Last month, in an attempt to explain white evangelical support for President Trump, Brit Hume of Fox News wrote the following:
"And he's willing to fight."
I have been thinking about this tweet for weeks now. It's become a kind of magnet for many of my wayward reflections on race, politics, faith, and my own white American evangelical culture. That is, at least in part, because I believe Hume unwittingly identified the central deception which has captured the imagination of white American evangelicals: they regard their place in the wider American culture in terms of combat. It is this error which has led the vast majority of white American evangelicals to believe that the POTUS is fighting alongside them.
For some time now, I have been reflecting on evangelicalism—the culture of evangelicals—and white American evangelicalism in particular. I grew up in a white evangelical home. We were homeschooled, watched Veggie Tales, attended non-denominational "Bible" churches, participated in AWANA, and never ever cursed. To this day, my parents' home is filled with stuff from Focus on the Family and WORLD Magazine.
I can still recall, even as a young kid, scanning letters written by evangelicalism's "leaders". These letters often rallied their readers to fight for biblical values, restore the nation's Christian heritage, and otherwise confront the liberals, Democrats, Washington elite, and all other sorts of people trying to "destroy the nation" and corrupt its children. If I'm honest, that combative dynamic was an animating part of our identity. As evangelicals, we saw ourselves as lonely moral voices in an increasingly immoral society. And I don't doubt for a moment that same deeply-embedded, martyr-like, aggressive impulse has had a corrosive effect.
As I have reflected on the character the faith tradition that I have inhabited my entire life, I have tried to get my head around the contours of its corruptions, animosities, and resentments. I have tried to reconcile how the faith tradition that raised me, that claimed to cherish virtue, that claimed to champion truth, not only elected the moral monster who sits in the White House today, but prays to keep him there another four years. It is the same tradition that produces Bonhoeffer biographers who publish racist children's propaganda, the same tradition which builds intellectual centers in opposition to the plain teachings of Christ. The cognitive dissonance is outrageous.
What I see today is an evangelicalism that has been seduced into adopting anti-Christ attitudes and practices and exhibiting shockingly violent rhetoric toward its supposed “enemies.” And I have seen how this has produced a sub-Christian posture toward fellow humans and cultures often seen by white evangelicals as the “other.” In short, what I see in evangelicalism today is a community of people organized and animated by outright disobedience to the Lord Jesus.
Fighting one's enemies is a violent practice explicitly forbidden by the Lord of the church. The church's political orientation is one of enemy-love, not combat. "Love your enemies" Jesus commanded, "and pray for those who persecute you" (Matthew 5:44). If we Christians ever identify enemies, our posture toward them must consist of creative hospitality, fearless peacemaking, and sacrificial service, not war. Likewise, the apostle Paul reminded churches that their warfare was not against earthly entities or people (Ephesians 6:12), but against the hostile cosmic powers that deceive and seduce us into betraying Christian virtues like reconciliation and generosity for the allure of power and possession. This is why the people of God are commanded to be meek and merciful peacemakers (Matthew 5:5,7-8) who refuse to repay evil with evil (Romans 12:17). And yet, for nearly a century, evangelicals—and fundamentalists before them—have denied the power of Christian peacemaking and truth telling by adopting the ways of the world. From Billy Sunday and Billy Graham, to the Moral Majority and the Religious Right, all the way to Jerry Falwell and James Dobson, evangelicals have been told that the true enemies of the church are intellectuals and New Dealers, Communists and secularists, immigrants and liberals.
This perspective has been fostered by more than misplaced indignation. It has also been seeded by a hollowed-out pragmatism that has cooled the white American evangelical conscience. White American evangelicals are quick to chastise adherents to Jesus' teaching about enemy-love as "naïve" and "impractical". Evangelicals have forgotten James' warning that "human anger does not produce the righteousness of God" (James 1:20), as well as Paul's teaching to "live peaceably with all" (Romans 12:18). Instead Evangelicals believe, due to the delusion of "high stakes", that the church has been "called by God" to seize the levers of power, control the culture, and establish a Christian nation. No principle will survive that sort of moral calculus. Any means can be justified by those ends.
Thus, in a tragic irony, by waging a war we were never meant to fight, white American evangelicals have been overtaken by the deceptive spiritual forces Jesus' followers are called to confront. We have forgotten that the church was formed and shaped by the cross of Christ, and it is that "cruciformity" that, once embraced, will lead the church to surrender whatever earthly political power it possess knowing it will inherit the earth when the Kingdom comes in fullness. But that isn't our story, our testimony. White American evangelicals have exchanged the the aroma of Jesus' good news for the allure of worldly political power. We have become utterly compromised, empty of imagination, fainthearted, cynical.
The fruit of this folly? Prejudice. Racism. Hypocrisy. And an unyielding hunger for power. I am grieved at the way white American evangelicals, as a culture, have been shaped by our engagement in cultural combat.
