The 2024 presidential election is a head-scratcher.
Donald Trump is intentionally violating every canon of American political etiquette. His interminable campaign speeches are aimed at no one outside the MAGA base. Outside of a few washed-up celebrities like Kid Rock and Hulk Hogan, the former president has failed to rally any celebrities, ex-presidents or Republican luminaries to his campaign.
Former advisers like John Kelly have criticized his authoritarian, even fascist, proclivities. His tendency to bounce erratically from one subject to another has pundits wondering about his cognitive health. He shows up late — by two or three hours — to campaign events. He is routinely mocked by late night comics like Stephen Colbert.
Meanwhile, Kamala Harris is running one of the most disciplined presidential campaigns in American history. She enjoys the enthusiastic support of Democratic stalwarts like Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack and Michelle Obama, and a vast host of celebrity surrogates like Beyonce, Willy Nelson and Bruce Springsteen. Pop stars from every conceivable field of entertainment are signaling their support for the Harris campaign, and enormous crowds are turning up to her slickly managed rallies. Although mainstream journalists strike a nonpartisan pose, their admiration for Harris and their disdain for Trump is thinly veiled.
And yet, as election day fast approaches, the presidential race is too close to call. Hence the scratching of heads.
“How could a convicted felon and an adjudicated sex offender who attempted to subvert a free and fair election stand a 50-50 chance of returning to the White House?”
How could a convicted felon and an adjudicated sex offender who attempted to subvert a free and fair election stand a 50-50 chance of returning to the White House?
Leading explanations
By now, every public intellectual in America has offered some kind of explanation. Trump voters are clinging desperately to their white caste privilege. Never-Trump Christians believe evangelical churches have been infected by an alien strain of toxic politics.
Trump’s success with white voters also has been attributed to high levels of inflation, immigration anxiety, a growing urban-rural divide, low levels of education, the rise of independent rightwing media, and the influence of online misinformation and disinformation campaigns.
The big-tent politics of the Democratic Party and the Christian nationalism that has captured Republican identity flow from competing religious visions that are both radical and recent.
Radically inclusive liberalism
At Democratic rallies, the faithful are reminded that discrimination on the basis of religion, gender, race, national origin, age or sexual orientation has no place in American politics. The rights and privileges of citizenship apply to all without distinction. We must ensure, therefore, that no one is left out or left behind.
This is often regarded as a secular message. All the great world religions are given equal prominence, and the welcome mat is out for atheists, agnostics and the religiously indifferent.
The religious groups best represented within the Democratic Party aren’t noted for their spiritual fervor. In a recent PRRI study, 42% of white evangelicals reported religion was the most important thing in their lives. Only 9% of white Catholics, 6% of white Mainline Protestants, and 13% of Jewish Americans said the same.
A 2024 Pew study found 28% of Democratic voters report more “nones” vote for the Democratic Party than white Mainline Protestants and white Catholics combined.
The secularizing of the American academy
In 1960, as I argued in my last column, American public life was dominated by white Mainline Protestantism. The religious makeup of Congress that year was 75% Protestant, with only a handful of white evangelicals in the mix. But as David A. Hollings makes clear in his groundbreaking Christianity’s American Fate: How Religion Became More Conservative and Society More Secular, a secularizing process long has been under way within the upper echelons of American society.
The trend was most apparent in elite universities where, by the 1930s, Christian assumptions no longer were being protected from critical scrutiny. Jewish scholars, many of them highly acclaimed secular scholars fleeing Nazi-dominated Europe, were being welcomed into Ivy League institutions. With Catholic representation also on the rise, and growing numbers of scientists, philosophers and sociologists identifying as atheist and agnostic, truth claims no longer could be defended by appeals to religious tradition or the divine will. The new epistemology insisted empirical facts, logic and reason.
From doctrine to ethics
Liberal Christians, who had been adapting to the rigors of a rapidly secularizing academy since the late 19th century, quickly shifted their focus from doctrine to social ethics. In the process, the supernatural elements of Christian faith were replaced with a passion for justice, fairness, equality, human rights and the things that make for peace.
“This new morality never would have emerged from hard science or secular philosophy; it was a vestige of biblical religion.”
This new morality never would have emerged from hard science or secular philosophy; it was a vestige of biblical religion.
This shift from doctrine to social ethics was keenly felt on the mission field. Hollings notes the leadership of the various denominational mission boards bristled with Ivy League graduates. These men and women were passionate about justice, fairness and equity. They opposed American and European imperialism. They believed indigenous churches should be under indigenous control. Conversionist evangelistic strategies were jettisoned in favor of respectful dialogue and the flowering of mutual understanding.
Prior to World War II, most American missionaries anticipated the universal embrace of the Christian gospel; but in the second half of the 20th century, many ecumenical Protestants had come to regard all religions as legitimate paths to spiritual truth.
