I am an election nerd. I love studying polls and following the ins and outs of campaign trail news.
Being just such an election nerd has put me in the vicinity of hope over the last few months. That’s because the polls have offered much good news to those of us who yearn very deeply for a repudiation of Donald Trump and the version of the Republican Party that exists in his thrall.
I join millions and millions of Americans — and tens of millions more around the world who watch our politics as closely as we do — in wanting to wake up next Wednesday morning with the news that the American people have voted in a Democratic-led House and Senate. The former always was possible in terms of normal U.S. political rhythms, the latter only seemed possible gradually over the last few months.
David Gushee
I will leave the election geekery to the side for now.
What I really want to talk about here is hope. I am interested in asking what hope looks like on the other side of evangelicalism.
I would say there were/are three flawed versions of hope in the evangelical Christianity that I encountered during my journey.
The first flawed version is End Times Hope: We can have hope because Jesus is coming back very soon.
This version of Christianity was somewhat peripheral to my own church experience but very much not peripheral in evangelical and fundamentalist Christian circles.
The idea is that recent events were giving evidence that the Bible’s promises and scenarios about the return of Jesus and the end of regular human history are being fulfilled in our time. Among the key events wired into these end times scenarios is the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948. Other events such as the Cold War could always be added.
Among the books I was handed as a brand-new baby Christian in the late 1970s was Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth. Its apocalyptic scenario that the end was very near proved irresistibly attractive to many Christians. A few decades later, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins hit the motherlode with their 12-volume Left Behind series.
“I now see that these books combined all kinds of toxicities.”
I now see that these books combined all kinds of toxicities — terrible biblical exegesis, fatalist readings of history, and lots of coded anti-liberal, anti-foreigner, parochial American Christian nationalism. What was the worst from my perspective as an ethicist was the tendency toward moral passivity — it was all out of our hands — and even the celebration of terrible or dangerous events as part of God’s plan.
Let me give you an example from the early 2000s. I was in a Sunday school class at a Southern Baptist church, and the U.S. was tangling with Iran, with threats of war in the air. The Sunday school teacher blithely stood up that day and said, with reference to that Iran situation, “It is growing gloriously dark.”
Glorious? Gloriously dark?! Yes!! Because a U.S. war with Iran might spark Middle East Armageddon involving a massive nuclear exchange that kills millions which is all part of God’s End Times Plan.
As I recall, I never went back to that class.
The second flawed version is Great Commissionism: With enough global evangelism, we could usher in the End Times.
This was a quite popular belief in that local Baptist church where my evangelical journey started. The mandate was that all Christians were to share the gospel here and around the world, as Jesus said in Matthew 28:16-20.
The hope flowed from the idea that called, trained, motivated and funded missionaries were indeed spreading all around the world telling people about Jesus, with us Southern Baptists doing a lot of the heavy lifting. Meanwhile, we humble local Christians, as I have noted here before, were supposed to be doing the same in our own social circles, sharing our faith at every opportunity.
“The hope flowed from the idea that called, trained, motivated and funded missionaries were indeed spreading all around the world telling people about Jesus.”
Some Great Commission/evangelistic folks read the Bible as containing the promise that as soon as Christian missionaries had managed to reach and proclaim the gospel to literally every nation, it would trigger the return of Jesus and the glorious end of history. Matthew 24:14 is the key verse for this view.
I think the appeal of this version of hope is that it seems like something we all can contribute to. It’s also not about dire, warlike end-times bloodshed but instead about the good news of Jesus Christ reaching the whole world.
Of course, the vast majority of people in these countries would not “accept Jesus into their hearts” and would thus spend eternity apart from God, and that was sad. But if we could just get to every nation, even the dangerous ones, the closed ones (cue the heroism and courage motifs), then we could play a part in ending this sad human drama called history and bringing Jesus back.
The third flawed version is Social Gospel Hope: This is found only in progressive evangelical circles that now hardly exist in U.S. evangelicalism. I have contributed to this one with my own writing.
This is the idea that the gospel is good news for the whole person and whole society. It involves God’s desire that all humans flourish, that the world live in peace, justice and reconciliation, that our human and ecological ills will be healed at last.
This, some of us argued, was what Jesus was about when he came preaching the kingdom of God, which was the amazing good news that God’s longstanding unfulfilled promises of a holistically redeemed world were beginning to be fulfilled in Jesus’ own ministry. Our task as Christians in every era is to live in such a way that the kingdom is evident in us and through us.
This vision is at least arguably grounded both in the Old Testament and New Testament, it has an optimistic reading of at least where history could go, it encourages energetic Christian moral activism, and it supports progressive social changes in the direction of justice, peace and flourishing.
In recent years, while I have not repudiated my appreciation for the Social Gospel movement nor the centrality of the kingdom in Jesus’ preaching, my hope is a more chastened one, avoiding the occasional outbursts of jaunty optimism in which I had read historical events as giving evidence of victories for God’s reign.
“It helps to remember that Jesus began by preaching the kingdom of God and ended with the cry of dereliction on the Cross.”
Just in biblical terms, it helps to remember that Jesus began by preaching the kingdom of God and ended with the cry of dereliction on the Cross. Yes, we confess that the Resurrection followed, but holistic human and planetary redemption has not.
This is the world in which we live. A world where we hope for God’s kingdom, witness and sometimes experience all too much Cross, and hope yet again for both penultimate and ultimate salvation.
I have not given up on the kingdom of God or the possibility of meaningful moral and political progress in history. I have given up on the expectation that such progress will be steady, cumulative or permanent.
I also have become much more cautious about identifying particular political victories with the advance of God’s kingdom. We can work for justice, celebrate its victories and mourn its defeats without imagining that we can read God’s ultimate purposes directly from the headlines.
And so, even if the fond hopes of many of us for a Blue Wave actually do materialize on Tuesday night, my counsel is to take a breath of gratitude and then resume the work of national moral and political repair.
Keep hope alive; but keep hope chastened.
Not much of a slogan, I know.
David P. Gushee serves as Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, chair in Christian social ethics at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and senior research fellow at International Baptist Theological Study Centre. He is past president of the American Academy of Religion and Society of Christian Ethics. He also is author of 30 books, including Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust; Kingdom Ethics; Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies; Changing Our Mind; and The Moral Teachings of Jesus.