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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ben Howe
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April 5 - April 20, 2020
Social media makes it easy to forget all of that in an instant of impulse. Within a day of watching Smith dehumanize this woman, my immediate reaction instructed me that the only possible response was to dehumanize Smith. He wasn’t a person: he was garbage.
But I have come to believe that it is vitally important that as human beings we accept that we are all capable of being garbage. It has occurred to me that one of the quickest ways to thwart any possibility of personal growth is to assume such a thing is not within you.
Broadly speaking, we have taken to confronting immorality by becoming immoral. But because our immorality is intended to stop an objectively worse immorality, we reason that it is not immoral.
It seems as though grace, redemption, compromise, and empathy had all become the dirty words of “losers” who hadn’t accepted that larger issues were at stake. I saw more and more the belief that we were amid a culture war and that our job in prosecuting that war was to inflict maximum pain. The conclusion was that pain is the only way our immoral enemies will “learn.”
Sometimes, they argue, we must choose or excuse evils because the outcome of the culture war is more important both to Christians and to God Himself.
For a great many evangelicals, the word power was exactly what they wanted to hear. The idea of having it, and wielding it, was more than intoxicating. It was a lifeline. And in the end, it’s what many absolutely believe Trump as president has given them.
“In 1980 I believed that Christians could dramatically influence politics,” Farris continued. “Today, we see politics fully influencing a thousand Christian leaders. This is a day of mourning.”
He was offering himself as God’s preference, not just man’s, and saying that the Christian thing to do was to pray for him and, ultimately, not to pray for his opponents. His enemies, one might say. And on top of that, he was suggesting that the idea one should pray even for one’s opponents is lip service of the politically correct kind.
Trump was telling the assembled Christians unequivocally that he was the only Christian choice. That only through voting for him were they serving God. He had his faithful evangelists stand up and profess the same on his behalf. His witnesses.
Certainly no one had courted them so deviously, so mechanically, or so relentlessly.
If the movement had now embraced a leader who was a living repudiation of the moral expectations they’d founded the movement to pursue, what would that say about the movement? That it is, was, and had always been about power.
Instead of noting that God often uses people He does not (and we should not) endorse, Trump evangelicals took it upon themselves to canonize Trump, claiming a divine approval for him that he’d never claimed for himself.
A dogmatic law of sorts seems to have taken hold. One that treats Trump support as synonymous with God’s will.
His election was proof that God would use this man.
it is difficult not to have reached the conclusion that Trump is less of a vessel to these people and more of an idol.
This view of Trump as God’s inerrant vessel permeates the modern evangelical movement, from its leadership down to its pews, and that’s because it has a basis in a specific evangelical prophetic tradition.
Trump is not simply comparable to Cyrus the Great, he is the prophesied reincarnation of the man.
This is great news for those Christians who struggled in 2016. With prophecy, bothersome concerns like character flaws and the spoiled fruit Trump bears on a regular basis are irrelevant! Because, like Cyrus, who he is matters less than what God has planned for him. And don’t worry, this isn’t men speaking on God’s behalf; God literally told them this was the case. Forget the condition of Trump’s soul! Let’s Make America Great Again!
“We’re not electing a pastor,” he said, “we’re electing a president.”
It’s okay to vote for the womanizer, the abuser. It’s fine. As long as they cut taxes. Godliness is neato, but self-interest is in the driver’s seat when it comes to following a national leader.
What Falwell Jr. was preaching states that it is the calling of the devout to put aside glaring assaults and affronts to morality in favor of winning a political race.
Trump evangelicals are tasked with putting God in one compartment and their voting and political conscience in another.
Is a hierarchy being employed to determine that there is an urgent moral dilemma? Or are people just employing moral relativism in order to feel okay about supporting actions they would otherwise find objectionable? That a debate on the right even exists over when and where these types of morally relativistic comparisons are appropriate or not appropriate is itself a departure from traditional conservative ideology. Moral absolutism has, in my experience, always been a pillar of conservative philosophy.
Everything boils down to “lesser evil,” and relativism is chic in the Trump GOP.
Hypocrisy in politics, and also in religion, is not hard to come by. It’s rampant and poisonous but has become such a mainstay that Americans practically don’t notice. None of these men are unaware of their glowing hypocrisy, and none of them care.
But modern politics, the evangelical movement, and the GOP at large have designed a rhetorical hierarchy that causes every decision, every moment, every vote, to live under the cover of an ethical dilemma: a choice of “lesser evils.” That reasoning is undoubtedly the death of all standards, since everything, no matter how despicable or dishonest or immoral or ungodly, is cast as subordinate to the larger concerns
Despite any short-term victories that might be attained through fear and outrage, it is critical for the long term that conservatives learn to communicate in a way that is considerate and thoughtful and, most important, reflective of the actual good intentions and outcomes being offered.