Cosmopolitan ecumenical liberalism
In Christianity’s American Fate, Hollings refers to this approach to missions as “cosmopolitan ecumenical liberalism.”
“Cosmopolitan” in the sense that leading Protestant missionaries were well-traveled and comfortable with cultural diversity; and “ecumenical” because they dreamed of uniting Christendom’s warring factions into a united community of faith.
When cosmopolitan ecumenist missionaries, and the children they had raised on the mission field, returned to America, their educational attainments, linguistic abilities and broad knowledge of foreign affairs made them attractive to elite universities, the American government (particularly the State Department), and the pulpits of leading Protestant congregations. Hollings notes that the higher echelons of the interdenominational Federal Council of Churches (National Council after 1950) were saturated with former missionaries.
Romancing the Civil Rights Movement
Historian Daniel K. Williams argues provocatively that many educated white Protestants were converted to justice-oriented Christianity by their involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.
“Nearly all of white academia had been baptized in this same religious revival,” Williams writes, “and so had most white Democrats. And when I looked into the matter more closely, I found that this religious conversion experience explained the secularization and institutional decline of white Mainline Protestantism.”
Hollings makes a form of the same argument in Christianity’s American Fate. The “revival” Williams describes was largely confined to the leadership ranks of the Protestant Mainline. As we move down the educational ladder from seminary professors to denominational officials to pastors of large urban churches to pastors of small town and rural churches, the fires of civil rights revival dimmed considerably.
“Pastors and denominational leaders who tried to spread their new religion to the folks in the pews encountered stiff resistance.”
Pastors and denominational leaders who tried to spread their new religion to the folks in the pews encountered stiff resistance.
The Civil Rights Movement inspired cosmopolitan ecumenicals because it shifted the religious emphasis from doctrine to justice, from the supernatural realm to the world of hard objective fact. In addition, the heroism of people like Martin Luther King Jr., James Lawson, Fannie Lou Hamer and Diane Nash fired the moral imaginations of ecumenical Protestants. Black civil rights leaders were putting their lives at risk for a noble purpose.
The tragic practicality of this faith contrasted impressively with the pious, bull-headed, evil of their white “Christian” oppressors. The heroes of the movement were adding a third testament to the Bible in real time. After decades of stuffy neo-orthodoxy and “Christian realism,” the Social Gospel flamed back to life.
Liberation theologies shake the theological foundations
The radically inclusive logic that drew ecumenical Protestants to the Civil Rights Movement gradually transferred to women’s issues, the justice struggle in Latin America, opposition to the war in Vietnam and, in the fulness of time, the gay rights movement. In the last decades of the 20th century, most cutting-edge theology was being written by Black, Latin American, feminist and gay scholars.
For the white male ecumenical scholars who once dominated American theological and ethical discourse, this was a challenging time. A new generation of scholars criticized the universalist, equal-rights agenda as a clever mechanism for enforcing white, male, straight American perspectives. No sooner had Black theologian James Cone settled into his office at Union Seminary than he unleashed a scathing assault on “whiteness,” shorthand for the hegemonic and privileged lens through which white scholars viewed the world. Scholars writing from LGBTQ, feminists, womanist, Latinx and Global South perspectives soon followed suit.
World Christianity takes an unexpected turn
As a new century dawned, the consequences of abandoning a conversionist missions model became agonizingly clear. Throughout Asia, Africa and Latin America, conservative evangelical Christianity was taking hold in indigenous churches. The influence of Pentecostal preaching, and adaptations of American “prosperity” theology, were proving to be particularly popular.
The churches of the Global South had no interest in a radically inclusive gospel that made room for everyone. Nor were they interested in a religion shorn of miracle, strict moral standards, and doctrinal rigor. In America, and throughout the developing world, old-school evangelistic revival was on the march.
Radical Apocalyptic Evangelicalism
In his book American Apocalypse: A History of Modern Evangelicalism, Matthew Avery Sutton argues that a passionate interest in the Second Coming of Christ, the pre-tribulation rapture of the true church, speculation concerning the identity of a literal antichrist, and the impending battle of Armageddon shaped 20th-century American evangelicalism. Sutton’s book chronicles the rise of “radical apocalyptic evangelicalism.”
Not since Ernest Sandeen published The Roots of Fundamentalism in 1970 has this thesis been argued so forcefully.
Daniel G. Hummel’s The Rise and Fall of Dispensationalism: How the Evangelical Battle Over the End Times Shaped a Nation covers much the same territory, but with a particular focus on dispensationalism, the dominant school within American evangelical apocalyptic theology. Hummel admits that the “scholastic dispensationalism” associated with Dallas Theological Seminary faced a strong challenge from the buttoned-down “covenantal” theology championed by Westminster Seminary.
