A Short History of Evangelical Christianity in the U.S.
A dash of toxic masculinity, a sprinkle of militarism, and a whole lotta grifting
First, a note:
I feel it’s important as I begin this year-long project that I define precisely what the term Evangelical means and, more aptly, how I plan on using it and referencing it in the context of this post and any posts moving forward.
Evangelicalism is a trans-denominational movement within Protestant Christianity. Much of its theological roots stem from various Christian denominational traditions, but, as the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) has pointed out, “The term ‘evangelical’ comes from the Greek word euangelion, meaning ‘the good news’ or the ‘gospel.’ Thus, the evangelical faith focuses on the “good news” of salvation brought to sinners by Jesus Christ.”
Throughout this month’s research on the topic of the origin of the Evangelical church’s rise in prominence and power in America, I came across historian Molly Worthen’s explanation of how to understand those individuals who claim to be evangelicals: “History — rather than theology or politics — is the most useful tool for pinning down today’s evangelicals.” And so a dive into history is what this will be.
What I will say lastly here is this: because Evangelicalism is a trans-denominational movement, it is not confined to its own doctrinal space. This means that even within adjacent denominations (i.e. Baptist, Pentecostal, Methodist), individuals very well may primarily identify as Evangelicals. What has become evident through my reading (and, if I’m being honest, an investigation of my own upbringing) is that Evangelicalism’s primary power in gaining prominence in America today has rested solidly not with the power of its theology but rather its ability to monetize and commodify its faith message as political and cultural power in a way that has been unbelievably enticing to Christians of most every denomination. Far more than any other Christian denomination, Evangelicalism’s most prominent early players saw the power and influence that came with controlling the cultural, social and political narrative of the time. My hopes in writing up what I’ve read and researched is that by unpacking this narrative, we may be able to get a better picture of the idiosyncrasies of a group that claims up to 35% of the US population and who has had overwhelming influence in our culture writ-large.
Let’s begin, shall we?
The nature of mythology is that it is not only rooted in deep cultural tradition but is also a preferred version of events — a story with clear protagonists, antagonists and moral lessons. When I looked at the personal and collective narratives of Evangelical Christians who supported Trump, I didn’t see a group of citizens supporting just a political candidate. I saw a group of individuals who had bought into a “faith warrior” narrative — who had decidedly assigned themselves on the side of “good” and their politcal opponents on the side of “evil” — who had bought into a mythic understanding of their place in the world and the political duty required of them as patriotic Americans. I, and many others, saw something akin to cult-like behavior — an absolute unabashed allegiance to a man who had done and said many things that seemed not only to run counter to their professed beliefs and values but which seemed, in many ways, to supercede their religious beliefs — nay, morph and form them into something altogether different, which included propping up Trump as a leader sent by and ordained in power by God.
Not all Trump-supporting Evangelical Christians behaved like this in the same way not all Evangelical Christians are charismatic or believe in speaking in prophetic word or listen to Dave Ramsey for advice on financial literacy. But I believe that they were (and are) just outwardly expressing and professing what many other Evangelical Christians inwardly feel to various extents.
A theme has run throughout most of the conversations I’ve had with Evangelical Christian friends and family and that is the narrative of persecution and the role that idea plays in justifying their religious moral “correctness.” Particuarly in conversations had about politics or modern social movements, the crux of many of their arguments stems from a sense they have of being derided because of their beliefs, not in spite of them. That because they have chosen to “be in this world and not of this world,” (a commonly used colloquial Christian phrase, pulled primarily from John 15–17) that the criticism they personally experience because of their professed beliefs about LGBTQ+ rights or women’s reproductive rights is prescriptive — a personal cross to bear and confirmaton of their moral rightness in a world inching toward damnation.
Indeed, much of the religious rhetoric around Trump and the recent election had a similar persecution narrative. In her book Jesus and John Wayne, Kristin Kobes du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University, attempts to historically contextualize the unwavering support of Trump by American Evangelicals. She posits that Evangelical support for Trump this past year and in 2016 was in fact not just a transactional manuever — a vote for a candidate who they believed would nominate conservative Justices and protect their religious freedom. She argues that Trump, and the support from the broader Evangelical community, was a result of years of Evangelicalism’s embrace of militant masculinity — a proverbial return on an investment made a little over a century ago. Indeed, white Evangelical support for Trump’s candidacy was symptomatic of the larger beliefs of the constituency, not a collective nose-holding vote like some have said. For example, the majority of white Evangelical Protestants:
Over two-thirds of white Evangelicals supported Trump’s border wall and over 68% of white Evangelicals believe the US does not have a responsibility to accept refugees. All of these are positions more or less supported by Trump and by other prominent far-right populist politicians.
