What If Trump Wins?

The Donald Trump presidency has reached a point of clarity. Twice Trump issued a tweet essentially threatening to intervene in the Mueller investigation.

Trump’s ominous tweet arrived just one week after he’d issued basically the same threat on Fox News: “You look at the corruption at the top of the FBI -- it's a disgrace. And our Justice Department, which I try and stay away from, but at some point I won't.”

Seven days: two nearly identical threats. Trump is preparing the field to go full Nixon, firing the people investigating him and jamming the gears of constitutional democracy.

Trump’s determination to fend off the Russia investigation is hardly news, but the crisis grows ever more acute. He fired FBI director James Comey. When he pushed his own FBI director to fire deputy director Andrew McCabe, Director Christopher Wray threatened to resign. Trump got rid of McCabe anyway, and the Justice Department threatens to prosecute McCabe. We’ve even learned that Trump tried to fire special counsel Robert Mueller, only to be backed down by his own White House lawyer, and has discussed firing Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein. When Attorney General Jeff Sessions, himself in jeopardy, recused himself from the investigation, Trump attacked Sessions both publicly and behind closed doors. There’s no question at this point that Donald Trump wants to rub out the Mueller investigation. 

Most threatening, it appears congressional Republicans will support Trump’s efforts no matter the cost. Some House Republicans have threatened to impeach Rosenstein for refusing to share information with them – about an ongoing investigation, no less. All these dynamics should lead us to ask, “What if Trump wins?” What if he fends off the investigation, maintains congressional majorities, and moves ahead with his agenda? What should we expect?

1.      Count on more corruption: self-enrichment and nepotism. Trump’s presidency began with his promise to remove himself from his businesses, the new president standing beside a table of folders containing his agreements to relinquish authority of those enterprises. But the folders held only blank paper. Although Trump repeatedly asserted that he had no dealings with Russia, his representatives actively pursued Trump Tower Moscow in the early stages of the 2016 campaign. But that’s just small change. We also have Robert Mueller investigating the connections between Jared Kushner’s meetings with foreign dignitaries and his never-ending search for big-time financing, including the possibility that Trump punished Qatar for turning away Kushner’s advances. And remember Donald Trump Junior’s foreign policy address in India that suddenly became more of a fireside chat? We have lots of questions about Trump and India.

2.       If we’re talking about corruption, we’ll need the courage to confront an ugly image: a fish rots from its head. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt leads the pack with his 50 dollar a night DC digs and a house purchased with help from a lobbyist, and we haven’t even broached his outrageous travel expenses. In just twenty or so trips, former Health and Human Services secretary Tom Price managed to spend a million dollars. Price lost his job, as did former VA secretary David Shulkin who turned his job into Wimbledon tickets and used federal funds for his wife’s travel. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke gave the reconstruction of Puerto Rico’s electrical grid to an untested, understaffed hometown firm; he too has travel expense problems. And Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin apparently used government money to tour Fort Knox and observe the solar eclipse. In this light Ben Carson’s $31,000 dining room purchase looks like chump change. With a Trump win, expect the rot to work its way all the way down.

3.       Observe how Trump targets his corporate opponents. The pressure can be negative, as when Trump attacked Amazon, falsely claiming their business was a drain on the Postal Service. His real enemy is Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post. Trump’s Justice Department also opposes the merger TimeWarner, owner of CNN, another Trump media nemesis, with AT&T. Scandalous as such examples are, Trump influences corporations in other dysfunctional ways. Trump claims his tax cuts have led companies to invest in workers. But consider the mixed reports the case studies Trump cites: WalMart put $700 million into raises and bonuses, while it is closing 50 stores, while the $252 million Apple was pulling back into the United States was largely on the way anyway.

4.       Expect endless warmongering and brinksmanship. The book remains open as to whether Trump’s Korea initiative will bear fruit. If it does, Trump will score a historic accomplishment. But Trump has also threatened to attack Venezuela. All the bluster around his two attacks on Syria led to one-time, ineffectual displays. It remains unclear how the US will deal with its nuclear agreement with Iran, but Trump seems bent on starting conflict there as well. Here’s how it looks to me: All the bluster makes Trump look strong in the eyes of his supporters, but it weakens the true influence of the United States.