It was in the crucible of this hot theological battle between new and old ideas, Hummel believes, that 21st-century evangelicalism was forged.
Sutton rejects the popular notion that the post-war “neo-evangelicalism” associated with Billy Graham, Christianity Today and the National Association of Evangelicals implied a strong repudiation of apocalyptic fundamentalism. Billy Graham may have had issues with some features of dispensational theology, Sutton admits, but the evangelist’s constant references to the imminent return of Christ, and his insistence on the impending judgment of America served to perpetuate and enhance apocalyptic themes within evangelical life.
Pop eschatology
Although there always were plenty of high-minded American evangelicals pushing back against the excesses of end-times theology, popular American evangelicalism was stamped by a binary distinction between the “born-again” and the “lost” and a fervent expectation that God was about to bring down the curtain on human history. Just as the precise categories of scholastic dispensationalism began to crumble in the 1970s, Hummel points out, new forms of “pop dispensationalism” like Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth and Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series swept all before them.
“Pop eschatology was free-form, market-driven and infinitely adaptable.”
Pop eschatology was free-form, market-driven and infinitely adaptable. Hollywood, pop music and paperback thrillers and dystopian dramas exploited apocalyptic tropes like the rise of the antichrist, demonic possession and various forms of civilization-ending cataclysm.
Popular evangelicalism assumed an error-free, internally consistent Bible. If it was in the Bible, it was literally true. This confidence allowed evangelicals to embrace the miraculous and the supernatural features of traditional Christianity. “Bible-believing” Christians were united by a commitment to traditional gender roles and sexual mores and a distaste for civil rights rhetoric and increasing levels of racial diversity.
Dwight L. Moody and Billy Sunday, the most famous evangelists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, both were boosters for capitalism who cultivated wealthy businessmen and distanced themselves from organized labor. Billy Graham followed a similar path and, as Darren Dochuk recently argued, conservative oil tycoons fueled much of the evangelical expansion in the second half of the 20th century.
Out of control
Considerable tension existed between an academic discourse rooted in biblical authority and the naturalistic assumptions of the secular university. Because of this, most evangelical scholars found themselves exiled from the elite institutions of American higher education. Although this exile was largely self-imposed, it was deeply resented nonetheless.
Radical apocalyptic evangelicalism is a form of pop eschatology that isn’t being taught by a single evangelical seminary. But it thrives in hundreds of personality-driven megachurches that are large enough to provide in-house theological education for prospective pastors. Pop eschatology blends elements of Pentecostalism, premillennial and postmillennial doctrine, apocalyptic fight songs, conservative political ideology and revivalism. It is intentionally designed to plant butts in the seats by keeping the customers optimally satisfied.
Evangelical scholarship is horrified by this new phenomenon but doesn’t want to dismiss it out of hand. Reformed scholars defeated their dispensational opponents in the evangelical academy but can’t control the pop eschatology that drives the MAGA revolution. Some reformed evangelicals are so frightened by this new religious Frankenstein monster that they are voting for a Democrat, many for the first time. But most have decided to go with the flow. They have their own beef with radically inclusive democratic liberalism and, forced into a binary decision, they favor Trump.
Mirror-image moral visions
Few American Protestant congregations fit neatly into either the universal ethics of ecumenical Protestantism or the demon-angel dualism of an emerging pop evangelicalism. But radical apocalyptic evangelicalism has reinvented the Republican Party, just as surely as radically inclusive liberalism has reconfigured the Democratic Party.
While the cosmopolitan ecumenical liberals Hollings describes were adapting to the empirical epistemology of Ivy League universities, Sutton’s radical apocalyptic evangelicals were creating their own institutions of higher learning. In this new world, the miracle-based supernaturalism of the Bible was simply assumed.
Radical apocalyptic evangelicals reinforce the lines separating “real Americans” from imposters. When radical inclusionists advocate for a justice-based transformation of society, radical apocalyptic evangelicals wax nostalgic for a time when men and women stuck to their God-ordained roles, minority groups made their peace with the status quo, and LGBTQ folk got saved or stayed in the closet.
The two visions are equal and opposite.
The rise of the evangelicals and the decline of the Mainline
Mainline Protestant churches have been declining since 1970, Hollinger argues, because most lay people resisted calls for radical change. While roughly 80% of evangelicals vote Republican, Mainline Protestants split their votes between the two major parties, and white Catholics are equally divided. PRRI studies show that Mainline pastors are far more liberal than their congregants and most Mainline laypeople don’t want to hear sermons about racial justice, gay rights, women’s rights or climate change.
In the PRRI study, 48% of evangelicals and 37% of Mainline Protestants endorsed the statement: “God intended America to be a new promised land for European Christians.” Presented with the statement, “Today, America is in danger of losing its culture and identity,” 80% of evangelicals and 64% of white mainline Protestants agreed, compared to only 12% of Mainline clergy.
