Donald Trump is joined by a coalition of 100 African-American evangelical pastors and religious leaders, following a private meeting at Trump Tower. (AP Photo/Dennis Van Tine/STAR MAX)
A moderate Baptist ethicist says evangelicals who support Donald Trump for president represent a failure of conservative Christianity.
David Gushee, a distinguished university professor at Mercer University, attributed the Trump phenomenon to a failure to “inoculate” American Christians against ideas and attitudes contrary to their religious values in a Religion News Service blog Feb. 21.
“I think my political vision has been decisively shaped by spending many years studying the rise of Fascism in Germany and Italy and right-wing politics in Europe during the ’20s and ’30s, and the way in which politicians were able to appeal to the baser, more racist, nativist, nationalist, xenophobic kinds of tendencies, fears and passions of people, most of whom were also self-identified Christians in those countries,” Gushee said of the column with Welton Gaddy on State of Belief Radio Feb. 27.
Gushee said he has used the language “inoculated Christians” in previous writings about political realities like Germany in 1929 or 1932.
“Some of them were inoculated in the sense that they would listen to somebody like a Hitler and they would say: ‘No way. There’s no way support for this person is compatible with the Christian faith that I hold dear,’” he explained. “But many, many other Christians, they didn’t get the shot. They didn’t get the inoculation, or it didn’t take. So the elements that were attractive at that moment in the passions of the era kind of overrode the Christian convictions that should have helped them stand firm.”
“It’s the contrast between a Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the one hand and like the German Christian movement on the other in pre-Nazi and Nazi Germany,” Gushee said.
David Gushee
Gushee said he is not making “a direct comparison” between the current election and pre-war Germany, but simply trying to argue there should be certain kinds of politicians and policies that are “just ruled out by what it means to be a follower of Jesus.”
“That’s what worries me about, at least the worst moments, of Donald Trump’s campaign,” Gushee said. “Things he has said, ways he has presented himself, the comments about Muslims, about immigrants, with the tone of his rallies, things like saying from a platform I’d like to punch him in the face, you know, about a person who was protesting — that kind of demeanor, the violent spirit, I just don’t see how a Christian’s intuitive sense wouldn’t just recoil and say: ‘No. No matter what else might be attractive about this person, this crosses the line.’”
Gushee said the anger and anxiety many voters feel today remind him of political tensions that in the past aided the rise of Latin American dictators.
“It’s more like the appeal of a strong man in Latin America, where democracy is crumbling or weak, and so you elect a strong man who is going to be tough and restore order,” he said. “Rule of law or the nicer virtues are set aside for the toughness and authoritarian kind rule that we need right now. That’s the neighborhood that I think we find ourselves in, and that’s why I wrote the piece that I did.”