This post in particular is not concerned with exploring why I believe those positions are antithetical to Christian belief (that will most likely be another post). But they are numbers that signify that while some other Christian-identifying Trump supporters may have felt he was “the better of two evils” (I hate that phrase so much), for white Evangelicals, he was a candidate perfectly in line with their political and cultural values — and, by extension, their religious ones.
A note: In the most recent 2020 election, white Christian support for Trump did decline, but the majority of white Christians still largely supported Trump. I’ve included a link here to a very helpful graph that breaks down the numbers a bit more, isolating as well the White, non-evangelical vote and White Catholic vote.
The Origin of “Cowboy Christianity”
The best place to begin this origin story is perhaps with The Second Great Awakening. It was a Protestant revival movement that occurred early in the nineteenth century and was a revivalist movement centered on what is called Arminian theology — a theology with a distinct emphasis placed on repentance, revival and conversion. The Awakening served to spur on the reformation of various institutions and bolstered religious enthusiasm across the United States.
Occurring simultaneously was increased western expansion and a significant population boom, which meant churches saw waves of increases to the numbers of their congregations. Many people were drawn to the message of the overall movement — to the stability and assuredness it gave them during a time of rapid change and growth. It’s important to understand that the broadly sweeping evangelical energy coursing through Protestant denominations during this time wasn’t just a religious movement — it was a social one and it absolutely transformed nineteenth-century American society.
In many ways, the emergence of this new religious zeal permeated traditional social hierarchical structures and spread throughout the culture, spurring on the creation of many different social organizations and fraternal associations and allowing for Evangelical dominance in US cultural institutions. It allowed for greater collective social association, which was very much helped by the societal reorganizing that was occurring due to the Industrial Revolution. Historian Nathan Hatch makes an interesting point about Evangelicalism’s influence in changing the fabric of social and bureaucratic institutions, something he refers to as “the democratization of American religion.” As Donald Scott, Professor at Queens College states:
Not only had religion become more democratic, it was in itself a democratizing force. Evangelicalism reinforced the growing sense of the sovereign power of the individual: it made the individual’s own religious experience — not the clergy’s learning and authority, not formal creeds and doctrines — the ultimate spiritual arbiter. Moreover, for evangelical converts, self-esteem came not from secular social status but from spiritual standing, measured by intensity of feeling and dedication to evangelical disciplines. The respect of their brothers and sisters in the faith was more important to them than external social standing. They counted themselves in no way inferior to any person who possessed mere wealth and secular prominence.
Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, however, geographic splits were developing in the movement. Evangelicals in the North adamantly opposed slavery and were strong proponents of criminal justice reform. Their evangelical Southern counterparts were decidedly anti-abolition and split off (for example, the Southern Baptist Convention was created over the issue of slaveholders serving as foreign missionaries).
Indeed, by the end of the century, united Evangelical Protestantism was in sharp decline. Protestant churches became divided over new intellectual and theological ideas, such as evolution. Those who embraced these newer ideas became known as modernists, while those who rejected them became known as fundamentalists. Fundamentalists defended the doctrine of biblical inerrancy and adopted a dispensationalist theological system for interpreting the Bible. This split will be important — we’ll get back to it in a minute.
Note for laypeople like myself reading this: while it’s not necessarily important to go into detail about dispensationalism here, certain features of that particular theological belief no doubt underlay much of resulting Evangelical culture, i.e. the beliefs around the premillenialism and “the Rapture” and its effect on Christian movie and book plots and narratives.
By the late 1890s, much had changed. Society had reformed, was more industrialized and more connected. Traditional gender roles, particularly in the public square, had begun to shift and morph. American masculinity in particular was undergoing a monumental change of its own. For most of the history of the world, men primarily worked as farmers or laborers or worked in specific trades. The growing reliance on machines and the economic realignment was causing the idea of what traditional masculinity was to shift as well. ‘Masculinity’ (specifically white masculinity) was experiencing a crisis of confidence as waves of immigrants came to the U.S. in pursuit of better economic prospects and as women began to be admitted to various colleges and employed in specific (and very limited, to be clear) lines of work.
