Should-Read: Some of us think that Evangelical Christianity lost its way early: when your evangelization shifts from: "this works for me; you go and do good—we will meet on the road" to "I am saved and you are not: shape up!", you have already become a hypocrite in your pretense of certainty about First and Last Things. And from that hypocrisy all others are but minor steps, as Michael Gerson should have known long ago. It was never terribly admirable from the days it stopped caring that its congregations where almost exclusively white and started claiming to be concerned with the Rock of Ages rather than the age of rocks: Michael Gerson: Trump and the Evangelical Temptation: "As the prominent evangelical pastor Tim Keller... wrote... '"Evangelical" used to denote people who claimed the high moral ground; now, in popular usage, the word is nearly synonymous with "hypocrite"...
...So it is little wonder that last year the Princeton Evangelical Fellowship, an 87-year-old ministry, dropped the “E word” from its name.... A number of serious evangelicals are distancing themselves from the word.... I find this desire understandable but not compelling. Some words, like strategic castles, are worth defending, and evangelical is among them... a “born-again” religious experience, a commitment to the authority of the Bible, and an emphasis on the redemptive power of Jesus Christ. I was raised in an evangelical home, went to an evangelical church and high school, and began following Christ as a teen....
The corruption of a political party is regrettable. The corruption of a religious tradition by politics is tragic, shaming those who participate in it. How did something so important and admirable become so disgraced?... The answer extends back some 150 years... how an influential and culturally confident religious movement became a marginalized and anxious minority seeking political protection under the wing of a man such as Trump, the least traditionally Christian figure—in temperament, behavior, and evident belief—to assume the presidency in living memory.
Understanding that evolution requires understanding the values that once animated American evangelicalism. It is a movement that was damaged in the fall from a great height.... Early evangelicals were an optimistic lot who thought that human effort could help hasten the arrival of the Second Coming. In politics, evangelicals tended to identify New England, and then the whole country, with biblical Israel. Many a sermon described America as a place set apart for divine purposes.... In the mid-19th century, evangelicalism was the predominant religious tradition in America—a faith assured of its social position, confident in its divine calling, welcoming of progress, and hopeful about the future....
A series of momentous intellectual developments that most effectively drove a wedge between evangelicalism and elite culture. Higher criticism of the Bible—a scholarly movement out of Germany that picked apart the human sources and development of ancient texts—called into question the roots, accuracy, and historicity of the book that constituted the ultimate source of evangelical authority. At the same time, the theory of evolution advanced a new account of human origin.... Religious progressives sought common ground between the Christian faith and the new science and higher criticism. Many combined their faith with the Social Gospel—a postmillennialism drained of the miraculous, with social reform taking the place of the Second Coming. Religious conservatives, by contrast, rebelled against this strategy of accommodation in a series of firings and heresy trials designed to maintain control of seminaries....
Fundamentalism... responded to modernity in ways that cut it off from its own past. In reacting against higher criticism, it became simplistic and overliteral in its reading of scripture. In reacting against evolution, it became anti-scientific.... This general pessimism about the direction of society was reflected in a shift away from postmillennialism and toward premillennialism. In this view, the current age is tending not toward progress, but rather toward decadence and chaos under the influence of Satan....
Over time, evangelicalism got a revenge of sorts in its historical rivalry with liberal Christianity. Adherents of the latter gradually found better things to do with their Sundays than attend progressive services.... As its old theological rival faded—or, more accurately, collapsed—evangelical endurance felt a lot like momentum. With the return of this greater institutional self-confidence, evangelicals might have expected to play a larger role in determining cultural norms and standards. But their hopes ran smack into the sexual revolution, along with other rapid social changes.... As a result, the primary evangelical political narrative is adversarial, an angry tale about the aggression of evangelicalism’s cultural rivals.... After shamefully sitting out (or even opposing) the civil-rights movement, white evangelicals became activated on a limited range of issues....
The leaders who had emerged within evangelicalism varied significantly in tone and approach. Billy Graham was the uncritical priest to the powerful. (His inclination to please was memorialized on one of the Nixon tapes, in comments enabling the president’s anti-Semitism.) James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, was the prickly prophet, constantly threatening to bolt from the Republican coalition unless social-conservative purity was maintained. Jerry Falwell Sr. and Pat Robertson (the latter of whom ran for president himself in 1988) tried to be political kingmakers....
Where do evangelicals get their theory of social engagement?... The Christian Bible, after all, can be a vexing document.... Some interpretive theory must elevate the Golden Rule above Iron Age ethics and apply that higher ideal to the tragic compromises of public life. Lacking an equivalent to Catholic social thought, many evangelicals seem to find their theory merely by following the contours of the political movement that is currently defending, and exploiting, them.... It is not that secularization, abortion, and religious liberty are trivial issues; they are extremely important. But the timing and emphasis of evangelical responses have contributed to a broad sense that evangelical political engagement is negative, censorious, and oppositional....
By the turn of the millennium, many, including myself, were convinced that religious conservatism was fading as a political force.... I believed that the old evangelical model of social engagement was exhausted, and that something more positive and principled was in the offing. I was wrong. In fact, evangelicals would prove highly vulnerable to a message of resentful, declinist populism.... It is remarkable to hear religious leaders defend profanity, ridicule, and cruelty as hallmarks of authenticity and dismiss decency as a dead language. Whatever Trump’s policy legacy ends up being, his presidency has been a disaster in the realm of norms. It has coarsened our culture, given permission for bullying, complicated the moral formation of children, undermined standards of public integrity, and encouraged cynicism about the political enterprise. Falwell, Graham, and others are providing religious cover for moral squalor—winking at trashy behavior and encouraging the unraveling of social restraints. Instead of defending their convictions, they are providing preemptive absolution for their political favorites.... Setting matters of decency aside, evangelicals are risking their faith’s reputation on matters of race.... For some of Trump’s political allies, racist language and arguments are part of his appeal. For evangelical leaders, they should be sources of anguish....
Here is the uncomfortable reality: I do not believe that most evangelicals are racist. But every strong Trump supporter has decided that racism is not a moral disqualification in the president of the United States. And that is something more than a political compromise. It is a revelation of moral priorities.... Evangelical leaders have associated the Christian faith with racism and nativism... with misogyny and the mocking of the disabled... with lawlessness, corruption, and routine deception... with moral confusion about the surpassing evils of white supremacy and neo-Nazism....
It is the strangest story: how so many evangelicals lost their interest in decency, and how a religious tradition called by grace became defined by resentment.... It is difficult to see something you so deeply value discredited so comprehensively. Evangelical faith has shaped my life, as it has the lives of millions. Evangelical history has provided me with models of conscience. Evangelical institutions have given me gifts of learning and purpose. Evangelical friends have shared my joys and sorrows. And now the very word is brought into needless disrepute...