5.       Expect more erosion of the rule of law. For appearances’ sake, Trump has offered a tiny dose of tough talk toward Russia. Congress has imposed sanctions, which Trump refused to activate. As a candidate and as president Trump has repeatedly criticized judicial rulings. His attacks on the FBI and the Justice Department indicate that Trump expects to overwhelm the judicial system by means of political force.

6.       Trump’s attacks will eventually diminish the news media. Trump rallies still collect the media into holding areas so that his supporters can boo and ridicule them. He complains that libel laws aren’t strong enough. He offers his appearance to the news media of which he approves and avoids other outlets. All of this is easy to see. Perhaps more sinister, the media still doesn’t know how to cover Trump, treating him like an ordinary president who seeks what’s good for America rather than his own self-aggrandizement. Many in the news media have performed heroically. Just this week the Washington Post called things as they are: “It has become standard operating procedure for Trump and his aides to deceive the public with false statements and shifting accounts.” For the first time reporters have finally pressed the White House press secretary to explain why Americans should believe the president. But if Trump wins, expect the media to weaken. 

7.       The gravest threat to democracy, should Trump suppress the Mueller investigation, involves voting. As a candidate and immediately after his election, Trump challenged the legitimacy of the popular vote. He still repeats the lie that millions of people voted illegally in 2016. In January Trump finally gave up on his bogus Voter Fraud Commission. But Republicans have long sought to suppress the ballot through gerrymandering and Voter ID laws. Racism has been a key feature of Trump’s campaign and presidency, and it shows in voting: racial resentment among whites proved a primary factor in support from Trump. For the rest of us, this means that a Trump triumph could lead to the end of free and fair elections, in large part through his attacks on minority communities.

8.       Eventually we should expect a ruined economy. Trump’s infrastructure plan is scarcely feasible and has no momentum. A Trump government will never invest in America’s human capital by providing education and nurture for children. Indeed, education sits right in the crosshairs of Trumpist policy. Trump only cares about appearances, so he seeks immediate victories over long-term prosperity. The current tax legislation provides a perfect example: it raises the debt, cuts revenue, and redistributes wealth toward the wealthy elite. A prosperous society requires investment, democracy, and fairness. Trump shares none of those values. If you want to imagine a Trumpist economy, think Putin, not Eisenhower.

In her recent novel Three Daughters of Eve, the Turkish author Elif Şafak conjures a chilling conversation about the value of democracy. The setting is a dinner party of Turkish elites.

“Frankly, I don’t believe in democracy,” said an architect with a crew cut and perfectly groomed goatee. His firm had made huge profits from construction projects across the city. “Take Singapore, success without democracy. China. Same. It’s a fast-moving world. Decisions must be implemented like lightning. Europe wastes time with petty debates while Singapore gallops ahead. Why? Because they are focused. Democracy is a loss of time and money.”

All over the world, from Russia to Singapore, from Italy to China, from Poland to the Philippines, democracy is rolling backward. Authoritarianism feeds on the fear of cultural change, the fear that things will get worse unless a great leader – a great man, in just about every case – takes the reins. Feeling insecure about their hold on prosperity, relatively prosperous white people looked to Trump to turn back the cultural clock.

(Contrary to popular opinion, white working class voters were less likely to support Trump than rich people were).

Trump’s ominous inauguration address, followed almost immediately by notorious Muslim ban, led me to wonder how things might turn out if Trumpism has its way. One image kept coming to mind: Kiev in 2014.

The Ukraine has far less experience with democracy than does the United States, with far weaker institutions. Things still haven’t settled down there, but in 2014 the Ukrainian people rejected their Russian-backed president Yanukovych and demanded the restoration of their former constitution. When they took to the streets, violence ensued that led to over 100 deaths. If Trump wins, and if he does so by suppressing democratic institutions and shuttering the Mueller investigation, are Americans willing to take to the streets in our cities like the Ukrainians did in 2014?

I’m afraid we’re about to find out.

Evangelicalism: Use with Care

When it comes to discussing evangelicals and evangelicalism, more precision would go a long way.

Evangelicals often complain about misuses of these categories. Basically, they don’t want to be lumped in with fundamentalists, who don’t dance, don’t chew, and don’t go with the girls that do. Who wants to be tagged alongside segregationists, creation scientists, and millenarians?

