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I I guess Ned Flanders goes to strip clubs now.
Until this week, I hadn’t thought about the cartoonish born-again Christian neighbor in the animated series The simpsons in a long time. New York Times The religion journalist Ruth Graham referred to him and his “joyful prudery” as examples-along with Billy Graham and George W. Bush- of what were once the country’s best-known evangelical Christian figures. Indeed, a 2001 Christianity today the cover story dubbed the character “Saint Flanders.” Evangelical Christians knew that Ned’s moral behavior was intended to ridicule us and that his “traditional family values” were out of step with an American culture outside of the sexual revolution.
But Ned wasn’t Elmer Gantry. He actually longed for the kind of personal devotion to prayer, Bible reading, moral chastity, and love of neighbor that evangelicals were coming to embrace. supposed want, even if he did it in a bland, ultra-suburban, middle-class North American way. As Graham points out, if it emerged today, Flanders would face harsh mockery for its moral scruples – but more likely from its white evangelical coreligionists than from its beer-drinking secular neighbors.
As Graham puts it, a “raunchy philosophy of boobs and booze has worked its way into the conservative ruling class, accelerated by the rise of Donald J. Trump, the decline of the influence of religious institutions traditional and a changing media landscape, increasingly dominated by the most cowardly. norms of online culture. (This article you’re reading now represents part of that shift, as I spent over 15 minutes thinking about how to cite Graham’s article without using the word tits.)
Graham’s analysis is important to American Christians precisely because the change it describes is not something “out there” in the culture, but rather is driven specifically by the same white evangelical subculture that formerly insisted on personal character:virtueto use a now distant word that the American founders knew well: “it matters”.
Yes, part of the popularization of the right is due to the secularization of the Barstool Sports/Joe Rogan base, in which Kid Rock is more of an avatar than Lee Greenwood or Michael W. Smith. But what is far more alarming is that the hardening and debasement is occurring among politicized people who claim the Christians. Congressman jokes during a prayer breakfast about denying her fiancé sex to get there was there to talk about her faith and the importance of faith and religious values to America. The congressman who tells a reporter to “f… off” is a self-proclaimed “Christian nationalist.” We saw “Let’s Go Brandon” – a euphemism for profanity that would once have resulted in church discipline – chanted in churches.
Pastor and aspiring theocrat Douglas Wilson publicly used a slur against women that not only will I not repeat here, but that almost no secular media would cite – and that’s without even referencing Wilson’s creepy and crude novel about a sex robot .
Wilson, of course, cultivates a caricature style: “Are we not evil? atmosphere not representative of most evangelical Christians. But the problem is how many other Christians react: “Well, I wouldn’t say it the way he says it, but…” Likewise, they call Donald Trump “mean tweets” attacking those who claim be sexually. attacked by him for their appearance or war heroes for being captured or disabled for their disability or valorizing those who attack the police and ransack the Capitol as “hostages”.
What’s worse is that evangelical Christians – including some I listened to – pontificate endlessly about Bill Clinton’s sexual immorality (pontifications I agreed with at the time and now follow). okay now) – ridicule those who refuse to do so as pearl-hungry moralists. exactly what they condemned Clinton’s defenders fornamely prioritizing political agreement over personal character.
Amid the Clinton scandal of the late 1990s, a group of scholars issued a “Statement Concerning Religion, Ethics, and the Crisis in the Clinton Presidency”, which stated:
We are aware that certain moral qualities are essential to the survival of our political system, including honesty, integrity, respect for the law, respect for the dignity of others, adherence to the constitutional process and desire to avoid abuse of rights. power. We reject the assumption that violations of these ethical standards should be excused as long as a leader remains faithful to a particular political agenda and the nation enjoys a strong economy.
These words now seem much more distant than a quote from Tocqueville.