For a variety of flavors of conservative voter, and especially those thought of as evangelicals, the perpetual sense of outrage, combined with an overwhelming sense of persecution, manifested as an easily recognizable self-righteous bitterness.
For the side so utterly fond of “facts don’t care about your feelings” political takes, this justification is motivated by a rather base emotional motivation: the heated desire for vengeance.
No, the absorption of the right by Trump. The previous identity was subsumed by the new one. This is not just true in the abstract, it was also true in a real-world sense. People on the right enamored of the Trump movement literally adopted his mannerisms, his speech patterns, his very words.
Taking stock, we have an evangelical movement that has gone Machiavellian; we have replaced the compassionate conservative with the bitter one; and the alt-right has integrated itself with the mainstream right.
the “new rules” rest in the notion that God needs us so badly to achieve His ends that we must be willing to sacrifice anything, even His very commands, in order to accomplish His will.
If an accusation is directed toward anyone deemed valuable to the right’s interests, that accusation will be denied as invalid. Any detractors on the right who see it differently will be accused of virtue signaling.
So now in place of debate you have argument, and within each argument you have both sides, right and left, always assuming bad faith while also acting in it. And attempting to silence opposition through designation rather than engagement. I’m a racist? Well, you’re a snowflake! It’s the triumph of the paranoid style.
So, utterly disgusted with liberal victimhood politics, conservatives adopted their own.
In other words, conservatives tend to portray the maligning of their motives as just as deeply hurtful as a liberal might portray the assumption of ethnic or gender inferiority.
So the philosophy at work here has three assumptions: First, that the persecution of the right is real, ongoing, and must be stopped. Second, that being silenced through accusations or character assassination would never happen to them again, but that they would make sure it happened to those who opposed. And third, that the idea of offense was itself so offensive that the only cure was to be deliberately and provocatively offensive. “Truthful,” they call it.
Trump was not merely unafraid of giving offense, he actively gave offense. On purpose. Merrily, even. He was the thumb in the eye. He was the guy at the party not afraid to tell what is “just a joke.” He was the “get over it” candidate.
the point I’m attempting to direct you toward is that evangelicals purported, for decades, to position the urgent need for the reestablishment of Christian values as the central doctrine of their political motivations. Above all else, we were tasked with growing God’s kingdom, preserving His creation, helping the poor, and loving the downtrodden. Despite evangelical leaders’ talk of character, their followers have the inverse priorities. That these leaders can’t recognize that it’s their hypocritical actions which have led to this gap between abstract ideals and real-life priorities is
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Why? Such a simple answer: selfishness. Something from which no one is free of temptation but which we are all tasked with rising above.
Evangelicals have steadily abdicated their cultural leadership role over the decades, choosing instead to depend on government-led crusades or simply closing in on themselves, which has left a vacuum for distortions of Christianity to fill.
I should note that there is nothing inherently wrong, or even religiously wrong, with seeking a better life. Not for one’s family nor even for oneself. No, the problem here is the selfishness. When they say “better world,” they mean “better life,” and they mean it only for their own demographic. That may sound harsh, but the evidence is overwhelming. The new and often stated objective of the political evangelical movement is prosperity for that movement in particular, for renewal in their towns in particular. For their “kind.”
“Our” communities. The sense of the Christian evangelical as not merely a voting demographic but a society unto itself, and one that requires not only representation but advocacy. To the exclusion of others. It’s a remarkably un-Christian impulse, but one that drives a great deal of commentary on the religious right. And once more, it represents that turn away from God and toward man that is so stark in this ongoing movement.
Michelle Goldberg summarized this in the New York Times, saying, “Christian conservatives may believe strongly in their own righteousness. But from the outside, it looks as if their movement was never really about morality at all.”13
On the morning after the election I explained this, saying, “I believed, and still believe, that Donald Trump’s character is such that he will drive this country further into problems we may have been able to escape and that the Republican Party will do nothing to stop him, thus destroying the credibility of conservatism as a philosophical force in American politics.”17 I have issues with Trump himself, but the issue with Trump is less about what he does and more about what other people do on his behalf or in opposition to him.
his existence seemed to create a level of partisan-driven intellectual dishonesty among his adherents (and his detractors) that seemed destined to drive the divisions in America deeper than ever.
we have moved into a world where the man’s worst aspects are reveled in; his every unthinkable action is celebrated and shared.
Republican voters, who have long identified as value driven, seem to have become flexible in their understanding of morality, all in the service of defending one man.
evangelicals no longer saw themselves as witnesses. They saw themselves as righteous.
In other words, government would reflect Christian values if the people to which the government answers are themselves a Christian people.
