Author’s Note: This blog post is the first in a series about the intersection of faith, politics, race, class, and culture - especially as it applies to that fascinating branch of Protestantism, Southern Evangelical Christianity. My thoughts and observations here are drawn from thirty years deeply embedded in this culture - so do me a favor and don’t hit me with any “but but but Not All Christians!” type of comments. I’m aware these are nuanced issues and that faith, as much as organized religion would like it to be otherwise, is a deeply personal and often individual pursuit. Consider that point a known quantity. Also, C.S. Lewis fans, I hope you enjoy my sub-headings.
Lately three or four of my Facebook friends have shared a blog post written by David French. French, a former staff writer for the National Review and now a senior editor at The Dispatch, is as deeply conservative as those credentials would lead you to believe. He’s also an outspoken Evangelical Christian, and so I was surprised that after clicking on the blog post the first thing I read under the title (Will Somebody Please Hate My Enemies for Me) was this line:
“Donald Trump is making it even harder for Christians to defend him, and yet they still do.”
Okay, I thought. This is off to a surprisingly good start. If you’ve known me since 2016, you know I’m utterly baffled by the overwhelming (and continued) Evangelical support for Donald Trump. One thing that came out in Pew’s 2014 Religious Landscape study was that Evangelical Christians overwhelmingly think of themselves as friendly, compassionate, empathetic, forgiving, and caring - while everybody else thinks of Evangelical Christians as hypocritical, petty, argumentative, culture-war obsessed, theocracy-seeking zealots.
Friends, do we think this public relations problem has changed for the better since Donald Trump took office, given his tendency to spew (incorrect) religious language from one side of his mouth and bigotry from the other, and given the tendency of Evangelical Christians to support a man who’s border policies are intentionally designed to be as cruel and inhumane as possible to some of the most vulnerable people in the world? I think you know what my guess would be. Pew has another religious landscape study due out in 2021, so maybe we can circle back around at that point and see how it shakes out.
Anyway, that little blurb about Trump and Christians caught my eye, and so I continued reading the blog post. Let’s take a look at what French had to say, and then I’ll walk you through why I both agree with him AND believe he somewhat missed the point.
A Beef Observed
The piece in question is structured around the recent National Prayer Breakfast, in which a freshly acquitted Trump used a religious occasion to, among other things, mock a man who used religion to make a moral decision.
French, it seems, was justifiably appalled by the childishness of the most powerful man on the planet. And in his outrage, French gets a few things right. For instance, he calls out hypocritical behavior on the part of Trump’s die-hard Evangelical supporters.
“The proper way for Christians to engage in politics is a rich subject—one worthy of book-length treatment—but there are some rather simple foundational principles that apply before the questions get complex. For example, all but a tiny few believers would agree that a Christian should not violate the Ten Commandments or any other clear, biblical command while pursuing or exercising political power.
But of course we see such behavior all the time from hardcore Christian Trump supporters. They’ll echo Trump’s lies. They’ll defend Trump’s lies. They’ll adopt many of his same rhetorical tactics, including engaging in mocking and insulting behavior as a matter of course.”
This is true. Evangelical Christians, particularly those of a “family-values” bent, possess a frankly astounding ability to cherry pick Bible verses out of context, interpret them literally (except for when they don’t), and then ignore those very commands. French also hits us with the following, which I think is pretty on point.
“Here’s the end result—millions of Christians have not just decided to hire a hater to defend them from haters and to hire a liar to defend them from liars, they actively ignore, rationalize, minimize, or deny Trump’s sins. They do this in part because they can’t bring themselves to face the truth about Trump and in part because they know it is difficult to build and sustain a political movement if you’re constantly (or even frequently) criticizing the misconduct of its leader. To criticize Trump even a quarter of the time he does something wrong would be to unleash a constant drumbeat of criticism against the man they hope to re-elect.”
French is right about all this. Okay, we could get into exactly why one of the most powerful and protected groups of people in the country (white middle-class protestants) have such a misplaced persecution complex (In fact, we should get into that. A topic for another time). For now, lets see what French has to say about a hypothetical woman that is totally not his real-life mother-in-law.