This is not the way of Christ. The church, the body politic of Jesus, was intended to engage in peace-making, service, hospitality, and enemy-love. We go to work to root out the sins of greed, thoughtless consumption, prestige-seeking, and prejudice in our own communities. Christians are supposed to agitate against the powerful on behalf of the powerless, not succumb to power and perpetuate the unjust status quo. We, the church, are not a collection of war heroes. We are broken vessels (2 Corinthians 4:7), scattered salt (Matthew 5:13), a royal priesthood (1 Peter 2:9), a sweet aroma (2 Corinthians 2:14), a home (1 Timothy 3:14-15), members of Christ's crucified body (Ephesians 5:29-30), instruments of peace. It is God who is our fortress (2 Samuel 22:2), God who is our sun and shield (Psalm 84:11).
What have we become instead? Small-hearted, tight-fisted, and pugilistic. And I am convinced that this is idolatry, that this is apostasy.
And so, when I read Hume’s tweet over a month ago, I saw something that captured—for me—how evangelicals see themselves, and how they, as a culture, behave: tactically arrayed against groups of "others" in a crusade for power and control. That same crusade, however, has blinded white American evangelicals to the church's true struggle against the powers and principalities, which involves resisting and rebuking the temptation to engage in a culture war. Indeed, the battles Christians must wage are battles of wisdom of discernment, where we seek to identify and rebuke ideologies that desire to capture and deceive us, including the ideology of whiteness and its shaping influence throughout modern America.
That need for discernment is precisely why I know that I still have much self-examining to do. If anything I have said so far is true, I am both implicated and tainted by the white evangelical experience. It has shaped my development, my conscious and subconscious values, all the way down to my basic understanding of the Christian faith. And while the questions below aren't necessarily new questions to me, I will be engaging them with renewed vigor and purpose.
- To what extent do I consider myself evangelical today, if at all? Even in this blog, I go back and forth between "we" and "they" statements.
- How must I, as a white American Christian, reckon with the "great moral injury" (to borrow Chanequa Walker-Barnes language) of white evangelicalism and whiteness itself in my own formation?
- What cues have I missed or rationalized along the way that I must revisit? How far deep does this rot go? Back to the infamous Bob Jones' Supreme Court lawsuit to prevent biracial dating? Or to fundamentalism's ostracization of the black church? Or to Edwards' and Whitefield's defense of slavery?
- Now that I have lived in a very different kind of racial space, and now that I have enjoyed the life of Christ in a very different kind of church community, what kind of posture must I embrace? What does it look like for me to relinquish the combativeness of white evangelicalism?
- And how do I do explore these questions without further centering myself and exacerbating my whiteness?
These are the the questions I intend to address in future posts. I welcome your comments and insights along the way.
Thanks for sharing, Jacaranda. As someone who has grown up in a white evangelical culture and attended churches whose ideology have resembled that of the broader white evangelical culture, it certainly resonates. This hypocrisy, self-righteous, combative evangelicalism sometimes angers me more than the man in the White House himself. They invoke my God, my faith, to endorse the vitriol coming out from all corners of our country - and in doing so, turn people away from believing in a God that is merciful, compassionate, and loving. Thank you for bringing a scriptural basis to articulate the hypocrisy behind this combative form of white evangelicalism.
ReplyDeleteI'm looking forward to your future posts, especially those around the definition of "evangelical" and whether you - and we - should continue to adopt that identity. And how, then, do both white and POC evangelicals respond when living together in a multiracial society where racialized power imbalances and inequities still exist.
To address something you raised about this kind of enemy-focused evangelicalism though - I wonder whether there's another chicken-and-egg question. I wonder whether, as a culture, so many in this country have tied their faith to their culture, and now find it hard to untangle. I caveat this again that I'm neither white nor did I grow up in majority-white spaces. But, I often wonder why so many evangelicals support the death penalty, or oppose gun control, or are anti-immigration. These issues seem biblically neutral at best, and I'd argue lean left on the policy spectrum. Either way, it's astounding how many white evangelicals align with these positions. I've wondered, therefore, how many people see these as "Christian" issues simply because they are evangelicals, their communities are mainly evangelical, and the culture they've grown up in is then synonymous with evangelicalism. So, when someone disagrees with you on these issues, they become not only your enemy, but an enemy of your faith and your God because they don't align with your definition of evangelicalism. And when that "way of life" seems to be under threat, you see it as the evangelical way of life being threatened by the liberal elite and whatnot. I wonder whether that, then, contributes to this enemy-focused, combative brand of evangelicalism where whiteness and Christianity become intertwined. Then, when white supremacy is challenged, people feel like the sovereignty of Christ is challenged, because they can't separate the two.
Anyway, all that to say - I totally agree and appreciate what you said, and just had another thought on your same train of thought to propose. Curious to get your thoughts.