By David French
Tuesday, June 06, 2017
There’s an emerging narrative in progressive and
mainstream-media circles that white Evangelicals — and only white Evangelicals
— have uniquely betrayed their faith and their fellow believers by voting en
masse for Donald Trump. Evangelical votes cast for Trump represent nothing more
or less than the grave moral error of choosing politics over God. Evangelical
votes cast for Hillary Clinton? Well, they were merely an attempt to embrace
social justice.
Consider these recent articles, indicting white
Evangelicals for the act of supporting Trump over Clinton. Here’s a piece from Religion Dispatches that describes
Evangelicals of color as “betrayed at the polls”:
So while white evangelicals
captured the election, they may have lost their fellow believers, the very
people who could keep their churches, denominations and institutions from the
attrition that has many Christian institutions and leaders genuinely worried
for the future. These days, evangelicals of color are talking next steps. Their
endeavors run the gamut, but the ones gaining steam include leaving
evangelicalism altogether, reframing the evangelical world as a mission field
as opposed to a place for spiritual nourishment, creating ethnic safe spaces or
staying firmly planted in evangelical community to combat racism from within.
It’s too early to tell which will prevail, but the urgency and organization
happening within communities of color point to a fundamental shift in the
evangelical landscape.
In the Financial
Times, Gary Silverman purports to describe how the “Bible Belt lost God and
found Trump,” while in reality hiding behind an “expert” to make the old
allegation that Republican Evangelicals are obsessed with sexual issues:
Church is less compelling. Marriage
is less important. Reading from a severely abridged Bible, their political
concerns have narrowed down to abortion and issues revolving around
homosexuality. Their faith, he says, has been put in a president who embodies
an unholy trinity of materialism, hedonism, and narcissism. Trump’s victory, in
this sense, is less an expression of the old-time religion than evidence of a
move away from it.
Lost in these pieces is any acknowledgment of the
terrible choice Evangelicals of all colors faced in 2016. The election wasn’t a
battle between light and darkness; it
was a battle between darkness and
darkness. Only the blindest progressive could fail to recognize Clinton’s own
“unholy trinity” of narcissism, corruption, and deception.
While there were some Evangelical leaders who tried
vainly to cast Trump in virtuous terms, the more intelligent (and ultimately
persuasive) defense was simply that he was the “lesser of two evils,” a person
who — despite his many flaws — at least wasn’t actively opposed to the
Evangelical community. Clinton made zero effort to court white Evangelicals. In
fact, she took the opposite approach, actively courting progressive communities
most hostile to religious freedom, including communities that seek to
financially cripple faith-based educational institutions, force people of faith
to pay for abortions, and eliminate their rights of conscience.
In such circumstances, it’s fair for Trump-supporting
Evangelicals to look at their Hillary-supporting counterparts and ask, “Who
betrayed whom?”
Furthermore, it is simply laughable to claim that it is Evangelicals who are obsessed with
abortion and LGBT issues. After all, with each new turn of the sexual
revolution, leftist radicals declare that wholesale adaptation to the new
sexual ethics must be a precondition for full inclusion and participation in
government, education, media, and increasingly the economy itself.
It’s also a bit ironic to accuse Evangelicals of
departing from true biblical Christianity when the evidence for their departure
— the supposed obsession with abortion and homosexuality — touches specifically
on issues clearly and unequivocally addressed in both the Old and New
Testaments. It’s certainly true that the Bible speaks to many, many other
issues, too, but if there is a case that supporting Clinton was more
biblically-sound than supporting Trump, these writers don’t make it.
What’s more, it’s just not true that Evangelicals are
obsessed with sexual morality above all else. With their dollars and their
time, they are far, far more supportive of the poor than they are of
conservative politics. In 2015, Rob Schwarzwalder and Pat Fagan published
an analysis showing the staggering disparity between spending on foreign
charity and spending on politics. For example, American churches provided $13
billion in overseas relief and development funds. Evangelical organizations
that “provide food, medical care, education, adoption services, orphan care,
post-prison assistance, substance abuse help and other critical services at
home and abroad” spent “more than $9.2 billion in relief assistance. By
contrast, Scwarzwalder and Fagan estimated the combined budget for federal,
state, and local Evangelical culture-war organizations at a mere $270 million.
None of this, however, addresses the thorny issue of
race. There, too, though, the Left can’t claim the moral high ground. Indeed,
there is not now on the national scene any distinct political movement that’s offering meaningful solutions to
America’s lingering and persistent racial problems. If Evangelicals moved left
on racial issues, they wouldn’t be joining a movement that’s “healing”
anything; they’d just find themselves allied with increasingly intolerant
post-Christian racial radicals.
Black Lives Matter increasingly dominates leftist racial
politics, and progressive Evangelicals have often wrapped both their arms
around that movement, which is committed to “disrupting the
western-prescribed nuclear family” and celebrates convicted
cop-killers and murderous dictators. Evangelicals white and black should
reject its destructive rage.
Christians are learning to navigate an increasingly
post-Christian culture and an even more post-Christian politics. They’re far
from blameless in either development, but this much is true: White Evangelicals
have no need to apologize for choosing Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton — especially since the church-going among them
formed the backbone of Trump’s primary-season opposition.
The true political and moral test of any movement comes
not in how it handles a surprise election contest but in how it fights the
battles to come. Will progressive Evangelicals attempt to moderate an
increasingly secular and radical Democratic party? Will conservative
Evangelicals attempt to hold a Trump administration and a post-Trump GOP to any reasonable standard of conduct, or
will they remain the cheapest date in politics simply because the GOP pledges
not to actively attack religious freedom or actively celebrate Planned
Parenthood? We don’t yet know those answers, and we may not know them for some
time. Meanwhile, progressives should try a dose of the humility they urge on
the Right. Their political champions also have feet of clay.
No comments:
Post a Comment