Changes in Evangelical Christianity and its involvement in politics

Context

I have a deep concern for the future of American democracy, the rule of law, civil liberties and social respect for facts and truth. I see a non-trivial possibility of the rise of an authoritarian American state with politics akin to fascism. The 2022 and 2024 elections should shed light on what direction American is likely to go in. Democracy does fall to  recently passed Republican Party vote suppression and election rigging laws in at least 17 states. If that happens, authoritarianism could rise. In that scenario, the American experiment would have ended, probably for a very long time. 

Two forces seem to be the key drivers of the rise of radical right authoritarianism in the modern Republican Party. One is special interest money working in the name of laissez-faire capitalism and unregulated markets. Those politics usually operate at the expense of the public interest, including the environment. That political force has been around at least since the mid to late 1800s. Lately, it has come to significantly control the GOP. 

The other is the rise of radical right evangelical fundamentalist Christian nationalism. That is a more recent source of influence in the GOP. Its modern origin arguably arose primarily with the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education that desegregated public schools and the fall of Jim Crow laws in the 1960s after federal voting and civil rights laws were passed. Those events enraged many religious conservatives and they are still enraged today. They were galvanized against the precipitating events and started to involve conservative Christianity directly in politics. 

The backlash against Christian nationalism

Today, there is a backlash within the political Evangelical Christian movement. Most young people are leaving it, often at least partly because they dislike church involvement in politics. They appear to see conservative political Christianity as a perversion of Christianity and Christian teachings and morals. An Oct. 24, 2021 article in The Atlantic, The Evangelical Church is Breaking Apart, describes what is happening. If too many young people leave the religious conservative movement, its power in the GOP might wane to a point where it is no longer a major force in the party or a major threat to democracy. The Atlantic writes:

The election of the elders of an evangelical church is usually an uncontroversial, even unifying event. But this summer, at an influential megachurch in Northern Virginia, something went badly wrong. A trio of elders didn’t receive 75 percent of the vote, the threshold necessary to be installed.

“A small group of people, inside and outside this church, coordinated a divisive effort to use disinformation in order to persuade others to vote these men down as part of a broader effort to take control of this church,” David Platt, a 43-year-old minister at McLean Bible Church and a best-selling author, charged in a July 4 sermon.

Platt said church members had been misled, having been told, among other things, that the three individuals nominated to be elders would advocate selling the church building to Muslims, who would convert it into a mosque. In a second vote on July 18, all three nominees cleared the threshold. But that hardly resolved the conflict. Members of the church filed a lawsuit, claiming that the conduct of the election violated the church’s constitution.

Platt, who is theologically conservative, had been accused in the months before the vote by a small but zealous group within his church of “wokeness” and being “left of center,” of pushing a “social justice” agenda and promoting critical race theory, and of attempting to “purge conservative members.” A Facebook page and a right-wing website have targeted Platt and his leadership. For his part, Platt, speaking to his congregation, described an email that was circulated claiming, “MBC is no longer McLean Bible Church, that it’s now Melanin Bible Church.”

What happened at McLean Bible Church is happening all over the evangelical world. Influential figures such as the theologian Russell Moore and the Bible teacher Beth Moore felt compelled to leave the Southern Baptist Convention; both were targeted by right-wing elements within the SBC.

“The divisions and conflicts we found are intense, easily more intense than I have seen in my 25 years of studying the topic,” he [a religious sociologist researcher] told me. What this adds up to, he said, is “an emerging day of reckoning within churches.”

The root of the discord lies in the fact that many Christians have embraced the worst aspects of our culture and our politics. When the Christian faith is politicized, churches become repositories not of grace but of grievances, places where tribal identities are reinforced, where fears are nurtured, and where aggression and nastiness are sacralized. The result is not only wounding the nation; it’s having a devastating impact on the Christian faith.

The first step was the cultivation of the idea within the religious right that certain political positions were deeply Christian, according to [historian George] Marsden. Still, such claims were not at all unprecedented in American history. Through the 2000s, even though the religious right drew its energy from the culture wars—as it had for decades—it abided by some civil restraints. Then came Donald Trump.

“When Trump was able to add open hatred and resentments to the political-religious stance of ‘true believers,’ it crossed a line,” Marsden said. “Tribal instincts seem to have become overwhelming.” The dominance of political religion over professed religion is seen in how, for many, the loyalty to Trump became a blind allegiance. The result is that many Christian followers of Trump “have come to see a gospel of hatreds, resentments, vilifications, put-downs, and insults as expressions of their Christianity, for which they too should be willing to fight.”

