow guy, and all that — it was led and dominated by Evangelicals.

But they weren’t the only ones there. Prominent Catholics — Archbishop Vigano and Bishop Strickland — participated with recorded messages, and there was at least one Catholic priest who spoke. There was an Orthodox speaker too. You don’t have to dig too deep in the Catholic and Orthodox online worlds to find plenty of support for the kind of things Evangelicals fronted. The first person I ever met who spoke to me favorably about QAnon was a fellow Orthodox Christian.

Besides, there are plenty of mainstream Evangelicals (and others), particularly intellectuals, who are embracing and promoting radical causes that are more socially respectable in New York Times world, but which strike many of us as bizarre and dangerous departures from Christian orthodoxy.

American Evangelicals have no monopoly on losing their minds politically. I’m reading right now Peter Seewald’s recently published first volume of his biography of Benedict XVI. I had not fully realized how anti-Nazi the Ratzinger family was, and how generally anti-Nazi German Catholics were, though some of the Catholic bishops eventually capitulated. Most German Protestants, though, went all-in for Hitler early on. German Protestants of the 1930s were not American Evangelicals. Some of the most intelligent and cultured German Christians of the era were seduced by Hitler.

Similarly, since the 1960s, some of the most intelligent and cultured American Christian leaders have been seduced by Third World communism, or other radical utopian causes. It’s just that a William Sloane Coffin type is clubbable, so to speak, whereas a Robert Jeffress is not. It’s easy to identify “the scandal of the Evangelical mind,” to use Mark Noll’s phrase, when we see it, but the kind of folks who point it out aren’t often looking for the scandal of the Progressive Christian mind, which is that they can be just as brainlessly caught up in enthusiasm for causes with little grounding in Scripture, Tradition, or reason, as a suburban conservative Evangelical.

You will recall that I wrote quite critically in this space of the December Jericho March. It was idolatry, and crazy, too. I wrote as someone who is a committed Christian, and both a theological and a political conservative who believes Christians should be engaged in the public square. But that, again, was rank idolatry. I am sadly aware of churches that are being torn apart by this kind of idolatry from the Right.

But I am also aware of churches that are being torn apart by an equal and opposite fanaticism from the Left. I know people whose churches — even conservative ones — are being ripped in two by Critical Social Justice, especially as it applies to race. What I’m hearing is that those minds have been set alight by this ideology are refusing to accept criticism; to oppose it is to show how racist, or otherwise socially unjust, you are. These apostles of enlightenment are every bit as fanatical and unquestioning, and intolerant of questioning, as the right-wing Christians who took the stage at the Jericho March. But they are behind a cause that is popular with elites, especially in the media, so their blind anger, intolerance, heterodoxy, and destruction looks “prophetic.”

All in all, I don’t see much to get excited about from political Christianity of either Left or Right. In my Jericho March column, I wrote:

For my sins, I guess, I watched all six hours of the Jericho March proceedings from Washington today, on the march webcast. I say for my sins, but in truth, I decided to watch it because I am interested in what the activist Christian Right is saying, and how they are thinking, in the wake of Donald Trump losing the election.

Except he didn’t lose the election, according to them. It was taken from him. This is an article of faith, not to be doubted. If you doubt, you are a traitor, a coward, in league with the Devil. I’m not exaggerating at all. I saw an interview that the influential Evangelical broadcaster Eric Metaxas gave to the populist activist Charlie Kirk this week, in which he boldly claimed that patriots must fight “to the last drop of blood” to preserve Trump’s presidency, and that those who disagree are the same as Germans who stood by and did nothing to stop Hitler (Metaxas is best known as a biographer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer). In the same interview — I wrote about it here, in “Eric Metaxas’s American Apocalypse” — Metaxas said it doesn’t matter what can or can’t be proven in court, he knows, and we know, that the election was stolen. When Kirk, who is very sympathetic to Metaxas, asked him what he thought of where the cases stood, Metaxas blithely claimed that he is “thrilled” to know nothing about them.

This knocked me flat. I have known Metaxas since 1998. He is one of the sweetest men you could hope to meet, gentle and kind, a pleasure to be around. Not a hater in the least. Though I have not supported his Trumpist politics, I would not have figured him for someone who would go as far as he did on the Kirk interview. What kind of person calls for spilling blood in defense of a political cause for which he does not care if any factual justification exists? What kind of person compares doubters to Nazi collaborators? A religious zealot, that’s the kind. The only way one can justify that hysterical stance is if one conflates religion with politics, and politics with religion.

Here’s the thing: the public square is full of progressive Christians who have as much unthinking passion  for their causes as Metaxas has for his. To doubt, or to tolerate doubt, or complexity, is a sign of false consciousness and a lack of commitment. Progressive Christianity adopts the Kafka trap articulated by people like Robin DiAngelo, who say that for white people to deny that they are guilty of the sins of racism is a sign of their guilt. It doesn’t matter what the facts are in individual causes — they know, they just know, that you are guilty.

The MAGA Christians had a rash and ineffective president on their side, but he’s gone now. Otherwise, the MAGA Christians are widely mocked, and largely powerless. By contrast, the Progressive Christians have on their side a committed president who is far more effective at governing than his hapless predecessor. They have the Democratic Party establishment, the news media, Hollywood, academia, and corporate America — all the power centers of American life.. Me, I was scandalized by the Jericho Marchers and what it said about conservative Christianity. But I am genuinely scared of what the Progressive Christians and their allies in power are going to do.

My point is not “neener-neener, they are worse than we are.” My point is that political Christianity has hit a dead end. Look, I know honorable Christians on both sides of the political spectrum who are involved in public life, and I’m not talking about them when I say this: But in general, the more political is a church or an individual Christian, the less likely that they are doing a bit of good for the Kingdom of God, or their own sanctification.

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