How Donald Trump Broke the Spell of Evangelicalism
When you’re inside evangelicalism, when you’ve grown up in it, and it’s the only way you know how to do “Christian,” when most people you know and respect live by its tenets and defend against those who don’t or even gently dismiss those who are different, when there are radio stations and celebrities and movie industries and TV evangelists dedicated to supporting it, followers have a hard time seeing through to the problems.
It’s like looking at one of those Magic Eye puzzles that were so popular in the ’90s. On the surface, the picture is just a bunch of dots. Then you catch a glimpse of something out of the corner of your eye. You have a feeling there’s something else there behind all those dots, but you can’t put your finger on it. Then someone points out that there’s actually a T-Rex in the middle if you stare long enough. So you stare, and sure enough once you’ve seen the T-Rex, you can’t un-see the T-Rex. It was there all along.
That’s what it’s like to finally emerge from evangelicalism.
Of course, I didn’t know when I left my church after the Trump election in 2016 that I was leaving evangelicalism. I didn’t realize that I had spent nearly 40 years in a fundamentalist institution. We never saw ourselves as fundamentalists. Evangelicals reserve that term for other religions (namely those with jihadists). When news anchors talked about Christian fundamentalists, we told ourselves we were just being labeled and misunderstood. Persecuted by the media.
I didn’t consider the three churches I’d faithfully attended starting at age 5 and until I was 39 to be abusive or extreme. They were my community. They taught me in Sunday school about how much Jesus loved me. They slipped cash into our mailbox when my husband and I were struggling in college. They brought my family meals when my middle son was in the NICU for 20 days.
I prayed with them when they struggled with depression and marital problems. They prayed when I suffered three miscarriages and found eventual motherhood completely overwhelming. We worshipped and served on the mission field together. We fed the homeless downtown and gave underprivileged kids new shoes for school.
We were good people who wanted what was best for our communities and our world. And what was best for them was to see things the same way we did.
It was this single-minded obsession with one inherent, unchanging truth that finally shattered the magical illusion for me. As I grew up and went to school and lived in the world and raised a family, I discovered that no where else was that the case. In every other healthy institution, questions and doubts and equality and diversity were valued. As a good American and modern person, I believed that everyone benefited from less hierarchy, more equality, and more open dialogue. Even church people.
In contrast, every church I knew functioned as a form of patriarchy and bonded around a Statement of Beliefs that included an unquestioningly literal interpretation of an inerrant 2,000-year-old scripture. Our church was no different, and we were proud of our culture of “unity.” Until I started questioning those beliefs, I hadn’t considered they were also a way of keeping us in line.
There was also the disconnect between an insistence that we only follow what the Bible says and the many accepted and unspoken rules about what it meant to be a ‘good’ Christian that weren’t found in the Bible. Like not associating with sinners and abstaining from wine and voting Republican to name just a few.
When I started teasing out (through devotion, life experience, and scripture) the differences between what Jesus seemed to want from me versus what my church culture demanded, I discovered a huge disconnect. One was leading me toward more peace and acceptance and wholeness. The other came loaded with shame and guilt and exhaustion. Suddenly, the unspoken requirements of church acceptance looked a lot like the ‘religion’ evangelicals are so fond of belittling in other denominations.
Meanwhile, my husband and I found new Christian voices we’d previously been deaf to. They helped us put language to our discomfort with our church’s teachings. But we found little outlet for expressing doubts in our community.
We talked about leaving for years. As we looked at other local churches though, we didn’t see many alternatives. They were all evangelical and focused on the same sets of core beliefs. At the time, it seemed our options were their way or the slippery slope to hell.
Once, the typical evangelical Statements of Belief told us we belonged. As our beliefs shifted, we realized that we were becoming outsiders. We hadn’t believed in young earth creationism in decades, but we were no longer interested in hiding it. We began to see LGBTQ brothers and sisters not as a problem to be solved but as equal and whole and worthy of love and acceptance. And we realized that reading the Bible as inerrant and literal from the lens of an American culture was toxic and even unfaithful to the original meaning and intent.
Suddenly, we could see how as white, middle-class, Christian Americans, we were more like the Roman conquerors and religious Pharisees in scripture than Christ.