In response, white Evangelical Protestant men began to establish a new Christian masculine identity. This new masculinity seemed to double-down on the masculinity of the past — an overcorrection out of fear of the changing times. It was a rougher, tougher masculinity. As Du Mez points out, there was no better cultural mascot for this than President Teddy Roosevelt:
As a young man, Roosevelt had been ridiculed for his high voice, tight pants, and fancy clothing and derided as a ‘weakling’ and ‘punkin-lily.’ But Roosevelt wanted power. Determined to reinvent himself, he went West, rechristening himself, ‘The Cowboy of the Dakotas.’ It was on the frontier, that a new masculinity would be forged. A place where white men brought order to ‘savagery’ — where men served as armed protectors and providers. Where violence achieved a greater good. If the Wild West could mold the exquisite Mr. Roosevelt into a rugged, masculine specimen, perhaps it could do the same for American manhood generally.
The thing is though, the West had already been “conquered” by this time. There was no real place for this new version of ‘rugged masculinity’ to take a foothold — to stretch its overcompensating and insecure legs. It would instead have to be folded into the baking cake that was early twentieth century America.
A perfect example of this is the way this idea of masculinity extended into Roosevelt’s politics and governance. His “Rough Riders” and predilection for military action (cough, cough the Spanish-American War) set the stage for a kind of American Imperialism that still dictates, to some extent, U.S. foreign policy. In the same way, it also became enshrined in ideas of political conservatism because it as well was inherently attached to concepts of rugged, strong masculinity.
Now, back to the Evangelicals. As this new rugged masculine identity swept the nation and implanted itself in the highest office in the land, Evangelical Protestants began to see traditional Victorian Christianity as too feminine, too genteel. If the goal was repentance and conversion, how could Evangelical Protestants expect this new kind of man to ever convert to such an emasculating faith?
What followed was an entire rebranding.
The Man Before Billy Graham
By the early 1900s, Christian men were attempting to “remasculinize” the faith. They insisted that Christianity was essentially masculine, militant, warlike. White Southern Evangelical Protestantism had actually already laid a framework for this, which necessarily coincided with their brutal treatment of minorities and strict adherence to traditional gender roles in both private and public spaces. Initially, this confluence of Southern manhood and Evangelical Christianity seemed untenable, even diametrically opposed. However, they found a way to morph their faith in such a way as to prop up their own dominance and justify violence (particularly around issues of race).
Enter: Billy Sunday.
Sunday had been an outfielder in the National League and had converted to Christianity in the late 1880s. He spent the time following his conversion as a sort of drive-by evangelist, primarily in the Midwest. He eventually became the most famous evangelist in the country. His sermons were famous for their fiery bluster and for his rejection of elitism and use of colloquial slang. As global tensions heated up around whether the U.S. would enter World War I, Sunday’s religious militancy took on a new dynamic. In 1917, he lead a New York City revival, which was attended by over 40,000. During it, he took a solid position against those who would prefer to stay out of the war or who consciously objected to it:
Sunday declared, “In these days, one is either a patriot or a traitor, in the cause of Jesus Christ, in the cause of the country.” In another sermon, Sunday said “I tell you, it is Bill against Woodrow, Germany against America, Hell against Heaven.” He later targeted conscientious objectors saying: “Either you are loyal, or you are not, you are either a patriot or a black-hearted traitor…All this talk about not fighting the German people is a lot of bunk.”
The democratization of American religion in decades prior had shaken up the denominational church hierarchy and the corresponding authority that such a hierarchy had afforded its clergy, particularly on matters of social and cultural relevance, i.e. war and politics. Evangelical Protestants like Sunday had been successful in packaging Christian belief into an easily digestible narrative of good versus evil, right versus wrong. This simplicity in narrative helped to undergird other issues of the time, such as Prohibition and foreign diplomacy and, as a mechanism for spreading its reach, had become increasingly corporatized.
