This Christmas season, I have been reflecting on the words of my favorite author, CS Lewis, who once said: “I have now learned that while those who speak of our miseries generally do harm, those who remain silent do even worse. »
Talking about American evangelicalism was never my intention. Growing up in the right-wing subculture of Christianity – the son of a megachurch pastor, a follower of Jesus, someone who identified as “evangelical” since childhood – I was a reliable advocate for the faith. I rejected caricatures of people like my parents. I have been offended by efforts to mock and marginalize evangelicals. I tried to see the best in the Church, even when the Church was at its worst.
It took the loss of my father and the traumatic events surrounding his funeral – as I write in the prologue to my new book, The kingdom, the power and the gloryWhich one is excerpted in our latest issue…to reconsider the implications of this silence.
The corruption of American Christianity is nothing new: Modern-day Pharisees, from Jerry Falwell Sr. to Paula White, have spent 50 years using the gospel as a weapon to win elections and dominate the country, exploiting insecurities cultural interests of their involuntary brothers for political, professional and political purposes. financial gain, while reducing the gospel of Jesus Christ to a caricature in the eyes of unbelievers. The collapse of the church’s reputation in this country – with Sunday attendance, positive perceptions of organized religion and the number of self-identified Christians at an all-time low – leaves evangelicals alienated from their secular neighbors as never before. Unbelievers may well prefer this way of proceeding. They might be tempted to shrug and move on, assuming that the collapse of evangelicalism is not their problem. They are wrong.
The current crisis does not come simply from the fact that Christ’s message has been eaten away, but also from the fact that his Church has become radicalized. State-ordered closures of sanctuaries during the COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracy-fueled objections to Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, misinformation around vaccines and educational programs — these and other flashpoints of the culture war accelerated notions of impending Armageddon within American Christianity. A community that has always felt misunderstood now feels marginalized, ostracized, even persecuted. This feeling is not relegated to the margins of evangelicalism. In fact, this fear – that Christianity is in the government’s crosshairs, that a diabolical plot to overthrow America’s Judeo-Christian heritage relies on silencing believers and subjugating the Church – now animates the religious right in a way that threatens the very foundations of our society. democracy.
“You sound like a hysterical maniac if you say the government is after us. But I believe they are,” Robert Jeffress, the Dallas pastor and longtime Trump loyalist, told me in the book. “This happened in Nazi Germany. They did not immediately put six million Jews in the crematorium… It was a slow process of marginalization, isolation, then the “final solution”. I think you see this happening in America. I believe there is evidence that the Biden administration has used the Internal Revenue Service as a weapon to go after churches. (The “evidence” Jeffress cited for making this leap – bureaucratic regulations paving the way for concentration camps – was non-existent. When pressed, he cited a single court case that was ultimately decided in favor of religious freedom.)
Mobilizing in response to this perceived threat, the forces of Christian nationalism – those who seek to tear down the wall between church and state, asserting the religious domination of the far right over the government as well as major institutions of the country – are now ascendant both within the Church and within the Republican Party. It is no coincidence that, just recently, Donald Trump began suggesting that he would ban any migrant from entering the United States unless they are Christian. Those who do not share “our religion,” the godless former president said, will not be welcome here if he is elected again. Many people poised for high-ranking positions in a second Trump administration see today’s societal conflicts not in terms of Republicans versus Democrats or conservatives versus progressives, but rather good versus evil.
Perhaps the only thing more dangerous than authoritarianism is authoritarianism steeped in religious justification. It doesn’t matter whether the potential tyrant is personally pious; Vladimir Putin’s lack of theology did not prevent him from joining forces with the Russian Orthodox Church to present the bloody invasion of Ukraine as a God-ordained conquest of a satanic stronghold. To believe that this could not happen here – a mass conflict rooted in identity conviction and motivated by religious zeal – is to ignore both 20th century precedent and the growing rhetoric of holy war within the Evangelical Church.
I am a follower of Jesus Christ. I believe that God took on flesh in order to model service and self-sacrifice; I believe He commanded us to love our neighbor, turn the other cheek to those who wish us harm, show grace to strangers, and let our light shine so that they may glorify our Father celestial. Not all so-called Christians bother to adhere to these biblical precepts, but millions of American believers still do. It is their responsibility to oppose this extremism within the Church.
But the responsibility does not lie solely with them. Whatever your personal belief system, the reality is that we have no viable path forward as a pluralistic society…none– without confronting the deterioration of the evangelical movement and without repairing relations between Christians and the broader culture. This Christmas, I pray that it will be so.