Like seeing the T-Rex in the Magic Eye puzzle, we couldn’t un-know what we knew. Not without killing off a significant part of our souls in order to belong. So we drafted a farewell letter for our pastors, then set it aside, still afraid of entering into entirely unknown territory. Evangelicalism was all we’d ever known.
We told ourselves that we’d found a church that was the least offensive and it wouldn’t be better anywhere else. Yet we attended services less and less. Each time we did manage to attend, we slipped in and out and told ourselves it was the last time.
Then the 2016 election happened.
To be honest, I didn’t pay that much attention to the run-up after the first few months. I didn’t think a man with zero empathy or capacity for self-reflection stood a real chance. Trump clearly demonstrated an unstable personality, lacked any political experience, and his shaky platform managed to be entirely un-American and un-Christian even as he promised to make America great. No one in their right mind would vote for Donald Trump.
So, when I woke the day after the elections to discover that Trump had won, thanks in large part to the evangelicals, I couldn’t believe it. I don’t remember hearing people in my church talking about how much they loved Trump or proudly wearing Trump t-shirts (as they had with Sarah Palin, for example).
Could the same community that vilified Clinton during my childhood for the ceaseless sex scandals now support a man who clearly demonstrated such low moral character? After a quick survey of my Facebook friends, I realized, yes they could.
My husband and I read post after post of fellow Christians from our church who had helped elect Trump. A few, including pastors, were jubilant that they’d managed to end the liberal reign of terror seen with Obama. Most though were chagrinned and almost apologetic, as if they really didn’t have a choice in the matter. If any of them voted for Hillary Clinton, like us, they were keeping quiet.
And I thought, “This is the inevitable outcome of evangelicalism. This is where this kind of thinking leads, to ignoring your doubts, denying your concerns, your common sense, and your conscience.” I was sure that each person believed they were doing God’s will and what was best for their families. But after 40 years of direct experience, I was equally certain that it could be very hard to tell the difference between God’s will and the opinions of the trusted authority figures in the evangelical world.
The next day, we emailed the letter to our pastors. We were out.
Leaving any religious tradition is one of the hardest things to do, especially when it’s the one you were raised in. Many ex-evangelicals describe leaving as a death. I would agree with that description.
Overnight, we cut ourselves loose from what had anchored us. Everything we had built our lives on was called into question, which called into question everything we’d built — our value system, our marriage, our identities, our relationships with family, how we raised our kids, our faith, our worldview.
I see why so few people leave fundamentalist faith traditions. It’s very, very difficult and painful. It’s easier to pretend. It’s easier to sit in a pew in silence or quietly slip away never to return but never really facing down your doubts either or shaking free of old, limiting beliefs and habits. It’s easier to maintain a few outer markers that cost you nothing while allowing you to still feel like you belong at family get-togethers or keep your parents happy — like voting for a conservative or against gay marriage.
But it can also be the most amazing joy to be free of it all and to begin again.
Navigating that first, isolating year after leaving evangelicalism was tough, especially in the era of Trump. People I’d once trusted as good people suddenly seemed foolish and even dangerous.
The level of self-deception and denial it takes to simultaneously claim that you are part of a persecuted faithful few while also electing the leader of the most powerful country in the world who’s just like you and using that power to exclude people who are different from you — all in the name of God’s love — is disturbing.
Equally disturbing is how difficult it is to change the mind of someone who believes they are God’s chosen ones. We have another presidential election in two years. Despite the daily debacle of scandals and failed policies and morals and equally failed leadership of Donald Trump’s administration, evangelicals will still vote for him.
Because it is a basic tenant of evangelicalism that you won’t find in any church’s statement of beliefs but is universally understood by its members: God votes Republican. And how can you argue with God? Will Trump win again in 2020? God, I hope not. Will evangelicals still vote for him? Yes. Yes, they will.
Is there anything ex-evangelicals can do about it? We can vote. We can raise money for better candidates. We can keep open dialogue with our friends and family still in evangelical communities. We can experience the fear of the impact of evangelicalism on our society, our faith, and our future, but refuse to give in to de-humanizing our friends, family, and neighbors. Instead, we can continue to love them even as we call their beliefs into question. And we can do what we learned to do so well in evangelical churches. We can share our stories of how once we were blind but now we see.
Thanks for reading.
Christa
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