“Let’s talk for a moment about a far more common Christian Trump supporter. And I’m going to pull real-life examples from countless conversations, including with many close friends. Imagine a kind, sweet Christian woman—a person so nice in person that you’d hardly think it’s real. But she loves Trump, and she loves Trump because she’s sick and tired. She’s sick and tired of the elite media deriding her faith as bigoted. She’s sick and tired of a political party that rejects the humanity of unborn children. She’s appalled at the way she believes the media have gone out of their way to destroy good men. I mean, they treated Mitt Romney as if he was some sort of woman-hating, callous monster. Mitt. Romney.
Donald Trump says “Enough!” Sure, he’s rude, and she wishes he wouldn’t tweet quite like he does. But the bottom line is that he fights. He punches back. And that’s what we need.
She doesn’t necessarily like Trump’s lying, but the Democrats lie too, and if you read what she writes on social media, and you hear what she says to her friends, it’s full of condemnation against Adam Schiff, the Steele dossier, and the other laundry list of Resistance sins.
She doesn’t like Trump’s personal insults, but her political conversations are full of shock and anger at the opposition’s disrespect for a president she appreciates. That’s where she invests her emotion. That’s where she focuses her activism. Have you seen what The Squad says about Trump? The misdeeds freshman members of Congress loom far larger in her mind that the misconduct of the world’s most powerful man.”
Speaking as a member of the media (albeit one not focused on politics) I make a point to only deride faith as bigoted when that faith is in fact bigoted. Despite what you might think, a lot of us in the media are interested in telling the truth.
Anyway, lets pause for a moment and examine French’s attempt to explain why his Hypothetical Woman spends so much time sharing racist Breitbart links and misleading Prager University* videos on her Facebook feed.
*Hey fun fact - Dennis Prager thinks he should be able to say the n-word whenever he wants.
Mere Christianlamities
French is attempting to humanize the Evangelical Die-hard Trump Supporter here. He’s doing this because the Evangelical Die-Hard Trump Supporter is the person he’s speaking to, and when he essentially says (later in the article) “Hey, guys, stop being such hypocrites, or at least don’t be so loud about it,” he doesn’t want to have already lost his audience. He’s also doing his part to fix the self-inflected PR problem we talked about at the top of my post.
I can respect these goals, even as I vehemently disagree with the character he presents as a springboard for his ideas. The person he describes has the best interests of her fellow man at heart (even if she is, um, a little deluded about exactly who has lied to her more in the last ten years). He gives the impression that if only the mean-ol-media would leave his sweet, well-meaning, Hypothetical Woman alone, she wouldn’t vote for horrible human beings like Trump, and she wouldn’t traffic in casual racism or bigotry on a daily basis.
That, um, isn’t how militant, right-wing, politically active, Trump-supporting Christians are operating anymore. It might be true that they started out that way in the Reagan era. I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. But thirty years of mainlining casually misogynistic racists like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh have poisoned that well. This is no longer about morals driven by a compassionate religion (if it ever was - again, we will give them the benefit of the doubt here).
No. This is about tribalism driven by fear and ignorance.
Let me give you an example. French touches on the abortion debate. He says that lots of Christians voted for Trump when they otherwise wouldn’t have because of abortion (true ). Here I thought French would go the way of conservative Evangelical commentators everywhere and absolve his readers of their guilt for this decision. But he surprised me - kinda.
French makes the point (in a round-about way) that Trump has caused more moral damage to the country (through his inhumane policies towards out-of-womb children, for one thing) than he’s averted by packing the courts with anti-abortion judges. In other words, French alludes that the devils bargain the religious right struck with Trump hasn’t played out in their favor. Abortion rates were already dropping. Check out this graph from French’s article.
Most science-type-people who study these sorts of thing point to the Affordable Care Act as the driving force behind the steep drop since 2010. In other words, if you provide women with the ability to manage their reproductive health, they will overwhelmingly choose to do so in a way that doesn’t involve aborting a fetus. Imagine what this graph might look like under a true Medicare-for-All type situation - in which poor women faced with an unplanned pregnancy wouldn’t have to worry about medical debt spiraling their lives even further out of control.
