Evangelical God-talk from the left and right
Religion is ever-present in American politics, especially Christian evangelicalism.
According to the National Association of Evangelicals “[T]he evangelical faith focuses on the ‘good news’ of salvation brought to sinners by Jesus Christ.” But not all evangelicals are created alike.
Two North Carolina pastors have been in the headlines recently for their political activities and statements. Both the Rev. Franklin Graham and the Rev. Dr. William Barber II consider themselves to be evangelicals. Graham, son of evangelist Billy Graham, leans conservative. Barber’s faith is in the liberal camp.
Both Graham and Barber might quibble with this right/left description as too facile, declaring instead that they simply follow the dictates of their conscience as directed by their faith. Because evangelicalism closely comingles with politics, however, some evangelical practices follow this dichotomy.
Issues typically associated with the Religious Right include resisting governmental policies viewed as intrusions upon personal belief. Abortion is murder. Marriage is between a man and a woman. County magistrates invoke the Bible when refusing to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, as do bakers and florists who decline to serve gay weddings.
Franklin Graham was quoted in The Atlantic as saying the Boy Scouts have “lost it,” since they decided to open membership to LGBT kids. “It’s not an organization that’s fit to exist.”
While Graham’s theology skews conservative, his Samaritan’s Purse humanitarian aid organization, based in Boone, North Carolina, is a tangible manifestation of his missionary work. Samaritan’s Purse responds to disasters around the globe, including hurricane and famine relief.
The Religious Left is historically enmeshed with poverty and social justice issues, akin to civil rights battles of the 1950s and 1960s. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister, quoted the Bible regularly in his fight for racial equality. King marched and preached alongside rabbis, priests, Protestant pastors of all races, as well as members of various faiths, and those with no faith.
New York Times religion reporter Laurie Goodstein recently wrote a widely shared front page story on the rise of religious liberals. Income imbalance, access to healthcare, and marriage equality are the rallying cries of the Religious Left in the present age, though many congregations have split over same-sex unions.
Spreading the gospel, for evangelicals, focuses not only on outreach, but also on public demonstrations of piety. Public piety was on display in a photograph circulating on social media that showed preachers laying hands on Donald Trump in the Oval Office as they prayed for him. The photo was posted on Twitter by Johnnie Moore, a former senior vice president at Liberty University, an institution headed by the Rev. Jerry Falwell Jr., an outspoken conservative who backed Trump.
“Such an honor to pray within the Oval Office for @POTUS & @VP,” the tweet read.
William Barber saw the moment differently, considering Trump’s policies toward the poor to be callous and immoral. In an interview with MSNBC, he paraphrased from the Book of Amos: “People for them are only things — ways of making money. They’d sell a poor man for a pair of shoes…. They grind the penniless into the dirt, shove the luckless into a ditch.”
Barber has been arrested many times for protesting against what he views as hurtful and regressive legislation in the GOP-dominated North Carolina General Assembly. Casting a wider net, he recently took part in a protest on Capitol Hill with other clergy over health care. He described proposed Republican legislation repealing the Affordable Care Act as “immoral” and “sinful.”
Barber, former head of the N.C. chapter of the NAACP, was the force behind the progressive 2013 Moral Monday movement that used religious rhetoric to oppose voting-rights restrictions and other legislation of the Republican-led state government.
“William Barber is the closest person we have to Martin Luther King Jr. in our midst,” says Cornel West, the Princeton professor and activist.
God is never mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, and there is no religious test for holding public office. Yet, both Democrats and Republicans attend National Prayer Breakfasts. Presidents swear oaths on Bibles. The U.S. Supreme Court convenes with the words, “God save the United States and this Honorable Court!”
The U.S. Congress is overwhelmingly Christian — and male — and thus not reflective of national demographics. According to Pew Research, 91 percent of members of Congress identified as Christian in 2017. By contrast, 71 percent of Americans identified as Christian, which is still more than two-thirds of the U.S. population.
Given these realities, God-talk from evangelicals on the right and the left will be with us for some time to come.
Anthony Hatcher is writing a book on Religion and Popular Culture, which includes a detailed history of the Moral Monday movement.