Yet it’s remarkable how happily evangelicals misapply the category to flatter themselves. Jonathan Edwards? Charles Finney? Even Harriet Livermore, who preached before Congress in 1827? (Confession: I only learned of Harriet Livermore while Google-prepping this post.) According to this line of thought, anyone who loved the Bible, loved Jesus, and sought the conversion of unbelievers counts as an evangelical. Like the rest of us, evangelicals appropriate a version of history that flatters themselves.

There’s a critical problem with this category mistake: evangelicalism as we know it derived as a spin-off from modern fundamentalism. It is not the religion of Edwards, Finney, or Livermore, nor could it be.

The meaning of “evangelical” has changed greatly over time. It once meant, simply, “Protestant,” as it largely does in Europe today. Today’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in America does not identify as evangelical in the way that, say, the Reformed Church in America does. Their name goes back to that more ancient usage, as did the Evangelical and Reformed Church, which became part of the United Church of Christ.

The fundamentalist-liberal controversies began in the second half of the nineteenth century and dramatically transformed the American religious landscape. These conflicts emerged in response to the combination of evolutionary science and modern biblical scholarship, both of which called into question the literal, scientific truth of the Bible. Modern science won’t allow us to imagine a 6000 year-old creation, and modern biblical scholarship won’t abide the notions that Moses wrote the Pentateuch or that the Gospels represent eyewitness testimony.

Fundamentalists largely lost their battle with liberalism, a defeat that pushed fundamentalism to the cultural margins. But in the 1940s and 1950s a new movement emerged among religious conservatives. Evangelicals basically adhered to fundamentalist principles, but they sought a renewed engagement with the broader culture. They built new institutions, embraced art and popular culture. They even learned to dance. More than any other individual, Billy Graham embodied this movement toward cultural engagement.

The problem is, no one has ever successfully distinguished evangelicalism from fundamentalism because so much is at stake in the distinction. The rise of the Moral Majority and the Religious Right in the 1970s, combined with conservative movements in major denominations, further blurred the distinction.

Let’s take an example. When conservatives took control of my alma mater, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, they said they wanted to build a great evangelical institution. (Note: they did not previously regard the seminary as “evangelical.” Southern Baptists largely avoided the term until the 1980s.) Eventually, they wound up firing members who supported women’s ordination. Southern Seminary is now known, among other things, for promoting women’s submission at home and in the church. That looks like a fundamentalist position to many of us, especially in comparison with “evangelical” seminaries like Fuller and Gordon-Conwell.

Now that 81 percent of white evangelicals have voted for Donald Trump, and the group still constitutes his most loyal base of support, the evangelical-fundamentalist distinction looks rather thin.

Experts know and write about the diversity within the evangelical movement, yet even they often use the word indiscriminately in many ways. I learned my lesson as a college student, doing honors research under Valarie Ziegler. My 1987 thesis, “Modern Fundamentalism and the Legacy of Nineteenth Century Revivalism,” demonstrates the enormous gap between, say, a Jerry Falwell and a Charles Finney. Finney knew nothing of evolutionary science or critical biblical scholarship, and his social views clearly identified him as a progressive. Falwell started out as a segregationist, then promoted the broad range of views we now identify with the Religious Right. Yet Falwell’s associates claimed a direct line between Finney and fundamentalism.

People apply the term evangelical to all sorts of people who diverge in significant ways. Is the black church evangelical? If so, why don’t African Americans support Trump like white evangelicals do? Do we include socially progressive evangelicals like Tony Campolo and Shane Claiborne — who prefer the term “red letter Christians” — alongside a Franklin Graham? How do we account for Southern Christians, who rarely identified as evangelicals before the rise of Jerry Falwell, and whose religious history is deeply imbricated with slavery and segregation?

White evangelicals’ scandalous affinity for Donald Trump leads many to question the viability of the movement itself. And well it should. It would also help if we’d be clear in what we’re talking about.

Milestones in My Journey Out of Evangelicalism

In many ways I still identify as an evangelical. I love Jesus, and I experience the sort of personal relationship with Jesus that evangelicals celebrate and psychologists are getting uncomfortably close to explaining away. I love the Bible too. And I love talking about Jesus. Those used to be the defining characteristics of an evangelical.

