by Peter Wehner
It’s hardly a surprise that in 2018 confidence in the church or organized religion dropped from the previous year, from 41 percent to 38 percent. According to Gallup, “This is another all-time low for an institution whose highly positive image has been shrinking since its peak 68% great deal/quite a lot confidence rating in 1975. The church had been the top rated institution in the 1973–1985 surveys.”25
FEAR AMONG THE FAITHFUL
So how did we get to this present place?
How on earth did we end up in a situation where, in the words of Redeemer Presbyterian Church’s Tim Keller, one of the most trusted evangelicals in the world, “‘evangelical’ used to denote people who claimed the high moral ground; now, in popular usage, the word is nearly synonymous with ‘hypocrite’”?26
It’s a long and complicated story.27 Part of the answer is undoubtedly that some evangelicals are giving in to the ancient temptation of being too close to political power, choosing to be court pastors to win the favor of the king. They are thrilled to be taken seriously, thrilled to be invited to the White House, thrilled to be seen as having influence in the highest ranks of political power.
That’s understandable; motivations are always mixed and never entirely pure, and pride often rears its ugly head in situations like this. Rather than acknowledge this, however, what we’re often getting is a spiritual show, a Christian Potemkin village, with people self-sacralizing their ambitions. (I know one person, a conservative commentator, who has justified his reluctance to publicly criticize President Trump because, he told me, he believes doing so will destroy his ability to witness to him.)
A more benign interpretation, as I understand the position of certain Christian leaders, is that access to power and influence has positive policy ramifications. I’ve stayed up until 3:00 a.m. talking with close friends—people of integrity with good hearts—who are aggrieved by my public criticisms of President Trump. In their defense of Trump’s evangelical supporters they argue that it is essential to influence the administration on issues that matter to politically conservative Christians. (They have in mind court appointments and pro-life policies, in particular.)
That position has a certain logic to it, but it comes with a price. Because of Trump’s narcissism, anything less than a full-throated public defense of him is viewed as disloyal. So to maintain their influence and access, many evangelical leaders have offered up outlandish rationalizations for the president. Faith becomes something to be used instrumentally, something to be publicly compromised in order to have a seat at the table of the politically powerful. And it raises the question, Where do evangelicals draw the line? At what point do they say that access to power isn’t worth debasing themselves and their faith? The answer with Trump—at least so far, at least for many of the most politically prominent evangelicals—is never.
“Once you have made the world an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing,” C. S. Lewis wrote in The Screwtape Letters, in which a senior devil offers advice to a junior devil. “Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades matter more to him than prayer and sacraments and charity, he is ours.”28
Another explanation for what is unfolding within American Christianity is political tribalism, which is hardly a new phenomenon but is more acute than in the past. There is intense partisan loyalty at play—a feeling of belonging and community, a sense of shared purposes and shared adversaries, an eagerness to have political views reaffirmed and celebrated, and the belief that the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
The result is that faith is subordinated to partisanship rather than partisanship being diluted by faith. When you become part of a team, including a political team, it can blind you to alternative perspectives and facts. In many cases political affiliations, not theological truths, are given priority. Politics is the lens through which reality is interpreted, the mold in which attitudes and sensibilities are formed.
“Political homogeneity in the evangelical world is unhelpful to America,” James Forsyth, a close friend who was born in Scotland and is now the senior pastor of the church my family and I attend in McLean, Virginia, said to me. Many evangelicals also feel increasingly powerless, beaten down, aggrieved, and under attack—and in some cases, they are. The elite culture is hostile to some traditional Christian beliefs.
The massive cultural shifts we have seen, especially in the realm of human sexuality, have left them with a sense that they’ve gone from being a “moral majority” to a persecuted minority. A sense of ressentiment, or a “narrative of injury,” is leading some evangelicals to look for scapegoats to explain their growing impotence. People filled with anger and grievances are easily exploited. “Christians and people on the right start by believing they are fighting satanic forces,” a person who is generally quite sympathetic to Christians told me, “and in the process become nihilists.” It is as if there’s a deep emotional need for a dark narrative.
Part of the explanation has to do with worry bordering on panic, including fear of lost status and influence. “We used to be the home team,” one theologian told me. “Now we’re the away team.”
The fear is that the America many white evangelicals knew and cherished is fading away; that the United States is in a moral freefall; that our problems are overwhelming and almost beyond our capacity to fix them.29 “We are on the verge of losing America” is a common refrain one hears. One pastor told me that Christians he interacts with “speak about losing their country with an intensity as if they are losing their God.”
