This is no slight problem. American Evangelicals (and the label is complex) have, in their links to Trump and their views, ignored so much of Christ’s teaching that the meaning of Christian faith seems lost. They espouse guns, self-promotion, riches, sexual promiscuity, aggression, false prophecy, racism, injustice and hatred and suck up to the powerful. How has this happened? Perhaps it has a long prehistory.
Perhaps, too, it is mainly about money. A lot of America Christianity has become big business over a period – organisations with their own brands, celebrities, media systems, commercial links and peculiar truth claims. Because they have become rich, they continually need to press their own enterprises to keep the growth coming. This has been going on for decades and the big prize is some kind of influence with the President and in politics. Billy Graham and others handled that with some awareness, but gradually the lure of “power”, media and financial clout has won over a period of many decades. The leaders are running a show and they induce followings which are fairly uncritical.
The link with the Republican Party goes back a long time, perhaps to the McCarthyite era when Right Wing Republicans persuaded a lot of evangelicals to attack Godless Communism in the USSR to get the Cold War underway. They needed to vilify FDR’s Christian Democratic tradition – “We will expel the moneychangers from the Temple.” Which threatened their wealth. During the fifties the pattern set in. Evangelicals supported Eisenhower, a principled Protestant, and Nixon, Tricky Dicky, who linked with Billy Graham. Graham described Nixon (probably with regret later) as “a man of destiny to lead the nation.” So, the Republicans were Protestant, the Democrats Catholic (through Irish and Italian immigrants), and older migrant groups British, German, Dutch and Scandinavian lined up with the Republicans. The position was also racial. Evangelical blacks, like Paul Robeson, were “Communist” and became part of the opposition. So, in this period Christians accepted these cultural divisions and moved into their own tribes, heightened by the vast US geographical spread. It was Christianity divided.
The bid to stop Catholic Kennedy with Tricky Dicky failed in 1960, but during this period Christian ministries and churches, soon to be megachurches, and Christian Colleges, often very good, grew as part of the ground roots Christian suburban flourishing at the time. The context was always American nationalism, shared in churches, chapels and communities. America was great, was leading the world, and of course American capitalism was right for the world, and the Christian critique of power and money in the Bible and the teachings of Jesus retreated into oblivion. I remember meeting the thoughtful son of a dad running a Christian radio show at this time, who understood and hated what his Dad was doing from his own Christian perspective. So, Republican, Capitalist Evangelicalism became normal. US Churches were conceived on a capitalist model. They partly competed for members and a congregation and the ones that put on the best show, often from very good motives grew the most. But there are problems with Church as performance, audience and events. That is not the Gospel. The Colleges were the same, good, competing, but often living within their own culture. Meanwhile, the United States was defending the world against Communism, and was beyond question.
The Kennedy brothers were assassinated. Martin Luther King raised a range of unaddressed issues of racialism in the American churches, but he too went. Grass roots American Evangelicalism was now quite fully shaped by radio and television networks linked with churches and personalities, like Oral Roberts, Jimmy Swaggart, Hal Lindsey, Garner Ted Armstrong, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and others. Music was part of the mix – Jim Reeves, Elvis, Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash and a host of church music groups good and bad. It has its simplicities. Christianity was “You must be born again”, as of course it is, but in this case without all the mind-changing teaching that Jesus also insisted on. Christian Colleges flourished as an important part of the US educational system, producing world class scholars and also in some cases uncritical ones living in the American dream. At Calvin College in 1980 there was some tension between the De Vos/Amway (short for the American Way of Life) major rich donor and the more radical, thoughtful Christian academic staff. In the 80s and 90s everywhere many courses were becoming how-to, technique, courses in business studies, technology, media, weapons and management, and the slower business of thinking was short-changed. Evangelical, and other, thinking became unhitched from principles and worldviews into instant opinion and process news.
Too often the simple won, especially in the media. Television is constructed around wall to wall advertising and advertising gets you to buy the product without study or thought. In fact, as we shall see, Trump is merely a rather successful bad advertisement. So, Christianity had to be simple, and here the great simplicity was formed. Christian political engagement was about abortion. Abortion does deserve to be treated differently by the liberal elite. It glosses the widespread using of women by men, the failure of caring for the next generation, the disrespect of all that sex involves and the trashing of love and the life of the forming child. It downplays the mother-to-not-be’s mental health. But it sits alongside capitalist exploitation, near slave labour, destructive wars, tens of millions of refugees, global warming, nuclear weapons, obesity, addiction, mass poverty, militarism, dictators in the world’s and America’s problems in politics. Christian politics is not a one-legged centipede. But it became the single Evangelical sledgehammer for many, the only, instant test of tribal loyalty.