But times change. For a very long time evangelicals have tied themselves to the notion of biblical inerrancy, the notion that the Bible is always both consistent and correct with respect to morality, theology, and history. (It isn’t.) More recently, I’m growing suspicious that evangelicalism has reduced itself to little more than branding for a movement that subordinates women and condemns LGBTQ persons, a movement that so authoritarian and hypocritical that it will buy anything that advances its cultural interests. 

I realize this is a harsh judgment to make. And I confess that it comes in anger, as white evangelicals more than anyone else ushered Donald Trump to power. What’s especially striking about that is that few white evangelicals ever accepted Barack Obama as a fellow Christian, despite his consistent and compelling testimony. I know huge policy gaps separate evangelicals from an Obama-style Democrat, but the evangelical rejection of Obama’s faith leads me to suspect there’s a strong dose of racial resentment in that judgment. If this is harsh, and if this is angry, so be it. I hope this piece is helpful to someone else.

Maybe you’re trying to sort out your own relationship with evangelicalism. Like millions of other people, you have encountered Christ in an evangelical context, a relationship that brings you vitality, purpose, and joy – but that evangelical framework no longer works for you. If that’s true, maybe you can relate to these milestones.

Fornication. Having not grown up in church, I committed to Christ just before my fifteenth birthday. I quickly got the message that I should be reading my Bible. By my senior year in high school, I’d read it all the way through. And I had a question: “Y’all are always telling us to avoid premarital sex because it’s a sin. Well, I’m living that code, but I just read the whole Bible, and it doesn’t say that.” My youth director tried to convince me otherwise, but the truth is, he didn’t have such a great argument. A few days later I received a greeting card in the mail. Under his signature, he wrote, “Proverbs 3:5-6.”

In the King James the passage reads, “Trust in the Lord with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding. In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths.” In other words, my youth pastor told me to stop thinking for myself and accept the authority of my teachers.

The Synoptic Problem. While reading the Bible through, I noticed that the Gospels often tell the same stories – but in very different ways. Whenever I noticed this phenomenon, I just assured myself there must be an answer I just couldn’t understand. But during a college visit I sat in on an introductory New Testament class. The professor, Richard Batey, was using a handy-dandy pull-down chart to explain how the Gospels were composed. The color-coded chart indicated which passages Matthew, Mark, and Luke had in common, and which were unique to each Gospel.

Professor Batey didn’t need to explain the rest. Because I knew the Gospels so well by that time, the main point was immediately clear: the Gospels must have some kind of literary dependence among themselves. In other words, contradictions among the Gospels must be intentional, not just different ways of remembering the same stories. I would never see the Bible the same way again.

Charlatans. Just after my conversion I attended revival services at a local church with some friends. The preacher, a future president of the Alabama Baptist Convention, was preaching on Satan. Suddenly the sound system began to crackle and fail. The preacher accounted this phenomenon to the devil: “This happens any time I preach on Satan.” I was impressed.

At the time.

My freshman year in college I began visiting Bellevue Baptist Church in Memphis, where the famous Adrian Rogers was the pastor. It bothered me a little that church members frequently cited their pastor as the ultimate authority: “Dr. Rogers says….” One Sunday Rogers used John 2:11 – the story of Jesus turning water into wine – as an argument that Christians should not consume alcohol.

Let me say that again. He used a miracle in which Jesus creates wine to prove that wine is sinful.

His basic argument was that ancient wine had no alcoholic content. Even at 18 I knew how to chase down that bogus argument. Of course the wine, albeit weak by today’s standards, was alcoholic! I concluded that one of two things must be true: either (a) this preacher is inexcusably lazy and doesn’t do his homework, or (b) he lacks integrity. Oh, wait: (a) is a subcategory of (b).

I stopped visiting Bellevue. And I remembered the guy with the skeevy sound system.

AA and Gandhi. My church had taught me that anyone who did not know Jesus was bound for hell. I struggled with that doctrine, but I continued to believe it. Then my Dad entered treatment for his alcoholism. I rejoice that he’s been sober over 30 years, and he continues to stay in Alcoholics Anonymous. My Dad became a person I could really admire. But that created a problem: through AA, God became very important for him, but Jesus did not (at that time). Could I affirm God’s clear blessing in my Dad’s life without giving up my doctrinal belief?

