Believe Me Quotes

“Evangelicals can do better than Donald Trump. His campaign and presidency have drawn on a troubling pattern of American evangelicalism that is willing to yield to old habits grounded in fear, nostalgia, and the search for power. Too many of its leaders (and their followers) have traded their Christian witness for a mess of political pottage and a few federal judges. It should not surprise us that people are leaving evangelicalism or no longer associating themselves with that label—or, in some cases, leaving the church altogether.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“The only way to get around Trump’s flaws was to somehow Christianize him. Paula White claimed that she had led Trump to accept Jesus Christ as his savior. Jerry Falwell Jr. said that Trump’s moral life had changed since he had become a born-again Christian. James Dobson told his followers to be patient with Trump, whom he declared to be a “baby Christian.” The kind of forgiveness and understanding that was never given to Bill Clinton was now available in seemingly endless supply to Donald Trump.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“Nothing Trump could say or do would deter his diehard white evangelical supporters. This is still the case. Most evangelicals were willing to ignore his moral lapses because he had, to their way of thinking, the correct policy proposals.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“Despite the biblical passages exhorting followers of Christ to “fear not,” it is possible to write an entire history of American evangelicalism as the story of Christians who have failed to overcome fear.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“Humility, on the other hand, is always centered on the cross of Jesus Christ, a political act that ushered in a new kind of political entity—the kingdom of God. Humility thus requires listening, debate, conversation, and dialogue that respects the dignity of all of God’s human creation. What would it take to replace the pursuit of power with humility?”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“We are operating more out of fear than out of trust in God. We are afraid, and there is no good result from engaging the world from a place of fear. . . . It causes us to trust in the wrong people and the wrong things to protect us. I see it in us. We are turning to the wrong saviors. We think our salvation lies somewhere where it does not. [We are] grasping at power in our current cultural atmosphere and trying to maintain influence. By the way, that’s not the way to get influence—to continue grasping at it desperately. . . . The person who is afraid long enough will always turn angry. Fear never leads to peace. Fear never leads to joy. It always leads to anger, usually anger at those who are not like you.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“Evangelical social critic Ronald Sider has said that too many evangelicals believe “life begins at conception and ends at birth.”15”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“Despite God’s commands to trust him in times of despair, evangelicals have always been very fearful people, and they have built their understanding of political engagement around the anxiety they have felt amid times of social and cultural change.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“Hunter argues that evangelical Christian attempts to “change the world” through politics—electing the right candidates, who will then pass the right laws and approve the right justices for the Supreme Court—have largely failed.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“They saw that those who retaliated violently or with anger against injustice were only propagating injustices of their own. Instead, the spiritual discipline against resentment unleashed a different kind of power—the power of the cross and the resurrection.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“It’s time to take a long hard look at what we have become. Believe me, we have a lot of work to do. Believe me.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“As I listened to the veterans of the civil rights movement tell their stories, I was surprised how often I heard them describe America as a “Christian nation.” But this was not the Christian nationalist nostalgia of David Barton, Robert Jeffress, or the court evangelicals. It was a gesture to what they hoped the United States might become.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“As we saw in chapter 5, many African Americans find American nostalgia troubling because they recognize that there is little in our nation’s history to yearn for. The leaders of the civil rights movement could not make appeals to a golden age. They could only look forward with hope. Those in the movement thus had a clear understanding about the differences between history and nostalgia. When they did turn to the past, it was often an appeal to ideals such as liberty, freedom, or justice, ideals written down in our nation’s sacred documents that had yet to be applied to them completely. History was a means by which they challenged white Americans to collectively come face to face with the moral contradiction at the heart of their republic.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“The playbook was clear on this point: character simply didn’t matter as much as the opportunity to seize a seat on the Supreme Court.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“Evangelicals voted for Trump because they have been conditioned to a way of thinking about political engagement that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a direct response to these cultural changes.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“Trump, on the other hand, was appealing to a different kind of evangelical voter. His business success and wealth made him attractive to those Christians sympathetic to the gospel of prosperity, or the “health and wealth gospel” movement.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“To win the evangelical vote, these political candidates knew that they would have to convince the faithful that the Christian fabric of the country was unraveling, the nation’s evangelical moorings were loosening, and the barbarians were amassing at the borders—ready for a violent takeover. Fear is the political language conservative evangelicals know best.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“Nostalgia freezes the past in images of timeless, childlike innocence.” 6 It fails to recognize change over time. So, instead of doing the hard work necessary for engaging a more diverse society with the claims of Christian orthodoxy, evangelicals have become intellectually lazy, preferring to respond to cultural change by trying to reclaim a world that is rapidly disappearing and has little chance of ever coming back. This backward-looking approach to politics can be seen no more clearly than in the evangelicals’ embrace of Trump’s campaign slogan: “Make America great again.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“For too long, white evangelical Christians have engaged in public life through a strategy defined by the politics of fear, the pursuit of worldly power, and a nostalgic longing for a national past that may have never existed in the first place. Fear. Power. Nostalgia. These ideas are at the heart of this book, and I believe that they best explain that 81 percent.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“Fear has been a staple of American politics since the founding of the republic. In 1800, the Connecticut Courant, a Federalist newspaper that supported President John Adams in his reelection campaign against Thomas Jefferson, suggested that, if the Electoral College chose Jefferson, the founding father and religious skeptic from Virginia, the country would have to deal with a wave of murder, atheism, rape, adultery, and robbery”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump