This post is made up of the first draft of chapter 2 of a book I'm working on called "End This Wicked Marriage." The tentative chapter title is--as seen above--"Why She Was Receptive." The previous post "How He Caught Her Eye: The Celebrity Key" was chapter 1.
Throughout the 2016 presidential election cycle—while I still had a Facebook account—any time I noted any objection to Donald Trump’s candidacy, the immediate, reflexive response I could count on from my many Trump-supporting relatives and friends was, “At least he’s not Hillary.”
Mind you, this was before the Republican National Convention. It was before Trump’s triumphant primary sweep through “the Bible Belt.” At that point, Republican voters still had more than a dozen GOP candidates to choose from. But by then many of my longtime friends—all of them longtime Republicans—had already rejected all the other Republican candidates, labeling them RINOS (Republican In Name Only). Never mind that Donald Trump had only recently converted to the Republican Party and that many of his views were out of step with long-held Republican principles. What mattered most to this new breed of quasi-Republicans was not conservative orthodoxy. Rather, it was the candidates’ level of disdain for their opponent. The other candidates were not willing to go to Trump’s extreme levels in denigrating Democrats in general and Hillary Clinton in particular.
Decorum, however, was never a Trump virtue—nor has it been a hot commodity for the new Republicans. Tact and restraint are as unfamiliar to Donald Trump as desert cactus to a catfish. And that’s what endeared the bloviating pretend billionaire to so many undereducated conservatives. Nuance is for Nancys, not for tough, hard-edged Republicans. “Say it like it is, Trump. Democrats are G** da** socialists by another name, and socialism is just another name for godless communism” was a common conservative mantra throughout the 2016 election cycle and beyond.
Trumpists’ Default Setting: Everything’s Binary
Make America great again. Life was so much easier back in the glory days of TV Westerns when the white-hat-wearing good guys’ virtue was absolute, and the black-hat-wearing bad guys’ malice was unqualified. Life in such a binary world is indeed easier to understand. But it’s also illusory. As most reasonable adults know, life is complicated, primarily because people are complicated. For all of Adolf Hitler’s heinous traits and actions, it seems he did exhibit one noble virtue: he really did love Eva Braun. Despite his many virtues, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was a man of many character flaws. Human life is not as basic as binary computer code. But convincing loyal Trumpists of that truth can be as challenging as trying to convince your computer and printer to re-establish communication following a required system update.
During my most dedicated years as a conservative evangelical, among the most irksome experiences to me was being labeled a liberal, or—and this one was downright infuriating—a “social gospel liberal.” That I cared about a cause that some might characterize as liberal or progressive did not mean I was one of “them”—a liberal. I was falling into the binary trap.
And I was by no means alone in such reactionary binary reasoning. For many—perhaps most—evangelicals, life is a long series of binary choices. Far too many fundamentalists see virtually every choice as placing one in a position of siding with God or Satan. Conservative or liberal.
Contrary Conservatives
My decades within conservative evangelicalism revealed to me a culture or rigid reactionism; the simplest way for most evangelicals to assess any other movement was to observe its backers. If a cause or movement’s supporters are liberals, then the cause or movement is, by definition, satanic and must be opposed. At that point, any possible rational evaluation of the cause ends. So too, not surprisingly, does the possibility of discussing the issue with those who raised it. The whole oppose-anything-favored-by-liberals notion is a ridiculous perversion of the concept of non-contradiction. Yes, two opposites cannot be concurrently true. But that’s not what evangelical reactionism is about.
A classic—and sad—example of this evangelical reactionism can be seen in the unrest over police brutality, white privilege, and the Black Lives Matter movement. For decades, white evangelical leaders—although there are exceptions—have fostered among their congregations the binary view that two versions of Christianity exist: 1. The “real” Christianity, which focuses on personal piety—you know, the kind so many of those leaders violated when they thought no one was watching—and 2. social gospel Christianity, which is less concerned with personal piety and more concerned with nurturing a just and peaceful world.
Spurious Polarity
In the binary view common in white evangelicalism one cannot be both a social gospel Christian and a “real, born-again” Christian. “Choose ye this day whom you will serve,” was a common-but-misunderstood mandate among the misguided faithful. If liberals support government programs aimed at helping the poor, then conservatives must oppose such programs.
So when liberal activists—and plain common folks—label the struggles for equality highlighted, for example, by George Floyd’s murder by cop—and so many similar incidents—as a matter of social justice, many white evangelicals instinctively recoil. They assume they must take the opposite view; to do otherwise would be to side with Satan. Justice demands are tied to the social gospel. Bad. Must oppose.