“What we’re seeing is massive discipleship failure caused by massive catechesis failure,” James Ernest, the vice president and editor in chief at Eerdmans, a publisher of religious books, told me. Ernest was one of several figures I spoke with who pointed to catechism, the process of instructing and informing people through teaching, as the source of the problem. “The evangelical Church in the U.S. over the last five decades has failed to form its adherents into disciples. So there is a great hollowness. All that was needed to cause the implosion that we have seen was a sufficiently provocative stimulus. And that stimulus came.”

But when people’s values are shaped by the media they consume, rather than by their religious leaders and communities, that has consequences. “What all those media want is engagement, and engagement is most reliably driven by anger and hatred,” Jacobs argued. “They make bank when we hate each other. And so that hatred migrates into the Church, which doesn’t have the resources to resist it.”

Scott Dudley, the senior pastor at Bellevue Presbyterian Church in Bellevue, Washington, refers to this as “our idolatry of politics.” He’s heard of many congregants leaving their church because it didn’t match their politics, he told me, but has never once heard of someone changing their politics because it didn’t match their church’s teaching.

The article goes on to discuss interviews with pastors who see the problem. One historian points out that Trump did not appear out of no where. She argues that Trump represents the fulfillment, not the betrayal, of many of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values. American evangelicals worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism. She defines Christian nationalism as “the belief that America is God’s chosen nation and must be defended as such.” That attitude which is a good predictor of attitudes toward things like immigration, race, guns and non-Christians. 

One expert asserts that the former president normalized discourse shocking rhetoric. He asserts that the “pugilism of the Trump era, in which anything short of cruelty is seen as weakness.” The problem facing the evangelical Church, then, is not just that it has failed to inculcate adherents with its values—it’s that when it has succeeded in doing so, those values have not always been biblical.

Some have resigned and some left the ministry entirely. Many Evangelical churches have become a hostile environment. Insufficiently incorrect pastors are slandered and demeaned by disrespectful and angry congregants. In some cases, organized groups of congregants demand firing of insufficiently correctly political pastors. These politicized Evangelicals tend to be more driven by political agendas than spiritual matters.

USA Today writes:

Division is causing people to abandon Christian churches. Last year, Barna found that the share of practicing Christians has dropped nearly in half since 2000. Gallup recently reported that U.S. church membership fell below 50% for the first time in eight decades.

But how many are leaving political Christian nationalism and how fast are they going? FiveThirtyEight writes in an article entitled The nones are growing, but it’s hard to know exactly how many there are:

By nearly all measures, the nones now represent at least a fifth of all American adults, rivaling Catholics and evangelical Christians as the nation’s largest cohort in terms of religious faith (or lack thereof). They are the fastest-growing religious/nonreligious cohort — the nones went from 12 percent of American adults in 1998 to 16 percent in 2008, to 24 percent in 2018, according to data from the General Social Survey. Gallup puts this group at about 21 percent. Pew Research Center says 26 percent. The Cooperative Election Study suggests their ranks are even larger, at about 32 percent.  

Part of that decline is about young people — elderly members of these denominations [mainline Protestant churches and Catholicism] who die are not being replaced by a younger cohort. But older people are now increasingly shifting from Christian to unaffiliated too — particularly older people who lean left politically. As a result, mainline Christianity is not only declining but becoming more conservative. Between 2008 and 2018, three of the largest mainline traditions (the United Methodists, the Episcopalians and the United Church of Christ) all became more Republican.

It’s fair to say that both the mainline and evangelical traditions in the United States are losing members. But that seems to be happening a bit asymmetrically. Evangelicalism is undoubtedly down from its peak in the early 1990s. But it’s reached a bit of a stasis in recent years, being buoyed by some inflows from the mainline tradition and enough younger families to offset some of the losses through death.

Questions: 

1. Is it reasonable to believe that conservative, political Christian nationalist fundamentalism is going to decrease such that the threat to democracy and the rule of law recedes before some form of radical right authoritarianism with staying power is installed by the GOP? Or, is it too early to predict?

2. Does the political Evangelical rhetoric The Atlantic article quoted sound or look a lot or exactly like standard post-Trump Republican Party rhetoric, talking points and behaviors?