What Americans therefore need, many evangelicals believe, is an alpha male, a strongman, a person who will hit back against his critics (and their critics) ten times harder than they were hit. The Baptist pastor of a Dallas-based megachurch, Robert Jeffress, says Trump’s tone doesn’t bother him because “I want the meanest, toughest SOB I can find to protect this nation.”30 Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr., in a tweet, declared this: “Conservatives & Christians need to stop electing ‘nice guys.’ They might make great Christian leaders but the US needs street fighters like @realDonaldTrump at every level of government b/c the liberal fascists Dems are playing for keeps & many [Republican] leaders are a bunch of wimps!”31 And according to Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, evangelicals “were tired of being kicked around by Barack Obama and his leftists. And I think they are finally glad that there’s somebody on the playground that is willing to punch the bully.”32 That “street fighter,” that “meanest, toughest SOB,” that “somebody,” is Donald J. Trump.
Although bully worship, as Orwell called it, is never justified, one must confess that there is a nub of a fair challenge in this claim. Religious conservatives may understandably ask a version of this question: “In a country where not all play by Marquess of Queensberry rules, where the stakes of politics are literally life and death—with hundreds of thousands of babies being aborted each year—and where Christianity and conservative values face real perils, how can we push back if we don’t embrace some pretty rough hombres?”
There is, however, a better way.
THE RIGHT WAY OUT AND THE RIGHT WAY UP
Having worked in politics my entire adult life, including on presidential campaigns and in the White House, I understand that governing involves complicated choices, transactional dealings, and prudential judgments. No one ever gets things exactly right, and all who choose to serve deserve our prayers for wisdom. Politics is certainly not a place for the pursuit of utopia and moral perfection; rather, at its best, it is about achieving the best approximation of the public good, about protecting human dignity and advancing, even imperfectly, a more just social order.
But with political involvement come temptations and traps, and it is the responsibility of Christians to act in ways that maintain the integrity of their public witness and improve our politics. The fact that this isn’t happening is what makes this moment s
o troubling.
I am not a prophet, nor am I a theologian or church leader. Still, based on my experience and based on my extensive conversations with such leaders and with others dedicated to living out their faith with integrity in the political sphere, I would point to four aspirations Christians should strive for if they wish to redeem this moment:
That Christians begin with Jesus, tying their efforts to what he actually taught and modeled.
That Christians, especially evangelicals, articulate a coherent vision of politics, informed by their moral vision of justice and the common good.
That Christians model and maintain a deep attitudinal shift away from a spirit of anger toward understanding, from revenge toward reconciliation, from grievance toward gratitude, and from fear toward trust and love.
That Christians treat all types of people as “neighbors” they are to love.
1. Begin with Jesus
Christians need to reacquaint themselves with the Jesus of the New Testament, not the Jesus of the right-wing media complex. The real Jesus demonstrated a profound mistrust of political power, declined Satan’s offer of the kingdoms of the world and their glory, and did not encourage his disciples to become involved in political movements of any kind.
The most meaningful emblem of Christianity is not the sword but the cross, which is the antithesis of worldly power. Unlike Muhammad, Jesus made it clear time and again that his kingdom is not of this world. And the New Testament, which offers detailed thoughts on all sorts of matters—from the qualifications for being an elder to parenting advice to how women should adorn themselves—does not provide anything like a governing blueprint.
The early church did not hand out voter guides. What it did do, according to the sociologist of religion Rodney Stark, is create “communal compassion” and social networks; care for the sick, widows, and orphans; welcome strangers and care for outsiders; respect women; and connect to non-Christians. That is how a tiny and obscure messianic movement in the second and third centuries became the dominant faith of Western civilization. That is how it transformed the ancient world and the course of human history.
To repeat: this does not mean that Christians, Christian institutions, and churches should never under any circumstances be involved in politics, since politics has profound human consequences. What it does mean is that Christians need to take on a much different posture than many of them have, to move away from hyperpartisanship toward a more detached and prophetic role, and to take more seriously than many do the idea of dual citizenship—the belief that we are citizens of the City of Man but that our deepest loyalties are to the City of God. This ought to create some safe distance from the principalities and powers of this world.
A proper political theology would prevent Christians, Christian institutions, and churches from becoming pawns in political power games. That may sound so obvious as to be banal, but evangelical Christians in particular—not all, but many—have been as susceptible to manipulation as any group involved in politics that I’ve seen.
“The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state,” Martin Luther King Jr. said. “It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool.”33 Today, far too many evangelical Christians—however admirable they may otherwise be and despite the many good works they may do—are tools of the Republican Party and the Trump presidency.
2. Articulate a Coherent Vision
Evangelicals need to develop a theory of political and social engagement that is far more comprehensive and careful, mature and informed, textured and sophisticated. Too often our political aspirations have been defined by the moment or by others and so seem to change and shift according to who is pulling the strings.