Remember that split between Evangelicals I mentioned up in the beginning? The one between Fundamentalists and Modernists? It came to a head around this time as well, between 1920 and 1930. Fundamentalists ended up losing control of the Mainline Protestant churches and separated themselves from non-fundamentalist churches and cultural institutions and Modernists largely abandoned the term “evangelical” and derided Fundamentalists for their use of propaganda in place of a faithful and critical reading of the Bible and instead, redirected their efforts in engaging in higher critical scholarship of their faith. The more liberal Protestants also placed an importance on the social justice dimensions of the Christian faith. Fundamentalists, in turn, accused Modernists of abandoning their traditional Christian belief.
What did both groups agree on? The muscular Christianity that now dominated the dynamics of the faith.
Each group weaponized ideas of militarism for their own purposes. For liberal Protestants, World War I was deemed “a war to end all wars” — a way of extending the reach of democracy and, by proxy, Christianity. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, viewed militarism in a different sense. Despite Sunday’s boisterous support of the War, many fundamentalists took issue on the grounds that America was in fact not “a Christian nation.” They believed that “a Christian’s loyalty belong to God’s kingdom” and that conflating ideas of patriotism with religion was a slippery slope. Besides, their premillennial belief had cemented their opinion that there could never be a “war to end all wars” because Jesus’s return and 1,000 year reign was the ultimate bookend to all war and violence on earth.
Ironically (given the current political dynamics of today’s progressive and conservative Christians), Liberal Protestants took this opportunity to criticize Fundamentalists’ lack of support for the war and painted the entire group as “un-American” and labeled their lack of “patriotism” as a threat to national security. Following the end of the war, however, many liberal Protestants expressed disappointment at the outcome and what they viewed as needless casualties in service of a lackluster result.
Sherwood Eddy, a promiment liberal Protestant, expressed his regret for his “patriotic” support of the war:
With two-thirds of the world, representing more than twenty nations, already dragged into the widening vortex of the present war; with more than five millions of the finest youth of Europe already slaughtered on the battlefield, with twenty millions who have already been wounded, nearly forty millions under arms, and whole nations organized for war and the manufacture of munitions; with the flood tide of impurity and immorality which war has brought in its train; with the barbarism and cruelty, poison gas, flaming oil, and organized destruction used at present on the battlefields of Europe, is it not time for the Church to set her own house in order, to humble herself with shame in the very dust for her criminal impotence and worldliness and sin, and to return to her crucified Lord and Master?
Jesus, the Businessman
The growing disallusionment with militarism amongst Evangelicals following the end of the war gave way to a new model of masculinity — that of “the Christian businessman.”
In his 1925 book, The Man Nobody Knows, Bruce Barton, an advertising executive depicted Jesus Christ as “the world’s greatest business executive.” While this new depiciton of Christian manhood was not inherently militaristic, it was still an extension of the now popular concept of muscular and masculine Christianity. The book is an astounding piece of work. In it, Barton does his best to recharacterize Jesus in such a way that might appeal to a young man living in the 1920s, a habit current modern-day Christians still employ to satisfy their own political ends. A few of my favorite wacky quips:
Re: Jesus’ leadership persona
First of all he had the voice and manner of the leader — the personal magnetism which begets loyalty and commands respect. The beginnings of it were present in him even as a boy. John [the Baptist] felt them. On the day when John looked up from the river where he was baptizing converts and saw Jesus standing on the bank, he drew back in protest. “I have need to be baptized of thee,” he exclaimed, “and comest thou to me?” The lesser man recognized the greater instinctively. We speak of personal magnetism as though there were something mysterious about it — a magic quality bestowed on one in a thousand and denied to all the rest. This is not true. The essential element in personal magnetism is a consuming sincerity — an overwhelming faith in the importance of the work one has to do. . . .
Re: Jesus’ penchant for salesmanship
Every one of his conversations, every contact between his mind and others, is worthy of the attentive study of any sales manager. Passing along the shores of a lake one day, he saw two of the men whom he wanted as disciples. Their minds were in motion; their hands were busy with their nets; their conversation was about conditions in the fishing trade, and the prospects of a good market for the day’s catch. To have broken in on such thinking with the offer of employment as preachers of a new religion would have been to confuse them and invite a sure rebuff. What was Jesus’approach?
“Come with me,” he said, “and I will make you fishers of men.”
Fishers . . . that was a word they could understand. . . fishers of men . . . that was a new idea. . . . what was he driving at . . . fishers of men . . .it sounded interesting . . . well, what is it, anyway?