Our current situation would be understandable in a world in which the words that come out of a person do not represent what is present in the heart, or in a world in which outward conduct can be separated from inner character. The problem is that such an imagined world is one in which there is no Word of God. Jesus, after all, taught us exactly the opposite, explicitly and repeatedly (Matt. 15:10-20; Luke 6:43-45).
Ironically, some of the very people who advance the myth of a “Christian America,” in which the American founders are transformed into conservative evangelicals, now adhere to the idea that orthodox Christians and deist Unitarians of the day founder would, in their entirety, agree, denounce. From THEFederalist documents In the debates over the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, virtually all of the Founding Fathers – even with all their differences on the specifics of federalism – would argue that constitutional procedures and policies alone were not enough to preserve a republic: the norms morals and expectations of some a certain level of personal character was necessary.
Do these standards prevent people of bad character from reaching high office? No way. Hypocrites and demagogues have always been with us. What every generation of Americans has recognized thus far, however, is that there is a marked difference between some leaders who fail to live up to the character expected of them and those who operate in a space where are not personal character expectations. You might hire an accountant to do your taxes, only to find out later that they are a tax evader and embezzler. This is very different from hiring an open fraudster because you have concluded that only fools obey tax laws.
Indeed, no leader of a community, association or nation is an abstract set of policies. We select leaders to make decisions on issues that have not yet happened or might not even be considered. A dentist who shouts abuse at his opponents and promises a practice based on “revenge and retribution” and the abolition of all standards of modern dentistry is not someone you should trust with a drill in the mouth. And even more so when it comes to entrusting a person with nuclear codes.
Furthermore, what conservatives in general, and Christians in particular, once knew is that what is normalized in a culture becomes an expected part of that culture. Defending a president who uses his power to have sex with his intern by saying, “Everyone lies about sex” is not just a political argument; it changes the way people think about what, when the time comes, they should expect for themselves. This is what Daniel Patrick Moynihan called “defining deviance downward.”
Louisianans defending their support of a Nazi propagandist and former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard because he is allegedly “pro-life” is not just a “lesser of two evils” political transaction. The words pro-life nazi-like words pro-life sex offender-change the meaning of anti-abortion in the minds of an entire generation.
No matter what short-term political outcomes you “win”, you find yourself in a situation where some people believe that authoritarianism and sexual assault can be offset by the right “political platform”, while d Others think that opposing abuses of power or sexual anarchy must require opposing “pro-lifers.” Either way, you lose.
What happens long term with your policies in a post-character culture matters. What happens to your country is even more important. But also consider what happens to You. “If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, a nation, or a civilization, which can last a thousand years, is more important than an individual,” CS Lewis wrote. “But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, because he is eternal and the life of a state or civilization, compared to his, is only a moment.”
The Bible not only warns us about the harmful effects of degradation of character – from immorality, to boasting, to cruelty and cruelty – on the souls of those who practice such things, but also against the disastrous effect it can have on those who “approve those who practice them” (Rom. .1:32).
Ned Flanders is not and never was the Christian ideal. Personal piety and honest morality are not enough. But we should ask the question: if The simpsons were written today and intended to make fun of evangelical Christians, would the caricature be someone disproportionately devoted to his family, to prayer, to church attendance, to kindness to his neighbors, to clumsy purity of his speech? Or would Ned Flanders be a screaming partisan, a violent insurrectionist, a woman-ogling misogynist, or an abusive pervert?
Could this change be due to the fact that the secular world has become more hostile to Christians? Maybe. Or could it be because, when the secular world looks at the public face of Christianity, it would not dream of thinking now of Ned Flanders, but only of another mocking face from the strip club?
If we are hated for trying to be like Christ, consider it simple joy. But if we are hated for our cruelty, our sexual hypocrisy, our feuding, our hatred and our vulgarity, then perhaps we should wonder what happened to our best man.
Character matters. That’s not the only thing that matters. But without character, nothing matters.
Russell Moore is the editor-in-chief of Christianity today and directs its public theology project.
