Merriam-Webster Dictionary says it like this: A person of conviction means you seriously spend time considering whether what you are doing is right or wrong. People with weak convictions tend to wander into moral ambiguity and end up in a place they never thought they would be.
Perhaps we should add that people with strong convictions can do that too.
Bill Leonard
Within American religious communities, those Christians who identify as evangelicals do not hesitate to confess their faith and declare the doctrinal, ethical and spiritual convictions that define their commitment to and witness for Jesus Christ.
In Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, Notre Dame professor George Marsden delineates these classic evangelical convictions: “(1) the Reformation doctrine of the final authority of the Bible, (2) the real historical character of God’s saving work recorded in Scripture, (3) salvation to eternal life based on the redemptive work of Christ, (4) the importance of evangelism and missions, and (5) the importance of a spiritually transformed life.”
Those theological guideposts took shape with the Great Awakenings of the Colonial and Frontier eras when multitudes were converting to Christianity, forming new churches and establishing a discernable evangelical identity. That “conversionistic” tradition was extended through revival campaigns led by evangelists such as D.L. Moody, Phoebe Palmer, Aimee Semple McPherson, Billy Sunday and Billy Graham, and further expanding evangelical moral and theological influence.
By mid-20th century, the term “evangelical” became normative for distinguishing this approach from that of fundamentalists on the theological right and liberals on the theological left. Coalitions of evangelicals later delineated their convictions in such documents as the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy (1978), the Danvers Statement (1988), distinguishing “complementary differences between masculinity and femininity,” and the Nashville Statement on Christian sexuality (2017). These confessional documents are touchstones of orthodoxy regarding evangelical belief and behavior.
Then came Donald Trump, a three-time presidential candidate and one-term president (so far), and the decision of large numbers of evangelicals to support him. That religio-political reality captures the evangelical dilemma of the present moment, invoking the question: Where have all the evangelical convictions gone?
“MAGA-affirming evangelicalism may run more people away from the church than it evangelizes.”
In an attempt to blend gospel with MAGA, a significant segment of American evangelicals have carried their perceived non-negotiable Christian convictions into moral ambiguity, ending up in a place they never thought they would be.
While forcefully insisting their uncompromising biblical-ethical convictions define theological and moral orthodoxy, MAGA-oriented evangelicals risk overriding those same convictions in their support of a presidential candidate convicted of sexual assault and a political party that criminalizes pregnancy miscarriages. By promoting the idea of a “Christian America” and the political machinations that accompany such efforts, MAGA-affirming evangelicalism may run more people away from the church than it evangelizes, ironically secularizing a gospel it claims to preserve, protect, and defend.
Illustrations abound:
- When the evangelical/Baptist speaker of the U.S. House says, “I am a Bible-believing Christian,” and insists if you want to know what “I think about any issue under the sun,” “Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it,” in what biblical text might he find Donald Trump’s counterpart? Is Trump a prototype of Cyrus the Great who liberated Jews from Babylon (as some evangelicals suggest), or Herod the Great who schemed to keep political power at all costs?
- After Trump-affirming evangelicals signed the Nashville Statement on Christian Sexuality, affirming that “God’s revealed will for all people is chastity outside of marriage and fidelity within marriage; and denying that any affections, desires or commitments ever justify sexual intercourse before or outside marriage; nor do they justify any form of sexual immorality,” do some of them now believe their presidential candidate is morally exempt from those Christian convictions?
- When the Danvers Statement says: “In all of life Christ is the supreme authority and guide for men and women, so that no earthly submission — domestic, religious, or civil — ever implies a mandate to follow a human authority into sin,” should it add, except on January 6, 2021?
- When the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy says, “persons denying the full truth of Scripture may claim an evangelical identity while methodologically they have moved away from the evangelical principle of knowledge to an unstable subjectivism, and will find it hard not to move” further, should it add, except in the case of Donald J. Trump?
In the confessional documents cited here and others like them, multiple evangelical coalitions boldly declare what they believe to be the essential doctrinal convictions drawn from and grounded in a biblical record they deem to be infallible and inerrant mandates of Christian faith and practice. As illustrated here, they hold all Christians accountable to these immutable truths. Thus, the crucial question: Wherefore Donald Trump?
“This dilemma isn’t simply about Trump, it is about the very witness of American evangelicalism itself.”
Is he the grand exception to the directives of the divine? If so, then where have all the convictions gone? This dilemma isn’t simply about Trump, it is about the very witness of American evangelicalism itself, lock, stock and gospel.
Those who claim to be “Bible believing Christians” as if the rest of us aren’t, must be held to account when they step away from their own perceived orthodoxy.
Other evangelicals sensed that danger a while back. In 2019, Mark Galli, then-editor of Christianity Today, addressed the moral and spiritual crisis that participation in the MAGA movement created for evangelicals, writing forthrightly:
To the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record, we might say this: Remember who you are and whom you serve.” Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior. Consider what an unbelieving world will say if you continue to brush off Mr. Trump’s immoral words and behavior in the cause of political expediency. If we don’t reverse course now, will anyone take anything we say about justice and righteousness with any seriousness for decades to come?
In 2021, the ever-quotable Ryan Burge, political science professor and Baptist pastor, offered this warning:
Some Americans seem to have embraced a conception of evangelicalism that is less about the gospel and more about cultural and political power. If this trend continues, those who wish to remain faithful to the historical definition of evangelicalism will have a harder time convincing the larger culture that their true motivations are theological — and not just about maintaining power in the public square.
In a Jan. 16 posting, Burge cited a study of “white, self-identifying evangelicals,” in which 45% of Democrats and 36% of Republicans indicated they never attend church. In 2022, a similar survey showed the never attenders at 20% Democrats and 60% Republicans. Obviously, fewer Democrats identified as evangelical, yet the sizable percentage of non-church attending Republicans may confirm other studies that a substantial number claim the designation evangelical, but with limited connection to congregations.
Burge’s analyses suggest the evangelical constituency now includes those who view the term as a political identity rather than a religious one or are at least less likely to distinguish the two.
In the mystery of divine irony, the Nashville Statement of 2017 asks a question more relevant in 2024 than when it was written:
Will the church of the Lord Jesus Christ lose her biblical conviction, clarity and courage, and blend into the spirit of the age? Or will she hold fast to the word of life, draw courage from Jesus, and unashamedly proclaim his way as the way of life? Will she maintain her clear, counter-cultural witness to a world that seems bent on ruin?
That’s a question evangelicals must ask of themselves, and they’d better hurry. By the end of this year, Donald Trump may experience an entirely new consequence of the word “conviction.”
Should that occur, the “clear, counter-cultural witness” of a substantial group of American evangelicals may find itself “under conviction,” as Billy Graham ever admonished sinners on their way to repentance.
Bill Leonard is founding dean and the James and Marilyn Dunn professor of Baptist studies and church history emeritus at Wake Forest University School of Divinity in Winston-Salem, N.C. He is the author or editor of 25 books. A native Texan, he lives in Winston-Salem with his wife, Candyce, and their daughter, Stephanie.