Re: his knowledge of messaging
. . . If he were to live again, in these modern days, he would find a way to make them [his works] known — to be advertised by his service, not merely his sermons. One thing is certain: he would not neglect the marketplace. Few of his sermons were delivered in synagogues. For the most part he was in the crowded places, the Temple Court, the city squares, the centers where goods were bought and sold. I emphasized this fact once to a group of preachers.
While I will not be discussing the corporatization and commodification of Evangelical faith in this particular blog post, Barton and the early Evangelical church’s use of media served as a framework for future mass media endeavors by the Church. I’m including it here as further example of the ways in which indentities of masculinity were played up and changed in order to bolster the influence, socially and culturally, of evangelicalism in the United States.
In the post-war years, Fundamentalists had difficulty maintaining broad cultural relevance and power in seminaries and other religious institutions because of their continued devotion to ideas of militant masculinity and an unwillingness to change with the times. Prominent writer at the time, Sinclair Lewis, offered up a thinly veiled critique of fundamentalism as explored in his popular novel Elmer Gantry. In the book, Sinclair details the exploits of an evangelical reverend who, despite his ministerial role, is still living a life filled with booze and sexual indiscretions. Fundamentalists’ lack of cultural relevance or popularity only served to feed the group’s inherent persecution complex and encouraged them to dig further in to their militancy.
Ah, we love a tie-in to the thesis, don’t we?
Having failed to gain any kind of power or influence in existing denominational structures, they struck out on their own, establishing their own Bible schools, seminaries, churches and associations but, by the 1940s, they were ready to make an attempt at cultural relevance again.
Billy Graham and the Evangelical Rebrand
In 1942, a group of fundamentalist evangelical leaders came together to form the NAE (National Association of Evangelicals). As Du Mez points out, their use of the word “Evangelical” was strategic: “Aware of their image problem, fundamentalists knew they needed to rebrand their movement. The fact that some of the more militant fundamentalists had started their own organization, the American Council of Christian Churches…helped with this project, enabling the NAE to distance itself from more reactionary elements.” Their willingness to publicly move away from less popular social positions, however, did not mean that their militaristic masculinity went away. It merely moved from driving the proverbial car to instead becoming a backseat driver.
Evangelicals were incredibly conscious about the fact that they would not be able to ascertain power or influence within other, more authority-laden denominations. They instead decided to use media as a means of attaining influence. They sought to produce their own publications and air their own radio programs and broadcast their messages directly to potential converts.
Billy Graham, a North Carolina native, was exactly the messenger Evangelical leaders were looking for and he became the face of the movement. And what a face he had. To many, his “All-American” (quotes are very intentional) good looks and youthfulness served to be just the antidote the dying religious movement needed. The militant masculinity so pervasive with Evangelicalism was carried off effortlessly, even made fashionable, by Graham, who was held up as a masculine ideal. Prior to his own conversion, he detailed what his thoughts had been about Christian faith:
I had always thought of religion as more or less “sissy stuff,” and that a fellow who was going to be an athlete would have no time for such things. It was all right for old men and girls, but not for real “he-men” with red blood in their veins.
After his conversion, he continued to hold to his preference for a strong, masculine identity, even saying going as far to say that Jesus was “a star athlete” and leaning into the more militaristic monikers, such as “Christian warriors.” Graham did his best to meld ideas of muscular masculinity into his preaching.
The advent of the second World War served as a convenient backdrop for this exact message. Pearl Harbor served to change prior fundamentalists’ minds about war significantly, largely due to the fact that it was a direct attack on American soil. This war could undoubtedly be painted as a battle between good versus evil. Because of the binarial aspects of the war and each sides’ corresponding politics, militant masculinity came back into fashion throughout the United States. Fundamentalist Evangelicals leaned into the muscular masculinity already woven into their theological framework and took advantage of the pro-military and pro-war sentiments coarsing through the nation, propping up the Evangelical faith as an inherently patriotic and distinctly American religion.
In a pendulum swing that even a writer’s room would find overwrought, it was liberal Protestants during this time (likely still traumatized by their support of the first World War) that critiqued the U.S. entering this second one. Evangelicals new role as “patriots” helped to drown out and distract from critiques of their extremism.