About the same time, the film Gandhi came out. Yes, it’s just a movie. But the movie conveyed a sense of holiness that I could not deny. A few years later I got to meet Arun Gandhi, Mohandas Gandhi’s grandson, and I experienced that same feeling. Over the years it’s happened countless times: the experience of profound holiness in the presence of non-Christians. Even as a college student, I realized: I can’t believe in a God who sends people to eternal damnation on the basis of their doctrinal beliefs. Sorry.

Southern Baptists and Abortion. In college I wrote a paper on “The Southern Baptist Witness on Race.” The project required me to call denominational offices, pore over denominational archives – in short, to do real history. It was fun!

Along the way I got a surprise. In 1971 the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution that favored abortion as an option under certain conditions, including “the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother.” But wait. I thought Southern Baptists opposed abortion!

Encountering that resolution showed me that church teaching can change very, very quickly. Later I encountered Randall Balmer’s compelling argument that evangelical strategists embraced the pro-life movement as a means of leveraging support for other causes – particularly their right to run segregated schools and colleges.

The Southern Baptist Takeover. My church tradition was Southern Baptist. I served Southern Baptist churches, was founder and president of my college’s Baptist Student Union, and even served the denomination as a 2-year volunteer home missionary. I attended the denomination’s flagship seminary.

All the while, fundamentalists were taking control of the Southern Baptist Convention and its agencies, including my seminary. The process took more than a decade, but I was part of the last graduating class before my seminary fell under fundamentalist control. And yes, I was president of the student resistance club, the Whitsitt Society for Baptist Freedom.

We students were allowed to share a picnic with the new seminary trustees to try and establish some form of dialog. Over the years I’d seen some questionable things from the fundamentalists, especially baseless accusations against my professors. And I’d heard rumors of even worse: famous pastors condemning seminary professors as heretics without even reading their works.

One key debate involved the question of women in ministry. I shared with a trustee, “You know that the first Baptists ordained women as deacons?” He was sure I was wrong, so like a good little seminarian I offered to photocopy the primary sources and mail them to him.

You know the answer. I never heard from the guy. Of course I didn’t.

I. J. Mosala. By the time I entered graduate studies in New Testament, I’d changed my mind on many things. I accepted contradictions and multiple sources in the Bible. I’d come to celebrate women’s leadership and the full inclusion of LGBTQ persons in the church. I certainly had abandoned the notion that non-Christians are categorically bound for hell.

But fundamentalism runs deep. I still hadn’t fully grappled with the complexities raised by Scripture. The pieces crowded my head, but the puzzle hadn’t come together. Then I read Itumeleng J. Mosala’s Biblical Hermeneutics and Black Theology in South Africa. It’s not widely read, but Mosala demonstrates directly how some biblical authors promote the interests of oppression – even Luke, the supposed patron of the poor. I haven’t read Mosala in a long time, and I imagine I might disagree with him on some points now. But I could not escape his basic argument: not only does the Bible include diverse points of view, it also contains dangerous material that can’t be explained away.

I’m still ashamed that it took me so long to accept this reality. Back in high school I’d preached a sermon about Saul’s failure to kill all the Amalekites and their cattle – and somehow the ethical problems eluded me. That’s how thick the fundamentalist fog rolls in.

Religion is social. However much we might believe religion is about our personal mystical experiences or the stuff we believe, a religious journey is always formed by relationships, communities, world events, and the like. My journey out of evangelicalism is just one of many, but it is a path many, many people share in broad outline.

Way back in 2012 I wrote a blog chronicling some of this process: “Where Do ‘Liberal’ Bible Scholars Come From?” Picking up the theme, my colleague Peter Enns invited other biblical scholars, along with some pastors, to share their own stories. If you’re pushing away from an evangelical identity that asks you to set your brain aside, maybe you’ll connect with one of these stories.

Lenten Sermon: Mark 8:31-38 in 2018

Mark 8:31-38

Three little gospel nuggets.

1.       You can talk yourself into defeat, or you can talk yourself into victory. When you speak to yourself the right way, strength, courage, vision and healing come.

2.       We have authority as believers in Christ to bring heaven’s will to earth by acting in partnership with God…What He allows or disallows—is all that we can allow or disallow here in the earth.

3.       You will only increase when you stop being stingy and release - There is a blessing in the release. Stop keeping your gifts to yourself! He gifted you so that you could provoke somebody else!

Joel Osteen.

Joyce Meyer.

