What's Wrong With Evangelicalism? Part One

What’s Wrong with Evangelicalism?

(Part One)

Recently, I read two books. The first was D.G. Hart’s From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin: Evangelicals and the Betrayal of American Conservatism (2011); the second, read immediately after, was Still Evangelical?  

To a degree, reading the essays in SE? is like listening to an Adele album, an experience likely to prompt remarks such as, “That girl has a lotta anger.”  Most of the SE? essayists were (or are) angry with the 81% of white evangelicals who helped elect a president who is flawed in so many ways.

Now, Donald Trump is hardly the first morally flawed president; Warren Harding and John Kennedy come to mind.  Nor is he the first crude man to hold the office: Harry Truman and Richard Nixon both used un-presidential language, Truman in public, Nixon in the Oval Office where an apparently forgotten tape-recorder preserved expletives that will never be deleted from his legacy. Trump’s xenophobic racism is disturbing but he didn’t introduce it to the White House; Andrew Jackson sent peace-loving Cherokees off on the “trail of tears” and a century later FDR’s 1942 executive order sent thousands of loyal Japanese-Americans to internment camps. President Trump, of course, has so blended and refined these traits he might be considered an example of American exceptionalism.

It’s easy to joke about Trump but many see nothing to laugh about in his presidency.

Since I immediately bristle whenever someone calls the president “the Evangelical President,” I can understand the pain and frustration evident in the SE? essays. No, perhaps I can’t. I’m a white male. Folks like me take a lot of hits in these essays; we’re to blame for … but I digress.

 I don’t contest the right of the angry contributors to this challenging book to ask how 81% of white evangelicals could vote for so despicable a man as Donald Trump. I do contest their answer that insists something about those evangelicals to be morally deficient. Indeed, while reading the early essays one detects a slight whiff of “Thank God I am not like those evangelicals.”

Some evangelicals were going to vote for Trump no matter what. American politics is like that. In recent years the “yellow dog” sobriquet can fit members of both parties.

I have an evangelical friend (a retired pastor) who is a son of the South—perhaps I should say “Old South”—who voted for Clinton because his father and grandfather before him voted Democratic. Doubtless, at least some evangelicals who voted Republican are possessed by a similar hereditary impulse. Yet, my friend confessed he voted for Clinton with great reluctance (though not as great a reluctance as he would have felt voting for Trump). If this lifelong Democrat so unenthusiastically voted for his party’s candidate, should we be surprised some less-committed voters cast their votes for her opponent?  This suggests a question I didn’t see asked anywhere in the SE?: What was so odious about the Democratic candidate that prompted so many evangelicals to vote for her rival—a man with his own load of odium?

As you may know, I’m the retired pastor of a Southern Baptist church in the Midwest, a congregation representing a spectrum of political opinion but all under the umbrella of evangelicalism. Those contributing to SE? live in a different world than I. I’m not a college president, a professor, an editor, or the leader of a parachurch ministry; I’m certainly not among the “elite,” to use Mark Galli’s term; nor can I casually allude to a relationship with evangelical leaders as Shane Claiborne does (“my friend, Jim Wallis pointed out…”); I did, however, have the opportunity to listen to ordinary folk as they wrestled with the decision facing them in November 2016.  I’m not privy to the ratiocination of a statistically significant number of people who voted Republican that year but I can say I know few who eagerly voted for Donald Trump, few who didn’t wish someone else’s name was heading the party’s ticket.

I think of the forty-something mail-carrier who has a degree in Medieval and Renaissance English Literature, leads a theater group where he brings a witness for Christ to the Columbus arts’ community, hosts a Bible Study in his home, a home he and his wife have often opened to homeless young people; and who was asked to step down from a leadership position at his church because of his support for LGBTQ rights. This evangelical, liberal in so much of his political opinion, couldn’t bring himself to vote for the Democratic candidate. Instead, he voted for a third-party candidate, saying he thought she had some good ideas.  Yes, I know he didn’t actually vote for Trump but his willingness “throw away his vote” does illustrate the frustration not a few voters felt.

I think of the award-winning scientist, still busy in his mid-eighties. A long-time Sunday school teacher and leader in the church I served, he supported and advised me despite our differing on issues dividing folks in our denomination. Several times he entrusted me with generous sums of money to pass along to struggling church members, always asking me to leave the source of the gift unmentioned. One day over lunch, he quietly told me, “I think I’ve finally made peace with my conscience so I can vote for Trump. But I don’t want to.” After the election he took no joy in Trump’s victory, only relief his opponent hadn’t been elected.