Evangelicals — A New Political Constituency
Graham had always had political ambitions. His role as an Evangelical leader, however, had prevented his foray into that realm. He sought power and influence and sought out political surrogates who would be strong defenders and adherents to the Evangelical faith and help to support the various political goals he and his congregants cared about.
Graham found that political surrogate in Richard Nixon.
Graham was excited about Nixon’s own support of continuing the war in Vietnam and had thrown his support behind Nixon during the 1968 campaign for that very reason. In fact, once Nixon came into office, Graham went from being just his spiritual advisor to being a a more significant political advisor — he began to relay detailed messages to Nixon with advice on military operations and peace talk negotiations. The two were in regular contact. In fact, in 1972, Nixon, under increased scrutiny from the news media due to the Watergate scandal, confided in Graham about his belief in “Jewish domination of the media.” From a Politico article detailing the conversation:
He [Graham] called that alleged media control “a stranglehold,” mused about “doing something about it” in a second Nixon term, and added, “A lot of Jews are great friends of mine,’’ Graham said. ‘’They swarm around me and are friendly to me because they know that I am friendly to Israel and so forth. But they don’t know how I really feel about what they’re doing to this country, and I have no power and no way to handle them.’’
‘’You must not let them know,” Nixon replied.
Later in his life, Graham spoke of regret at his political involvement, stating:
I … would have steered clear of politics. I’m grateful for the opportunities God gave me to minister to people in high places; people in power have spiritual and personal needs like everyone else, and often they have no one to talk to. But looking back, I know I sometimes crossed the line, and I wouldn’t do that now.
Graham’s 1968 political endorsement seemed to let the genie out of the bottle a bit. Prior to that Presidential election, no prominent American religious leader had thrown their support so zealously behind a political candidate. His and other leaders’ support and alignment with a poltical candidate also served to align the values of the American Evangelical movement with that of Conservative politics (or really, align the Republican party’s agenda with that of Evangelical Americans).
Evangelicals had already slowly begun to align themselves with the conservative Republican party prior to Graham’s endorsement. The modern-day Civil Rights Movement and the Brown v. Board decision had angered a large swath of Southern Evangelicals, who opposed desegregation and had used the idea of “religious freedom” as a way of justifiying their preference for segregation and their establishment of private schools. In fact, famous evangelical leader Reverend Jerry Falwell’s elementary and secondary education schools (Lynchburg Christian School and Bob Jones University) came to be known as “segregation academies.”
It was this evangelical resentment against pro-civil rights Democratic candidates that Nixon had capitalized on in his own Presidential run in 1968. Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” as it was coined, harnessed this white rage (evangelical and otherwise) and used it to bolster his own political ambitions. As Nixon stratgeist Kevin Phillips stated in 1966, the goal was to exploit white prejudice against minorities and build a large, unwavering voting bloc:
The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South,” Phillips noted, “the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become republicans.
Phillips was clear to point out the importance of leaving out the most overt racist language, however:
When you are after political converts, start with the less extreme and wait for the extremists to come into line when their alternatives collapse.
Republican candidates instead turned to dog-whistling and couched their racist and minority-phobic policy ideas in the language of decency, morality, family values, and law and order. White evangelicals slowly began to conflate the two — the Republican party and their own self-expressed beliefs in morality and faith-driven living.
Takeaways for now
I began this essay explaining that Evangelicals voted for Trump, not against his other opponents. Despite all of the requisite nose-holding that some claim to have done, it doesn’t fit with the larger narrative of Evangelicalism and its roots as a political coalition.
As we take stock of the historical origins of Evangelical Christianity’s development, we can see that the formation of ‘The Religious Right’ was decades in the making. A history of support of racist policies (under the guise of religious freedom; Nixon’s “Southern Strategy”), the embrace of militarism and rejection of a single church authority, and Graham’s involvement in politics through sponsorship of various political candidates helped to turn the Evangelical movement from a strictly religious one in a political one as well.
This essay is not concerned with going into the specific details on how this coalition was built (you would be here until tomorrow reading this), but understanding the history of how the movement morphed and changed helps us make sense of what has felt, on its face, so cognitively dissonant about Evangelical support of Trump. So many younger people of faith have worked to reconcile what feels like a total incongruous relationship between their parents’ faith (the faith they themselves may have been raised to believe) and their parents’ simultaneous support of a candidate whose behavior feels utterly divorced from the Bible they were taught to read and the Jesus they claim as their personal Savior.