T. D. Jakes.

Snapshots in messianic dreaming, Twitter style. American style.

Messianic dreaming. The idea that God will break into human affairs and make things right. Pain and wickedness will pass away. God will exercise authority over all things. It will work out.

Mix in a little American consumerism, and messianic dreaming turns out well for us. By us, I mean me. Our you (individual name). Or you (individual name). Or you (individual name). You can talk yourself into victory. You have authority to bring heaven on earth. You will increase. God can break in and make it all work out – with a little pinch of consumerist positivity – for you.

Thank you, Joel Osteen, Joyce Meyer, and T. D. Jakes, for making this all so clear. Messianic dreaming.

                So Peter calls Jesus aside. It’s what you do when you don’t want to embarrass somebody. You don’t correct them in front of everyone. You take a quiet minute, and you set them straight. It’s what David Mellott would do.

                For if ever there were a time for messianic dreaming, it would be right now. Pick your threat. Just pick one. It’s always the right time for messianic dreaming. You could be in a Syrian city, huddling cold and hungry with your children, and wondering why God doesn’t stop the shelling. You could be a student from Parkland, Florida, wondering why powerful men and women – who have never looked at a loaded gun from the wrong end – wondering how long they can evade your questions. You could live at low altitude, wondering what will happen to your livelihood when the rising salt water makes farming impossible – knowing people who matter don’t care, and wondering what kind of life your kids will have if you migrate. You could be the parent of a black or brown or Jewish child, seeing the rise in racial harassment in our public schools, and wonder why God won’t turn this country around. You could be pretty much anywhere, pick your threat, and wonder why God’s healing has not arrived.

                You could pull Jesus aside, couldn’t you, and maybe correct him? If you let your emotions out, come on now, you might just scold Jesus. Because as a messiah, as a messiah… let’s just hope Jesus has some time before the messianic evaluation forms are due. It’s only compassionate to tell him now. Because he seems to have misread the job description.

                Maybe Peter could go nicer on Jesus, but Peter tries to be kind. At least he pulls Jesus aside.

                Jesus does not save us by jumping in on our behalf. He will not save us by taking our place, even on the cross. He saves us by coming in alongside us. By becoming one of us, entering the fullness of human reality, by becoming vulnerable to growing, to grieving, to wondering – not instead of us, but right alongside of us.

                This is how Jesus answers Peter’s messianic fantasy. We may share in Jesus’ journey. We may walk the road with him. We will face opposition alongside him. We will learn the way of the cross. We hand over our deeds to our own lives.

                This gospel does not dominate the airwaves. It won’t sell many books. Those who proclaim it probably won’t need insurance for their private jets. Messianic dreaming sells. Christ-like living might not. Jesus’ gospel is poor marketing.

                Let’s face it… we’d rather not buy it, either. Or have to sell it.

               

These days, there’s no need for heroes. The kids from Parkland, Florida, like Emma González and David Hogg, staring down the emissaries of hate with clarity and truth, those young people are true heroes. Thank God for them. But we do not need them to take our place in the work of grace and justice. We need Jesus to walk alongside us, as we walk with one another.

                We don’t need another moment, another crisis either. We don’t have to look back to Fanny Lou Hamer, or Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or Daniel Berrigan – as if the days of dangerous witness have passed. Bishops and pastors are calling in. Right now, if we are fully engaged in ministry. Right now, if we speak of Syrian children as fellow human beings in need of shelter; right now, if we cry out for the need to invest in the health and education of poor children; right now, if we confront religious bigotry and dismissive racism, believe me (WINK), right now we won’t have to look for another moment. People will push us, “Pastor, just preach the gospel.” They will demand our silence. They will threaten our jobs.  

                Someone might say, “That’s easy for you to say, Greg. You’re a professor. You have tenure. You actually benefit from speaking out.” I hope you say that. Because there is no more demanding call right now than to serve as a pastor, or as a chaplain, or as a religious educator, as an agent of change – there is no more demanding call than to be out there doing the work of justice and grace. You would be absolutely right.

                We all want heroes. But Jesus call disciples. He demands our lives.

                And the challenge – for Peter, for me, for all of us – the challenge is to believe Jesus. To trust that Jesus, and Jesus alone, will provide a life so much richer, much more vital, and far more abundant than the life we hand over.

