America Magazine: “Stand up and be counted.” In the lead-up to the 2018 midterm elections, one might find this pithy phrase in the voter guides produced by the Christian Coalition, American Family Association or other evangelical political action groups that compose the “religious right.” These days, such guides do not assess candidates purely on their religious convictions; they are as likely to endorse a Catholic candidate as an evangelical, provided the politician is a reliable vote against abortion…
There has been a revolution in Catholic-evangelical relations since [President] Kennedy was compelled to defend his faith to Baptist pastors that year—a change mostly for the better. By making common cause on religious liberty, marriage and, above all, abortion, evangelicals have become familiar with Catholic ways of thinking and arguing. That familiarity has diminished evangelical contempt for the Church of Rome, even if significant theological differences remain.
This revolution, however, has mainly happened among evangelicalism’s “elite,” the middle- and upper-middle-class evangelicals who have sought a respectability the traditional religious right never cared much for. The grassroots consortium of pastors and believers who make up the religious right blur distinctions between church and state, faith and politics. But they do so in a distinctively populist way. Having been jilted, in their view, by the elites on the Supreme Court on issues like abortion and school prayer, the religious right has sought to animate ordinary believers to change politics through democratic means.
By contrast, the visible manifestations of the Catholic-evangelical alliance have taken a more high-brow form… The now-forgotten Manhattan Declaration, a sophisticated defense of broadly conservative positions on life, marriage and religious liberty issued by Catholic, Orthodox and evangelical Christians in 2009, gave this alliance a public form many suburban evangelicals could happily endorse.
It is those suburban, middle-class conservative evangelicals who were most likely to oppose the election of Donald J. Trump. Fifteen days before the 2016 presidential election, the Southern Baptist leader Russell Moore—the most prominent evangelical anti-Trumper—delivered the Erasmus Lecture, sponsored by First Things, aptly titled “Can the Religious Right be Saved?” The lecture was everything “elite” evangelicals could have asked for. It was a bracing challenge to the “old guard” religious right establishment, who normalized Mr. Trump by either silently acquiescing to him or fervently endorsing him, combined with a substantive articulation of a positive evangelical vision for politics.
“The religious right,” Dr. Moore quipped, “turns out to be the people the religious right warned us about…” Dr. Moore suggested that the problems with the religious right stem from its evangelical wing, which has failed to be properly evangelical; the religious right has pursued a path of entrepreneurial political activism, with at best tenuous theological commitments. The pursuit of power, in short, has eviscerated the movement’s faith.
The morning after the election, the so-called old guard leaders of the religious right awoke gleeful at their newfound influence. They had stood with Mr. Trump through scandal after scandal and would now reap their reward… President Trump and evangelicalism became inseparable…
Evangelicals have long been both a media-savvy and a media-hungry group, who have given politics a central position in their self-consciousness… Dr. Moore and Mr. Falwell spoke not only as evangelicals but for them, jockeying for position as the standard bearers for the movement’s political witness.
The scandalously visible evangelical support for Mr. Trump coupled with the headline number of 81 percent meant evangelicals “owned” the president in a unique way. And they continue to own him or to be owned by him…
While some members of the religious right tried to persuade voters in 2016 that Mr. Trump was a “baby Christian,” in reality, what the candidate believed did not matter: Evangelicals would have fawned over anyone who so blatantly fawned over them, provided that he gave them the access to power they craved.
Such a politicized evangelicalism makes effective use of the urgency that has so profoundly marked the evangelical temperament. Billy Graham traveled the world urging people to make a “decision for Christ” in that very hour. In 2016, his son Franklin Graham recreated these evangelistic rallies in his “Decision America” tour—which was curiously timed around the political cycle, raising questions about which decision was being made by attendees. Despite nearly 20 years of claims by hopeful members of the media and younger evangelicals that the religious right has died, it is difficult to think of a movement in the United States right now that is more effective at harnessing religious vitality for political ends.
The political fervor of the religious right goes hand in hand with a chronic anxiety about being under assault by, well, practically everyone. This has remained true despite the fact that leaders of the movement enjoy unparalleled access to the White House. Mr. Trump told evangelicals at their “state dinner” that they were “one election away from losing everything”—and they doubtlessly agreed with him. For the leaders of the religious right, politics is the concrete point at which a grand cultural struggle takes shape…
Yet to the extent that religious enthusiasm intertwines with politics for many of President Trump’s most ardent evangelical admirers, it also tends to overlap with anti-Catholic sentiment. Consider the Southern Baptist pastor Robert Jeffress, whose 10,000-person church brought the world the “Make America Great Again” hymn. Mr. Jeffress has distinguished himself by standing ready to offer justifications for nearly anything Mr. Trump says or does. When he was rewarded for his loyalty by praying before the opening of the Jerusalem embassy, audio resurfaced of him claiming that the Roman Catholic Church is a counterfeit religion that expresses the “genius of Satan.” The ecumenical disinfectant of political respectability quickly went to work on Mr. Jeffress. He made the Fox News apology tour, announcing that he (now) loves his “Catholic brothers and sisters in Christ…” [But] it is a distinctively Protestant America many of President Trump’s most ardent evangelical supporters are aiming to promote—perhaps everywhere except on the Supreme Court…
Still, insofar as evangelical-Catholic relations over the past 50 years have been warmed by political collaboration, the public conflation of evangelicalism with President Trump presents an opportunity to reconfigure such ties and form new bonds…
The vast majority of evangelicalism’s life is intertwined in issues and places that have nothing to do with the religious right or the tumult of our politics… The vast and diverse network of evangelical social relief agencies, like World Vision and Compassion International, provides a practical point of contact with Catholicism that is often overlooked… There is no codified “evangelical social teaching” comparable to what Catholics have. But in some ways, the practical theology at work provides a plausible opportunity for dialogue all the same.
In one way, then, nothing has changed in the evangelical landscape—except that the long-expected transformation is now further off than it once was. Whether evangelicalism survives Donald J. Trump depends upon whether it has leaders who are able to disentangle its political witness from the dimensions of Mr. Trump’s presidency that have so clearly scandalized the Gospel witness. Such a task is for conservative evangelicals in a way that it is not for Roman Catholics. Whether Catholics will be up to it remains an open question…
Necessity, as we have long known, is the mother of invention. Thankfully, few movements have been as adaptable or as willing to reinvent themselves as those who call themselves evangelicals.
Our Comment:
America Magazine is published by the Jesuits. Evangelicals and Catholics are working together at the political table, just not enough for this author. The time will come, when the common denominator that they all agree on, Sunday worship, will unite them all in such a way as to join them together to compel the conscience by worship laws.
Prophetic link:
“As the controversy extends into new fields, and the minds of the people are called to God’s down-trodden law, Satan is astir. The power attending the message only maddens those who oppose it. The clergy put forth almost superhuman efforts to shut away the light, lest it should shine upon their flocks. By every means at their command they endeavor to suppress the discussion of these vital questions. The church appeals to the strong arm of civil power, and in this work, papists are solicited to come to the help of Protestants. The movement for Sunday enforcement becomes more bold and decided. The law is invoked against commandment-keepers…” Spirit of Prophecy, Vol. 4, page 425.
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