Maybe both sides need to ask how we could have come to this. Surely there were better people among the Republicans, among the Democrats.

Did I feel anger in 2016? Yes. But my anger was its highest right after the major parties had chosen their champions and was largely dissipated by the election. My dear friend Brian summed up my feelings just after the conventions. Brian, a deacon in the church I had served, may have been borrowing someone else’s wit but I continue to associate the sentiment with him. He used his Facebook page to protest, “Three hundred million people in this country and these are the two they come up with!”  Come November, Brian—a fifty-something African-American—and his wife voted for Donald Trump.

If some evangelicals “held their noses” as they voted for Donald Trump (Galli), I’d like to think at least some evangelicals gritted their teeth as they voted for Hillary Clinton.

Yet, some evangelicals did vote for Trump as if they were affirming motherhood, apple pie, and the Second Coming. I can understand people voting reluctantly for Trump; I cannot understand them voting gleefully. So I won’t try.

A scholar, whose name and book I’ve forgotten, mentioned an unforeseen consequence of Roman Catholic clerical celibacy:  No lowly priest or exalted prelate could pass his position to a son. (That it may have happened on rare occasions does not negate the general truth of the observation.) If evangelicals practiced clerical celibacy, no Franklin Graham would be touting “the God-factor” in the 2016 election under the auspices of the well-respected organization his father shaped and no Jerry Falwell, Jr. would be describing the dreaminess of Donald Trump to the chagrin of many on the campus his father helped build.

Now we hear Houston’s Dr. Ed Young (longtime pastor of that city’s Second Baptist Church) saying the Democratic Party was “godless” and a Florida pastor saying he sensed demonic activity among some anti-Trump protestors. I might say the octogenarian’s comment was due to his age, but since I’ll be an octogenarian sooner than I might like, I’ll suggest he’s been listening to all the wrong people and, in any case, doesn’t represent the opinion of most Texas Baptists (though I live in Ohio, I’m a transplanted Texan). As for the other pastor’s opinion, I don’t know what to say other than he should take a deep breath and think again. I have an innate distrust of enthusiasm, which may explain my discomfort sitting in the bleachers at a football game. Still, as uncomfortable as I might be amidst hundreds of otherwise sane people calling for the blood of a fellow human in a striped shirt, I would not call those fans (from fanatics, by the way) demonic—“silly,” maybe, but not demonic. We live in an age when writing a letter to the editor, putting a negative post on FaceBook, or affixing a lewd anti-(fill in the blank) bumper sticker on your vehicle is insufficient to express your outrage; you must join others screaming, cursing, and making threating gestures with your entire fist, not just one finger.

If, to borrow from Charles Colson, many rightward leaning evangelicals believe the “Kingdom of God will arrive on Air Force One,” many leftward leaning evangelicals seem to believe that blessed reign will arrive in an electric car (driven, perhaps, by a white male in livery).  The venerable but flawed pastor of my childhood and youth, who would have been in his late sixties and early seventies when he most influenced me, occasionally commented that politics had no place in the pulpit because it sullied the gospel. Later, the man who served as a mentor during my first years as a pastor told me, “You have to be everyone’s pastor. Keep your politics to yourself.”  For decades no candidate’s sign appeared in my yard, no candidate’s name adorned my bumper. Every post-election Sunday, whether my candidate had won or lost, I simply reminded the congregation to pray for our nation’s leaders. Interestingly, I soon discovered most church members just assumed I had voted as they had (great minds and all that).

Reflecting on the 2016 mess, I wonder if my pastor and mentor were onto something.

Of course, many of today’s evangelicals would insist both those men who meant so much to me were wrong, insist that pounding on doors or posting on social media on behalf of the candidate most likely to advance the Kingdom is being “salt and light,” doing Christ’s work in a fallen world. Problem is, what if we don’t agree on who that candidate is? What if we think neither candidate is likely to advance any cause but their own?

When evangelicals threaten to break fellowship with others over honest differences of opinion, when they question the spiritual commitment of those who vote for a candidate they despise, when they wring their hands in unrelenting despair over the outcome of an election (especially when they live in a democracy that will allow them a chance to make a course correction in four years) something is wrong.

No, I haven't answered the question. But I've given you a clue.