Evangelical congregations flourished in the late 20th century because pastors rarely challenged parishioners to think differently about racial justice, gay rights, militarism, poverty, immigration or gender norms. Nor were evangelicals asked to alter their understanding of biblical inspiration, supernatural miracles, the mechanics of salvation or biological evolution.
“White evangelical Protestants were ill-prepared for sweeping social change.”
As a consequence, Sutton argues, white evangelical Protestants were ill-prepared for sweeping social change. Men and women who have been taught to accept religious ideas like the rapture of the true church, the rise of the antichrist and the active involvement of literal angels and demons in human affairs were especially susceptible to Q-Anon conspiracy theories. A segment of society that feared secular universities proved incapable of reconsidering white complicity in slavery, the oppression of Native Americans or the suppression of women’s rights.
The fact that more than half of American Mainline Protestants vote Republican doesn’t mean they understand, or are attracted to, radical apocalyptic evangelicalism. Forced to choose between two visions, however, they opt for the one they fear the least.
Radical inclusion finds a political home
While white ecumenical congregations were refusing to take a stand on issues like racial justice, gay rights and gender equity, the Democratic Party was making the gospel of radical inclusion its primary organizing principle. This doesn’t mean that all, or even most, Democratic voters would sign off on every aspect of their party’s inclusive platform. But the Democratic Party is a coalition of minorities.
White liberals are a distinct minority within the white electorate, and although America is rapidly becoming a majority-minority nation, Black, Hispanic, Asian, LGBTQ, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, and nonreligious Americans all constitute a modest fraction of the American electorate. The novel vision of radical inclusion makes this coalition of minorities politically viable.
Cleaving asunder what God hath joined together
In order to serve as a political philosophy, or as a guiding ethical frame within the humanities, radically inclusive democratic liberalism must be framed in secular terms. The cosmopolitan ecumenical Protestants Hollings talks about proved unable to sell this ethic to their own churches and, in the long-term, it will be difficult to build and sustain a political movement, or an academic culture, around this challenging creed.
Radically inclusive liberalism entered the world on the tongue of Jesus of Nazareth and has survived, even in truncated form, only through the worship, service and scholarship of the Christian community. It will only survive in a secular form if it is nourished by a faithful remnant of Christian congregations.
How radical apocalyptic evangelicalism has shaped the GOP
Radical apocalyptic politics thrives on resentment. Critiques of white racism, homophobia, and misogyny, and capitalism have been commonplace in the humanities departments of secular universities for decades.
“Radical apocalyptic politics thrives on resentment.”
Until recently, however, most white evangelicals were protected from this messaging by their pastors, Christian schools and universities, and the advent of conservative media. But the election of a Black president, the presidential candidacy of two women, and the legalization of same-sex marriage have made these anti-establishment arguments impossible to ignore.
White evangelicals experience the rhetoric of radically inclusive liberalism as a condemnation of traditional American values. Having been taught for generations that white Protestant America is a kind of cultural gold standard to which the rest of the world aspires, white evangelicals are told their treatment of women, nonwhite people and sexual and ethnic minorities has been, well, deplorable.
Shaken by what they perceive to be a liberal assault on American values, white evangelicals will use any weapons at their disposal. Trump wields radical apocalyptic evangelicalism as a weapon against his enemies; Trump functions as the ideal weapon for stemming a liberal assault on America. Both sides understand the advantages of this arrangement and have concluded it is worth the risk.
The political impact of religious division
Kamala Harris is the perfect avatar for radical inclusive liberalism. She is Black. She is Asian. She is a Baptist with a Jewish husband. Both her parents were immigrants active in the Civil Rights Movement. She spent the years between 12 and 17 living in Montreal, Canada. If elected, she will become the first American woman, the first Black woman and the first Asian woman to serve as president.
Although Harris is a center-left institutionalist who rarely rhapsodizes about the virtues of diversity or condemns America’s historic sins, she is the walking embodiment of radically inclusive democratic liberalism. The medium is the message.
We shouldn’t be surprised that Harris is struggling to win more than 50% of the electorate. Selling a radically inclusive vision to white America always has been a monumental challenge.
Which explains why Donald Trump has a shot at the nation’s highest office even though he has been rejected by every corner of the American establishment. People shaped by radical apocalyptic evangelicalism see Trump as their avatar. When he is indicted, convicted, deplored, diminished or mocked, they love him all the more.
Trump doesn’t understand radical apocalyptic evangelicalism. It mystifies him. But he knows white evangelical voters are bristling with resentment, and that was enough. Trump teeters on the verge of victory because he’s selling resentment. And in white-dominated America, that’s always been an easy sell.
Alan Bean serves as executive director of Friends of Justice. He is a member of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas.
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