By now we are through the fall of Nixon, the failure of a conservative/ evangelical/ fundamentalist/ capitalist coalition in the dirty tricks of Watergate. When Carter, the obvious honest evangelical appeared on the scene, would the tribal evangelical/ fundamentalist groups, led by their gurus, change allegiance? No, because they had vested in Republicanism – money, alliances, public support, access to politicians – and were building into the machine. So, Carter was merely tolerated. However, he was hated by the militarists as he worked for peace and disarmament, and they were determined to get him out. Reagan who had been an actor, TV spokesman for an arms company, General Electric, and had one folksy political talk about communism, became the evangelicals’ man. Though he possibly did not know one end of a church from another through infrequent attendance, he became their Republican Man, not Carter.
By now something was clearly wrong. Reagan’s team in the 1980 election had sent a delegation to Paris to negotiate with the Iranians to prevent the Iranian hostages from being released before the election. Yes, they deliberately worked at the continued detention of these American citizens to help Carter’s defeat. The deal was in exchange for military spares and equipment which marked the beginning of the “Iran-Contra deal” where money was sent to Nicaragua rebels to fight the regime there. The Iranians released the hostages as the very time the victorious Reagan was being inaugurated as President, presumably to imply to the world that their detention was linked to Reagan’s election. The counter story went round that when Reagan actually put his hand on the Bible, the hostages were released. If you believe that, you will believe anything. Already delusional stories could carry the day.
Reagan threw a few sweets to the evangelical leaders, but nothing substantial. He was the front guy, with a team running his show, and they did not have much evangelical interest. In 1988 Pat Robertson thought of running, got backing from 3 million followers and loads of money and then in the primaries failed, because he was an awful politician.. Bush Senior and then Bush Junior linked up with the evangelicals and got their rewards in votes. There were now major enterprises that were evangelical, right-wing, capitalist and had built up media and other empires. Prophets were emerging as gurus of how christianity and world events should be seen, usually separated from centuries of good Christian scholarship and thoughtful educated Christians who were sane, but without any media following. Lots of people stopped reading books, except those which were cultish and could be finished in an afternoon.. Since Reagan the capitalist elite had had a green light to expand and dominate American public affairs. Evangelical Christians could not really pretend that their faith had any influence with the political machine, or the great US fight between Democrats and Republicans to control Washington. They were really marginalised and used as voting fodder. Mammon was running the show its way. This involved rubbishing climate change so that big business was not upset. It involved wars in the Middle east and strong support of the US military and the US position as superpower. It involved ignoring healthcare, poverty and wealth and all the other ills of American society. It involved having guns as a constitutional right, even though there were now no slaves. The Evangelical agenda accepted laissez-faire Republican capitalism as its own and defined the left as enemy and abortion still as the only touchstone of Christian politics. It ignored Obama, an obvious principled, educated Christian President, partly because he was black and Democrat and descended into hearsay. The leaders, like Franklin Graham, became a parody of their forebears, and the way was opened for Trump.
He was rich enough to run, was able to dominate the Republican machine, and threw a few bribes to the Christian leaders, now desperate to be listened to. Abortion and the Supreme Court was enough. He obviously despised God and worshipped Mammon, had no knowledge of Christianity, denied the faith in most of his personal life and attitudes, and did not do repentance, but still the Evangelicals went after him, as the pagan Cyrus who might serve God’s purposes one way of another. He was given some 80% support and even as his promises, failure to tell the truth and murky principles became exposed, was still supported in this recent election, although quite a few withdrew. He also made promises to the unemployed and poor in the Midwest, which this election shows they do not enough think he has kept. It was false advertising, promises thrown out to the poor sods who might have some hopes and evangelicals went along with it. Of course, there are vast numbers of thoughtful, principled, faithful Christians all over America, and legitimate differences of view and Christian understanding, and this is merely describing a tendency, but it is one which can be measured in millions of votes.
This really is a long Christian calamity – Evangelicals supporting an establishment which has backed militarism and war, world capitalism, ignoring the poor and followed a nationalistic agenda. It is perhaps almost as big a problem as the Catholic Church faced at the beginning of the Reformation. Christ’s warnings about false prophets and empty leaders who put on a show, but are inwardly full of dead men’s bones, applies to Trump. He should never have been near public office. The Republican Agenda has no integral link to Christianity. More than this Democrats have their own establishment; this is no either-or, except at Presidential elections. It is not even enough to have Christian, or Evangelical leaders and politicians, but there is the long hard slog of seeking and thirsting after what is just and wise, what is for the poor and weak, what heals the nations and allows ordinary good living. Present ideologies and the criticisms are often trading vacuities. The United States has often seen itself, and been seen around the world, as leading Christianity, but this is failure which needs repentance, deep re-evaluation and the flattening of the power and wealth and control. There are many American and other Christians who have already done the thinking, but are ignored by the media circus. Good change can be relatively free from pain and calamity, but the time is ticking away and a very large American Christian subculture needs to start sifting its thoughts and attitudes with an unprecentented level of self-criticism. There is a slow train coming round the bend.