Molly Worthen, author of Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism, posits that quite a few many aspects of modern-day or contemporary Evangelicalism feels out-of-step with what it claims to be its dominating moral authority — the Bible. It’s part of why my first month of this 2021 project was an attempt to get my bearings — to better understand the historical context in which the church grew and came to prominence.
Worthen captures my exact sentiment in her 2013 interview with Religion & Politics:
I think we have to treat evangelicals seriously as thinkers. That requires going fairly far back in history and tracing their intellectual genealogy back several centuries…I think talking about a list of doctrines is important and helpful, but I came to think of evangelicals as Protestants who have, for centuries, circled around a shared set of questions rather than shared doctrines. And for any person with a religious worldview, politics is part of a coherent worldview. You can’t break it off and treat it in a vacuum. It is connected to what they are up to in church, the way in which their church is interacting with the world beyond America through missions, the way they’re thinking about their own tradition in liturgy and spiritual experience, and what counts as an authentic connection to the divine. All of this has ramifications for how they live out their faith in the world and at the ballot box. And so it seemed to me that an accurate intellectual and political history had to pay attention to those things.
I am well aware that I have only began to scratch the surface in understanding the Evangelical church’s role in our broader culture — I’m lucky that I have eleven more months of this project to investigate those specific aspects (although I’m painfully aware I don’t even think that will be enough time to cover it all in enough thoroughness). In my first post of this project, I detail my frustration with the current state of the White American Christian Church broadly — its seeming rejection of intellect, of critical engagement with its source material, and its absolute infatuation with a persecution narrative.
We have a responsibility to our faith — to the ways in which we allow it to be manipulated and interpreted by those who prize power above everything else in efforts to fully realize their political goals. While I’ll contend that Progressive Christians may be guilty at times of the same thing, it’s overwhelmingly clear that White Evangelicals have allowed their religion to be intertwined with their politics in a way that has fundamentally transformed both American Evangelicalism and the Republican Party, so much so that they seem to be practically one and the same.
As many of us continue to reel from the radical pro-Trump insurrection that occurred only weeks ago at the Capitol Building, it’s important, now more than ever, that fellow Christians hold their fellow believers’ feet to the fire on their unwitting support of Trump and continued election denial. Franklin Graham, son of the late Billy Graham, head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and long-time Trump supporter, said he was sickened to see “people attack my Capitol and break down the doors of my Capitol,” but did not condemn the behavior of Trump at the rally held before the riots began. In fact, many evangelical leaders continued to support Trump in the days following the insurrection, despite broad bipartisan calls for his censure.
The Christian faith was evoked with abandon on January 6th’s seditious insurrection, with supporters and rioters holding up signs declaring “Jesus saves!” and “God, Guns and Guts Made America, Let’s Keep All Three.” One participant shouted, “Shout if you love Jesus!” and another answered, “Shout if you love Trump!” The crowd broke into uproarious cheers. Evangelical Trump supporters have extended their own feelings of cultural persecution to the man himself as well as the election outcome, citing dark forces (aka Democrats, or really, anyone opposed to Trump) and invoked the name of God as they continued to declare their support for an individual they see as a candidate sent from the Divine.
Our collective reckoning with what has happened to our current Republican party, one that largely refuses to be honest with its constituents and outright refuses to acknowledge legitimate election results and helps to incite sedition at its nation’s Capitol must also include an autopsy of the White Evangelical Christian faith if we are ever to get to a place of collective reconciliation and truthful, faithful coexistence.
References:
A Nation of Immigrants? Diverging Perceptions of Immigrants Increasingly Marking Partisan Divides | PRRI. (2020). Retrieved from https://www.prri.org/research/a-nation-of-immigrants-diverging-perceptions-of-immigrants-increasingly-marking-partisan-divides/
Burton, T. (2018). 68% of white evangelicals think America shouldn’t house refugees. Retrieved from https://www.vox.com/identities/2018/5/29/17405704/white-evangelicals-attitudes-refugees
Du Mez, K. (2020). Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation.
Eddy, S. (1944). A Century With Youth. New York, N.Y.: Association Press.
Fitzgerald, F. (2017). The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America.
Hatch, N. (1989). The Democratization of American Christianity.
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