You’d think this would be a win-win for everyone, particularly French’s Hypothetical Woman who’s just so darn concerned about babies that she will vote for a piece of protozoal pond-slime like Trump. It removes her theoretical moral obligation to vote for Trump in order to save babies!
It ought to also appeal to any ideologically-pure small-government conservative. What’s better from a conservative standpoint - a law telling private citizens what they can and can’t do with their own bodies (anti-abortion laws), or a law telling business and corporations that they have a moral and legal responsibility to give employees control over their own reproductive health (the ACA)?
Well, I think we know the answer in principal. But surely you wouldn’t be shocked if you found out that French’s Hypothetical Woman was totally on board with Hobby Lobby challenging the ACA so they didn’t have to give birth-control coverage to their employees. And you wouldn’t be shocked if you learned that the people who own Hobby Lobby are not only hard-core Evangelical right-wing Christians, but true whackadoos, and smugglers to boot.
My point is that if French’s Hypothetical Woman was a die-hard Trump supporter solely because she just cares about babies, she’d be actively supporting any-and-all measures that quantifiably reduce abortion - up to and including single-payer healthcare. But she isn’t. She’s a die-hard Trump supporter because her political activism is driven far more by tribalism, fear, ignorance, propaganda, and poor internet-literacy skills than it is by a set of ethics derived from Evangelical Christianity. It's certainly not based on much of anything Jesus said.*
*This point assumes that the Bible does indeed have a workable set of ethics that allows a sufficiently well-intentioned person to live a moral life based solely on the Christian Bible. I think this is an arguable point, and indeed, I’ll be tackling this idea in a later post.
This tribalism and propaganda is why French’s Hypothetical Woman is so often in favor of theocratic laws that would horrify her if they were the same exact laws, but from a Muslim government. And it’s the reason she so often votes against her best interest.
This kind of well-intentioned-but-misplaced, Sean Hannity-twisted morality is the best-case scenario for a religiously active Evangelical Christian who is, at this point in time, still somehow fully on-board with Trump. In the worse case scenario, French’s sweet, nice, Evangelical Christian example is a die-hard Trump supporter because all her life she’s been using authoritarian-leaning religiosity to cloak her shallowly-hidden bigotry and xenophobia, and she knew exactly what she was getting when she cast that vote in 2016. It’s worth asking oneself who, exactly, she’s being sweet and nice to. And what they look like - or what language they speak - or who they want to have sex with.
Surely French knows this - he comes across as a smart, well-rounded person with some interesting life experience. But he lets his readers off the hook here. He constructs a false scenario that allows die-hard Evangelical Trump supporters to continue their mouth-foaming support of Trump for contrived ethical reasons. Although he insinuates that anti-abortion culture wars are not helpful to either 1) lowering abortion rates or 2) attracting more Christians to the fold, he doesn’t really suggest doing anything about it. He certainly stops just short of telling his readers not to vote for Trump, instead imploring them to maybe be less loud and obvious in their hypocrisy, and to trust in God to do earthly justice.
This bugs me, because there’s a Certain Type of Christian who will use the “trust in God” sentiment as an excuse to disengage from the civic process entirely - either through write-in or third-party candidates or skipping the ballot-box altogether. As we know, Trump won the presidency by 80,000 votes in 3 states, and he lost the popular vote by 3 million people (despite his repeated lies on the subject). We’ll talk about this Certain Type of Christian, and why this matters, next time. For now, it’s enough to know that David French got 3/4 of the way towards saying something really meaningful to his audience of Evangelical Conservatives - holding them accountable to the way their current actions don’t really match up to their stated beliefs. But he chickened out at the last minute, leaning on words like “love” and “justice” instead of “use your power as a voter to enact the most straightforward of the Bible’s instructions for your behavior.” Love and justice are powerful words. But Evangelicals have unfortunately spent the last fifty years or so warping the definition of these words within their community. And so now, we are faced with this.
-A-
Next Time: Are politically inactive Evangelicals more dangerous to vulnerable communities than culture-war Evangelicals? My theory is a resoundingly luke-warm maybe..