                This is grace, this life. We cannot create it for ourselves. We cannot even choose it. But from time to time we do receive a brush-by, a glimpse, a taste of this life. I see how you look after one another. I see you driving one another to the doctor, bearing one another’s burdens.

                Teaching in an outlaw seminary, banned by the Nazis, Dietrich Bonhoeffer remarked: “The physical presence of other Christians is a source of incomparable joy and strength to the believer.”

                May I share an extended quote from Bonhoeffer, his last circular letter from the underground seminary?

A sort of joy exists that knows nothing at all of the heart’s pain, anguish, and dread; it does not last; it can only numb a person for the moment. The joy of God has gone through the poverty of the manger and the agony of the cross; that is why it is invincible, irrefutable. It does not deny the anguish, when it is there, but finds God in the midst of it, in fact precisely there; it does not deny grave sin but finds forgiveness precisely in this way; it looks death straight in the eye, but it finds life precisely within it.

                We live at a moment of intense corporate pain. Our society, once declaring itself a haven for displaced persons, now seeks out black and brown people to deport. It tells our children they need teachers carrying heat. More obviously than we could have imagined, it takes from the poor and gives to the rich. It tells us all to be bitter, fearful, materialistic, shallow, anything but free, anything but joyful. And in the face of this some preachers, SOME PREACHERS, preach the shallow joy that does not know pain.

                But we know a Savior who plumbs the depths of human anguish. We know a Savior who will walk alongside us in our pursuit of grace and justice. We know a Savior who agonized on the cross yet lives in resurrection glory. We know a Savior who, when we hand ourselves over to him, walks with us in joy. Amen.

White Evangelicals, Authoritarianism, and Trump

No man exercised greater influence on me than my grandfather. He died when I was twelve, several years before I came to a Christian confession of my own. Papa was a country Missionary Baptist, member of a church that had an outdoor pool in order to facilitate baptism in “living water.” I remember the quiet intensity of his praying and his faithful preparation every weekend to lead adult Sunday School.

Papa read a great deal despite his eighth grade education. Only recently did I come to understand why his education ended so early: just fourteen, he set out on his own after his mother suffered a mental health collapse that would leave her institutionalized for the rest of her life. I had all the information but never put it all together until my Mom shared the whole story. Compassion for my grandfather, dead over 50 years, moved me to weep for him.

Somehow Papa’s Bible fell to me after his death. Inside I found some study notes, along with a typewritten page of fundamentalist apologetics. You can find the story, marked “false” at Snopes.com, the internet fact-checker. As the story goes, NASA scientists once found themselves stumped by a missing day in their astronomical calculations. A Christian scientist resolved the problem by pointing them to Joshua 10:12-13. There God stops the movement of the sun and the moon – “about a whole day,” as the King James Version renders it – to allow the Israelites extra time to exterminate their enemies.

I suppose my grandfather treasured that story.

Our media teems with analyses of why white evangelicals support Donald Trump. Evangelicals have long touted “family values.” But in the 2016 election they favored a serial adulterer who has no firm connection to an actual congregation over a lifelong United Methodist, and they did so by an 80-16 margin. Some attribute white evangelical support for Trump to the racist disposition of many white voters, which indeed had a measurable impact on the election. Others point to policy issues, abortion and church-state relations, which surely influenced evangelical voters.

By no means am I competent to rank the reasons for white evangelical loyalty to Trump. Messiah College historian John Fea is indeed qualified, and his book on the question will show up this summer. I’m eager to read the book, but I’m also impatient. For now, we might ask what distinctive factors in evangelicals’ DNA might lead them to support an authoritarian candidate like Trump. And Trump was an authoritarian candidate. Saying “I alone can fix it,” and “I know more than the generals,” candidate Trump accused the news media of “fake news” encouraged his supporters to beat up protestors at his rallies, compared US intelligence agencies to Nazis, and attacked the credibility of a judge who happened to be Mexican-American. I would like to highlight a few dimensions of evangelical identity that surely predispose Christian conservatives to tolerate this kind of authoritarianism.

