The fear and rage that drove evangelical support for Donald Trump has not abated since his return to office, journalist and author Christine Emba observed during a webinar on Christianity and democracy hosted by the Brookings Institution.
On the contrary, the “church of fear” that convinced white evangelicals Trump alone could protect them and the nation from the onslaught of secular liberalism simply shifted focus now that Trump is back in the White House, said Emba, a staff writer with The Atlantic, an op-ed columnist with the Washington Post and author of Rethinking Sex: A Provocation.
Christine Emba
“Now we have a president in office who is defending the state against secular liberals and tearing all of those things down,” she said. “He’s at the top, at the helm. They should feel safe. But instead of saying, ‘OK, that’s done, we’ve defeated them,’ there’s just a new enemy. Now we have to defend American Christianity from immigrants who are coming into America to ruin the faith. There’s always some next fear that seems to be pulled forth to reanimate this group. The church of fear is still in effect.”
Emba moderated the Feb. 4 webinar featuring Jonathan Rauch, a senior fellow at Brookings and author of Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy. The book is aimed at secular Americans who see Christianity as the source of national division and at Christians who blame secularism for the decline of faith in the U.S.
“They say it’s the secular liberals who have basically driven Christianity from the public square, that liberalism is a destructive juggernaut, like an acid that destroys faith, family tradition, patriotism,” he said. “No wonder Christianity is in the bad way it is.”
Rauch conceded some religious Americans feel alienated in their own society, an attitude exacerbated by constant reports of closing churches and rising ranks of the “nones.” He observed: “I’m willing to say there is a nugget of truth in this. It is hard to be a Christian or member of any other faith in a consumeristic and individualistic and very rowdy culture like we have today.”
But conservative evangelicals must also “look in the mirror” to understand why people are abandoning Christianity in huge numbers, he added. Doing so would make it clear their transformation into culture warriors and their total embrace of the MAGA movement are major turnoffs that obscure the transcendent message of the gospel. “For white evangelicals, there is no gap between their politics and Republican Party politics and part of this is because of a transactional arrangement that they have made with Republicans and specifically Donald Trump.”
Jonathan Rauch
Rauch cited pre-election comments made by the president that demonstrate just how power driven evangelicals have become. One of them came during a campaign speech to the National Religious Broadcasters: “If I get in there, you’re going to be using that power at a level that you’ve never used it before.”
Donald Trump Jr. previously proclaimed the uselessness of Jesus’ teachings in protecting Christians from the secular world: “We’ve turned the other cheek, and I understand, sort of, the biblical reference — I understand the mentality — but it’s gotten us nothing, OK?” Trump, Jr. said. “It’s gotten us nothing while we’ve ceded ground in every major institution in our country.”
A 2016 PRRI/Brookings survey illustrates the influence Trump has over conservative Christians, Rauch explained. In 2011, the study found only 30% of white evangelicals believed politicians guilty of immoral acts could responsibly fulfill their public duties, compared to 72% who held that view in 2016.
“White evangelical Protestants were, of all sectors of Christians, the ones who cared the most about character in public office,” he said. “In 2016, they flipped. They became the Christians who cared the least about character in politics. Um, what happened in 2016?”
Part of what happened was an abandonment of evangelicalism’s counter-cultural witness for one fully immersed in the “angry, fear-based, politicized, partisan part of the surrounding culture. And that’s what we’ve seen happen to white evangelical Protestantism. It becomes divisive and makes it all the harder to govern a fractious country.”
The irony is the nation’s founders depended on Christianity as a key player in supporting a pluralistic democracy, Rauch said. “They believed, rightly, that the values the church taught, and the values the republic depended upon, overlapped. And when those things pull apart, when they part ways and grow out of alignment, it becomes a lot harder to govern this country.”
Jesus’ consistent warning against succumbing to fear is a biblical value that aligns well with the principle of sharing political power within democracy, he said. “It’s not the end of the world if the other side wins. You don’t try to steal the election. You don’t delegitimize them. You wait for your turn in office and maybe you learn and improve.”
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