Political Books: Making Evangelicalism Great Again. Click here. The desire of many white evangelicals to gain political influence is at the root of their identity crisis today.
Political Books: Making Evangelicalism Great Again
The desire of many white evangelicals to gain political influence is at the root of their identity crisis today.https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/political-books-making-evangelicalism-great-again-11573832942
Donald Trump on Jan. 18, 2016, speaking at Liberty University, which was founded by Jerry Falwell.PHOTO: CHIP SOMODEVILLA/GETTY IMAGES
“Donald Trump is no devout Christian,” Angela Denker writes in “Red State Christians: Understanding the Voters Who Elected Donald Trump” (Fortress, 309 pages, $26.99). As the Republican front-runner in 2016, she tells us, Mr. Trump “failed the Bible test when asked his favorite passage: ‘Two Corinthians?’ he ventured, failing to realize that the biblical book is referred to as Second Corinthians.” His critics ridiculed Mr. Trump for the line, evidently not realizing that numbered biblical books are commonly called “one,” “two” and “three” in Britain—“Two Samuel,” “Three John” and so on. Even supposing Mr. Trump didn’t pick up the habit from his Scottish mother, his cultured despisers revealed their own parochialism. Ms. Denker manages to compound the error—the “Two Corinthians” line came in a speech at Liberty University, not in answer to a question about his favorite biblical book.
I mention this silly episode because it nicely captures the way in which Mr. Trump’s carelessness and bravado so often tempt his detractors to indulge in precisely the kind of carelessness they claim to abhor. Ms. Denker, a liberal Lutheran pastor in Minneapolis, has written her book to explain Trump-supporting Christians to liberals who find Mr. Trump and his religious supporters repellent. It’s not a terrible premise—the subject of Mr. Trump’s religious supporters is routinely treated with astonishing ignorance—but Ms. Denker’s need to signal her detestation of Mr. Trump at every turn, often with lame snark and small inaccuracies, rather controverts her professed wish to promote sympathy and understanding.
A large proportion of her claims are little more than sheer assertion, backed by neither evidence nor cogent reasoning. One example: “Purity-based theology”—conservative Christians’ concern with sexual purity—“leads to honor killings in Afghanistan and oppression of women in conservative churches across America, forcing women to be traffic cops of their own bodies, silencing their own desires and urges, making them no more and no less than repositories for male fantasies and sinfulness.” That, she goes on to argue, is why so many evangelical women voted for the wanton philanderer Mr. Trump. QED.
Ben Howe’s “The Immoral Majority: Why Evangelicals Chose Political Power Over Christian Values” (Broadside, 265 pages, $26.99) is a similar kind of critique, but from the inside. Mr. Howe is a conservative, a committed evangelical Christian and fervent anti-Trump Republican. Why did so many evangelicals support a profane, unprincipled sexual libertine? “Broadly speaking,” writes Mr. Howe, “we have taken to confronting immorality by becoming immoral. But because our immorality is intended to stop an objectively worse immorality”—the hegemony of modern progressivism—“we reason that it is not immoral.” Or, more pointedly: “American evangelicals, allegedly the frontline warriors in the culture war, seemed to be saying that the only way to save America from depravity was to follow the depraved.”
There are two glaring problems with Mr. Howe’s argument. The first is that a presidential election is not an ideal instrument with which to measure a group’s moral disposition. Many people who voted for Mr. Trump, including ardent religious believers, supported other candidates in the primary and plumped for the Donald only reluctantly, on the grounds that the alternative was a candidate who made the expansion of abortion rights a centerpiece of her campaign.
The other problem is that it’s never clear who Mr. Howe’s “we” signifies. Sometimes he censures supposed evangelical leaders—Jerry Falwell Jr., Robert Jeffress—for not only endorsing Mr. Trump in 2016 but obsequiously identifying themselves and their causes with him. That is entirely fair. At other times he speaks knowingly of what “most” or “many” evangelicals think or say. I have a strong suspicion he’s getting these impressions from Twitter, a web platform he mentions frequently.
What both these books lack—indeed what American political and cultural discourse lacks—is a workable definition of “evangelical.” In “Who Is an Evangelical? The History of a Movement in Crisis” (Yale, 191 pages, $26), Thomas S. Kidd ably remedies that lack by tracing evangelicalism from its beginnings in the 18th century to the present. Mr. Kidd is a professor of history at Baylor, the author of several fine books on the religious milieux of Revolutionary-era America, and himself a self-identified evangelical. What all legitimately termed evangelicals have in common, he contends, is a belief in the Bible as the Word of God, an emphasis on personal conversion and the conviction that the individual believer knows or experiences God.
The elasticity of the word “evangelical,” especially when it’s used as a noun to designate voters rather than an adjective for a loose collection of beliefs and attitudes, is responsible for a great deal of slipshod punditry. The news media almost always pack a racial identity into the word—evangelicals are white—although, as Mr. Kidd notes, evangelicalism has long included many black and Hispanic (I would add Korean) believers. We’re told endlessly that “81% of white evangelicals” voted for Mr. Trump in 2016, but a substantial number of those voters also said they rarely or never attend church. The term has long since become a political or cultural label and has only partially to do with theological or ecclesiastical affiliation.
Mr. Kidd’s brief history is invaluable as a primer, especially for political observers who find American evangelicalism mysterious and alien. His aim, though, is not to defend the movement. Although he chronicles its praiseworthy achievements—promotion of the rights of slaves and Native Americans, ministry to the poor—Mr. Kidd also notes a persistent “establishmentarian” tendency within evangelicalism: the urge to use the law to impose religious and cultural practices on people who don’t espouse them. From the 1970s on, this tendency—now in reaction to the cultural radicalism of the 1960s—has run completely amok. It has given rise to what Mr. Kidd calls “Republican evangelical insiders”: putatively Christian “leaders” who relish their proximity to political power. “The desire of many white evangelicals to reestablish political influence,” he writes, “is at the root of their identity crisis today.”
That strikes me as irrefutably true, and for that reason I wonder why Mr. Kidd refers to himself, in the book’s introduction, as a “#NeverTrump evangelical.” Why the need to identify yourself vis-à-vis a political figure at all? On the other hand, Mr. Kidd’s arguments are fair and his scholarship is superb: When he relays Mr. Trump’s most famous biblical “gaffe,” an endnote carefully points out that “Christians in Britain do conventionally say ‘Two Corinthians.’ ”
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