              
First, suspicion of expert opinion thrives among Christian conservatives. The fundamentalist movement emerged as a response to the twin threats of Darwin’s theory of evolution and critical biblical scholarship. Not only did fundamentalists lose the battle to control mainline Protestant denominations, they also lost public respectability. The Scopes Monkey Trial symbolizes their loss of esteem, leading to a broad cultural prejudice against religious conservatives as backwater rubes who oppose science and reason. For these reasons Christian conservatives crave public legitimacy. Alienated from higher education and other conventional sources of knowledge, fundamentalists have been quick to believe what their leaders tell them. Back in 1995 evangelical historian Mark Noll addressed this problem in his classic The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.

                
Second, fundamentalists compensated for their cultural losses by creating alternative institutions, a world of their own. Christian schools, colleges, universities, seminaries, and publishing houses allowed fundamentalists to credential their own experts. Meanwhile, “evangelicals” emerged from the fringes of fundamentalism, establishing their own institutions. We might explain the distinction between evangelicals and fundamentalists in terms’ of evangelicals’ desire for greater integration into the broader society. But that boundary is remarkably porous.* If the Creation Museum may provoke general ridicule, the far more hip Museum of the Bible garners major media attention – but hardly of the flattering variety. Evangelicals and fundamentalists both tie themselves to the notion of biblical inerrancy – a commitment that inevitably leads to cultural conflict. Their institutions may look and feel different, but both groups find it necessary to guard their own sources of truth.

                
My grandfather’s NASA story shows how easily the combination of cultural marginalization and institutional protectionism render Christian conservatives especially susceptible to false narratives, whether actual “fake news” or authoritarian lies. Nine women may accuse senatorial candidate Roy Moore of sexual misconduct, but true believers will believe neither them nor the media sources that report their stories. On a grander scale, most evangelicals reject contemporary climate science, perhaps in numbers large enough to tip the scale on US policy.

                
My grandfather died in 1978, just as the Moral Majority was gaining national prominence. Keen observers noted a shift in the fundamentalist ethos at that point. Christian conservatives began an effort to return from the cultural margins and exercise influence over the larger culture. Imitating pop culture, Christian music and film industries sprang up. Indeed, Christian filmmaking may be at its high point right now. Christian political influence ushered Ronald Reagan to the White House.

                
Few have paid it serious attention until recently, but within the Religious Right a new theological sensitivity emerged – dominionist theology. Dominionists teach that Christians should “take dominion” over culture, electing leaders and enacting laws according to their understanding of God’s will. In short, dominionism is thoroughly authoritarian. Most dominionists are not so extreme, but some preachers will call for the execution of gays and lesbians on biblical grounds. Dominionism represents an extreme form of evangelical authoritarianism, but its influence is growing.

                
Christian fundamentalism emerged as a response to cultural movements that undermined cherished Christian assumptions, especially those tied to the Bible’s literal and scientific accuracy. By rejecting widely accepted sources of knowledge, such as academia and the media, then by building their own sources of authority, Christian conservatives have grown more and more insular – more and more authoritarian. The ultimate expression of evangelical authoritarianism may lie in the home schooling movement. By removing children from the public schools, evangelicals can indoctrinate them in creationist science and theological dominionism. Indeed, Frank Schaeffer, one of the early and most influential home schooling advocates, has said as much. Now an atheist, Schaeffer writes that the home school movement was explicitly designed to “undermine a secular and free vision of America and replace it by stealth with a form of theocracy.”

                
If we take the long view, we should not be surprised that white evangelicals came to support Donald Trump in such large numbers. Trump favored their cherished policies, winning their sympathy despite his, um, complicated personal life. His authoritarian rhetoric troubled few religious conservatives, who are long accustomed to such discourse. And because they do not trust conventional experts and popular news media, evangelicals were ready to believe Trump suffered unfair attacks from the media. “Fake news,” indeed.

*Some readers will take exception to the ways in which I am blurring the categories of evangelicalism and fundamentalism. We may indeed distinguish between the two groups. Fundamentalists tend to hold narrower views concerning what might count for legitimate differences of opinion among Christians, and they generally voice a more negative view of the larger culture. Evangelicalism emerged as a moderating response to both tendencies. But if we pay close attention to how evangelicals and fundamentalists actually use these categories, the distinction all but vanishes. Conservative Christians call themselves evangelical when it favors them. This applies even when they believe women should submit to the leadership of men, oppose equal rights for LGBTQ persons, and believe that persons who do not confess Christ in the way they do are bound for hell. For these reasons I choose not to distinguish between the two groups. After all, 80 percent of “evangelicals” voted for Trump.