In this respect, evangelicals and Protestants have much to learn from Catholicism, which has laid out and built on principles of social teaching over many centuries, often through encyclicals like Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum (Of the new things), which addressed the condition of the working class, and John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus (The hundredth year), which expounded on issues of economic and social justice at the time of the collapse of Soviet Communism and reflected on the political, economic, and moral components of a free society.
The cornerstones of Catholic social thought are human dignity; subsidiarity, which holds that nothing should be done by larger and more complex institutions that can be done as well by smaller and simpler ones; and solidarity, meaning the social obligations we have to one another, with a special concern for the poor and most vulnerable members of the human community. (Many of us who are non-Catholic but have had great respect for the teachings of the Catholic Church have been shaken to our core by the sickening and shameful sexual abuse scandals, by the Church’s efforts at cover-ups, and by the failure to prevent further abuse.)
As Michael Gerson puts it when describing Catholic social thought, “The doctrinal whole that requires a broad, consistent view of justice, which—when it is faithfully applied—cuts across the categories and clichés of American politics. Of course, American Catholics routinely ignore Catholic social thought. But at least they have it. Evangelicals lack a similar tradition of their own to disregard.”34
Unless and until some similar approach begins to take hold—and is transmitted from theologians and church leaders to the wider community of believers—the random, ad hoc nature of evangelical political involvement will continue and probably worsen. There is no authoritative theological construct in place to check, channel, and refine raw partisanship cloaked in Christian garb.
3. Model a Deep Attitudinal Shift, Biased Toward Unity
A third thing that needs to happen is in some senses the most fundamental, which is a deep attitudinal shift among many politically active Christians—to move away from a spirit of anger toward understanding, from revenge toward reconciliation, from grievance toward gratitude, and from fear toward trust. Fear is prevalent, but for Christians, love casts out fear.
Ken Stern is a fair-minded liberal who spent a year with people on the right to better understand their worldview. (His book, Republican Like Me: How I Left the Liberal Bubble and Learned to Love the Right, documents his journey.) Stern visited evangelicals in a variety of settings and was impressed by the generosity he encountered. A pastor friend and I met with him for lunch. Here are the questions Stern posed to us: Why, since so many evangelicals live lives devoted to helping others, does that not translate into a political agenda that reflects that fact? How is it that the “culture war” issues succeed in becoming the public face of Christianity, while the many acts of kindness and charity, and the spirit informing those things, are kept under a bushel, largely out of public view? Why consistently show your worst side rather than your most winsome one?
We wondered the same thing.
It’s been said that C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien never lost their wonder and enchantment with the world. It’s an unfortunate commentary on the state of things that the same can be said of so few public, and certainly so few politically active, evangelicals.
In his book What’s So Amazing About Grace? Philip Yancey tells of how prior to writing his book he began asking a question of strangers when striking up a conversation. “When I say the words ‘evangelical Christian’ what comes to mind?” Yancey wrote that he mostly heard political descriptions—and not once did he hear a description redolent of grace.
Yancey adds this:
Grace comes free of charge to people who do not deserve it and I am one of those people. I think back to who I was—resentful, wound tight with anger, a single hardened link in a long chain of ungrace learned from family and church. Now I am trying in my own small way to pipe the tune of grace. I do so because I know, more surely than I know anything, that any pang of healing or forgiveness or goodness I have ever felt comes solely from the grace of God. I yearn for the church to become a nourishing culture of that grace.35
It’s true enough that a co
mmon error within Christianity is to use grace as a way to elide wrongdoing, and that those who are willing to stand up for biblical morality can easily (and unfairly) be caricatured as ungracious. But Yancey’s insights are worth considering in the context of Christians and their role in and impact on public matters. He’s a faithful follower of Jesus who sees things from a perspective that is not only biblically grounded but desperately needed because it’s in such short supply.
4. Become Loving Neighbors
Which leads me to the fourth thing Christians can do to strengthen our public witness and the state of our politics: internalize and act on the lessons from an ancient parable. The one I have in mind is Jesus’s parable of the Good Samaritan, and it speaks to this moment in a powerful way.
The context of the story is that Jesus, who declared that we should love our neighbor, is asked, “Who is our neighbor?” The parable—found in the tenth chapter of the Gospel of Luke—is Jesus’s response.
In the story, a Samaritan comes across a Jew who has been beaten, robbed, and left dying on the side of a dangerous road from Jerusalem to Jericho. After a priest and Levite both ignore the wounded man, the Samaritan rescues him and, at his own expense, nurses him back to health. “Go and do likewise,” Jesus says.
What makes this parable so extraordinary and relevant to us is that there was deep enmity between Samaritans and Jews at the time; they despised each other. They had practically no dealings with each other. It was the first-century version of political, ethnic, and religious tribalism, with the Samaritans in particular marginalized, oppressed, and viewed with suspicion.