The Bible’s Calls for Justice
Such thinking comes from corrupt interpretations of the Bible, passed down by corrupt clergy, not from the Bible itself. Here are some examples of what the Bible says about social justice:
· “Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow’s cause.” – Isaiah 1:17
· “Open your mouth, judge righteously, defend the rights of the poor and needy.” – Proverbs 31:9
· “Thus says the Lord: Do justice and righteousness, and deliver from the hand of the oppressor him who has been robbed. And do no wrong or violence to the resident alien, the fatherless, and the widow, nor shed innocent blood in this place.” – Jeremiah 22:3
· “Give justice to the weak and the fatherless; maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.” – Psalm 82:3
· “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.” – James 1:27
· “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” – Galatians 3:28
And perhaps most pertinent: “He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” – Micah 6:8
Some Are More Equal
Not surprisingly, passages such as the ones listed above get little to no attention in most white evangelical churches, which instead tend to focus on evangelizing (getting people “saved”) and on resisting temptations to sexual sins. Yeah, I know, many prominent evangelical leaders who preached against sexual sins were later brought down when their own sexual misbehaviors were discovered and publicized. Yes, I know, too, that President Trump has a long, boastful history of marital infidelities. Curiously, however, in a culture that proclaims, “the priesthood of all believers” and that also claims, “all are equal at the foot of the cross,” some are more equal than others. A president who gives his followers political power gets “a mulligan” regarding his own misconduct.
And that curious and contemptible contradiction brings us back to George Floyd, who has become the symbol for racial inequality and injustice. These days, I rarely speak with my Trump-loving friends and relatives, but I still know them well enough to be certain they continue to espouse the racist (though they’d label it conservative or traditional) assessment that “law breakers and agitators merely reap what they’ve sown.” (Never mind that George Floyd did nothing more than pass a counterfeit $20 bill, and that he likely did so unaware that it was phony.)
I am no expert in identifying counterfeit currency. For all I know, I may have passed some along over the years. Had my doing so led to a cop killing me, I suspect my friends and relatives would have demanded justice (though perhaps no longer, now that they see me as a liberal). But such a harsh outcome would not have happened to me, an old, straight, white Protestant. That it happened to George Floyd—and that Mr. Floyd represents so many others like him—cries out for equal justice. But evangelicals’ binary thinking process concludes that one is either a good, law-abiding Christian or an ungodly troublemaker.
A Desire for a Theocracy
Closely related to white evangelicals’ binary “reasoning” is their desire for a national theocracy —although most of them would never advocate the idea openly, probably because most of them have never thought through to the logical conclusions the views they hold on church and state. But, back to that binary thinking, if secular liberalism is bad—and by every evangelical measuring rod it is—then the counter for it must be the polar opposite: mandated absolute religious conservatism on a national scale. Another name for that is Theocracy.
As I indicated above, most evangelical Christians likely would not openly advocate for a literal theocracy. I’d suggest that is more because they dislike the label than because they disapprove of the concept.
But at its core, the Trumpist ideology that captured the Republican Party of 2016—and prevails even beyond the 2020 election—is driven largely by a desire for Christian nationalism, which plausibly is more closely related to theocracy than American liberalism is to the socialism Trumpists dread. According to “Make America Christian Again: Christian Nationalism and Voting for Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential Election,” an analysis by Andrew L. Whitehead, Clemson University; Samuel L. Perry, University of Oklahoma; and Joseph O. Baker, East Tennessee State University, “Trump successfully made a direct appeal to Christian nationalism.”
The authors correctly concluded,
Notably, Christian nationalism is also the only significant religious predictor of voting for Trump in the full model. The mediation models help make sense of this by showing that two standard measures of religiosity—religious practice and views of the Bible—have effects that can only be fully understood by examining their indirect effects, which occur by predicting differential levels of Christian nationalism. These findings bolster the claim that how Americans understand the role of religion in public life, something distinct from private religiosity, is an important and separate potential causal factor for explaining various attitudes and behaviors (Stewart et al. 2017). …
Although the group of Americans most closely associated with America’s perceived Christian heritage (white Protestants) might decline, Christian nationalism is not reducible to or strictly defined by this particular demographic group or its associated religious tradition(s), and can influence narratives and action beyond institutional religion. Furthermore, Christian nationalism may be particularly influential in that it can be used to unite disparate groups within a common narrative, while also implicitly excluding groups that are cultural “others.” While white Christians might be declining demographically, one of their primary cultural creations will remain a powerful political force for years, and elections, to come.
Why were white evangelical Christians—once synonymous with “The Moral Majority”—so receptive to overtures from an openly pagan novice politician? Because their binary thinking reduced the 2016 presidential election to a choice between what they saw as the irredeemable, thoroughly evil Hillary Clinton versus the opponent who was most vocal and vehement in his opposition to that “anti-God liberal.” Their binary beliefs allowed for no other options.
Not a Binary Faith
Perhaps (might we hope?) that a cry for justice will, finally, reach the white evangelical community that has—for far too long—closed its collective ears and hardened its collective heart. May empathy, finally, prompt white evangelicals to see beyond themselves. And may white evangelicals—beginning with their leaders—experience a new Great Awakening that will broaden their concerns beyond calls for personal piety—many of which are mere pretense—to include genuine concern and compassion for every human being.
Oh that white evangelicals might, en masse, come to realize that their faith is not binary; they can pursue personal piety and social justice.
Read the first draft of Chapter 3, Family Ties--and Strange Bedfellows.