I heard one of those televangelists preaching at me online the other day, declaring with equal sincerity that Jesus loves me and that Donald Trump is the savior we’ve all been waiting for.
I’m having a hard time reconciling these messages.
Mark Wingfield
If Jesus really loves me, why is he allowing a narcissistic con-artist president to throw the world into chaos on a whim? If Jesus loves me, why are millions of people who claim to follow this Jesus rejoicing as food is snatched from hungry children, people lose their jobs for no good reason and political enemies are prosecuted with no regard for the actual law?
If Jesus loves me, why is Donald Trump ruining everything in sight?
For many of those like me raised in conservative evangelicalism, the priority of reaching the world for Christ — seeking to evangelize — was paramount. We were told nothing else mattered more.
“If evangelicals really wanted to evangelize, they wouldn’t do such a good job of antagonizing everyone else.”
That’s no longer true, however. If evangelicals really wanted to evangelize, they wouldn’t do such a good job of antagonizing everyone else. The movement that once claimed to proclaim the “good news” of the gospel now is obsessed with the bad news that anyone who gets in their way is a mortal enemy to be annihilated.
They’ve gone from “believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved” to “agree with our self-serving political agenda or roast in hell.”
For example, Franklin Graham has ceded his authority to preach the gospel as an evangelist because he has prostituted himself as a political operative. And the number of preachers who are like him are legion. They no longer can proclaim the good news of Jesus because they are obsessed with the bad news of empire.
We cannot hear your words about Jesus because they are obscured by your devotion to an antichrist figure.
What continues to perplex the rest of us is how this came to be. If Jesus really does love us, as we’ve been taught, how could a loving God allow the church to fall into such apostacy?
Turns out this is a very American question to ask. For all our lives, we have enjoyed a kind of freedom of religion most of the world has not known and does not know still. The majority of people alive on earth today are not allowed to freely practice the religion of their choice.
Which makes what the American church has squandered even more precious. The quest for dominance has sacrificed the celebration of religious freedom.
Sadly, this is evidence for the reality of free will. We cannot imagine a loving God perpetuating the kind of hatred embodied in the MAGA movement. To connect this movement that denies the overarching narrative of the Gospels even with predestination makes a mockery of who God claims to be.
“We cannot hear your words about Jesus because they are obscured by your devotion to an antichrist figure.”
And yet, as we see repeated throughout biblical history, this very God has granted us the power to determine our own actions and beliefs. Even when they defame the name of God.
The Bible teaches God gave us free will because God loves us and wants to receive love in return. And the only way to authentically respond to and reciprocate that love is by possessing the freedom not to love God. So, God bet all of humanity on free will.
Today, many of the people who claim to love God and Jesus the most have traded their reciprocal loving relationship with God for a transactional political power. As a result, they show no evidence of loving God and especially of loving what and who God loves.
Here’s where we must turn to one of the most misquoted and misunderstood chapters in all the Bible, Romans 8. Despite the horror of the present moment, we can be certain God endures this horror with us. That’s a lesson most privileged American Christians never have had to live into the ways Christians the world over have.
If the Bible is to be believed, God will remain with us and walk alongside us to redeem even the worst that happens. But God won’t stop it from happening because God honors free will. Just as the Children of Israel repeatedly worshiped idols and a golden calf, so the children of evangelicalism have chosen to worship the idol of Donald Trump.
An old Gospel song echoes through our land again today:
Oh, freedom, Oh, freedom
Oh freedom over me
And before I’d be a slave
I’d be buried in my grave
And go home to my Lord and be free
Oh, freedom
Let us pray the church will once against embrace freedom and free will just as fully as the Creator does — on earth as it is in heaven.
Mark Wingfield serves as executive director and publisher of Baptist News Global. He is the author of Honestly: Telling the Truth About the Bible and Ourselves and Why Churches Need to Talk About Sexuality.
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