.John Fea is a history professor at Messiah College in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania. He is the author of "Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump." He was interviewed by Chauncy DeVega in Salon and as of this writing the article is the featured story on the website. You can see how I adapted the photo they used as my own editorial comment.
Fea wrote this OpEd in USA Today:
Below is a link to a review of his book from Christianity Today. Considering the book was released in June, 2018, it is worth reading this extended review and comparing it to the interview with Chauncey DeVega published today.
An evangelical historian searches for the roots of Trump-friendly evangelicalism.
Fea answers these questions and more in Salon:
- In the United States white Christianity, especially in the South, was a tool for enforcing and legitimating white supremacy against nonwhites. Why is there any surprise about Donald Trump — who is an evident white supremacist — being a natural partner and champion of right-wing Christians?
- When the Christian right talks about "religious freedom" and says that America is a "Christian nation," what do they really mean?
- How do right-wing evangelicals reconcile Trump's obvious wicked behavior with their claims to be Christian?
- If right-wing Christian leaders are saying that the Democrats are demonic forces, is that an encouragement to violence?
- What do right-wing evangelicals and other Christians want? What is the Christian right's dream for America?
- How do right-wing Christians reconcile the public policies they support with the actual teachings of Jesus Christ?
- The contradictions are obvious and stark. Jesus would not be a Republican or a conservative.
This is from 2018 (in the book review):
At this point, it is worth pausing to reflect on the choices Fea makes in structuring his book thematically. Though Fea offers a sharp critique of evangelicals’ appetite for power, only rarely does he entertain the possibility that their pursuit of power may be intimately intertwined with their fears. For instance, though he acknowledges that white evangelical fear of newcomers might, in fact, reflect a fear of those who could challenge their own “power and privilege,” he quickly returns to a more sympathetic characterization of evangelical fear: “In a sin-cursed world, we should expect anxiety-induced emotions to rise in response to social change.” The problem, then, is not so much that evangelicals have misplaced fears, but rather that they “have not always managed their fears in a healthy way.”
To understand “the evangelical road to Donald Trump,” however, it pays to take a closer look at the nature of evangelical fear. Why have evangelicals feared some things (immigrants, civil rights, feminism), and not others (militarism, authoritarianism, guns)? Is fear simply a natural response to changing times, or is it actively stoked by individuals and groups with vested interests? Perhaps, upon closer inspection, fear and power end up being two sides of the same coin. Perhaps what white evangelicals have most feared is simply a loss of power.
This is from the Salon interview as a portion of his answer to the question “did Trump just give right-wing evangelicals permission to be who and what they really are?”
The dark side of Christian evangelicalism flourishes under Trump. Did Trump create these racist evangelicals or is he just a manifestation of racism in that faith community? I would probably say it's the latter…
Much of this is driven by a fear-mongering narrative about white Christian America: We're going to lose our "Christian nation" that we believe the country was founded upon. We need to make America great again, as if it was great in the 1950s or the 1920s with Jim Crow and other forms of oppression. We need to revisit the past, as if it was a much more moral Christian era — which it wasn't. The right-wing Christian leaders were and are essentially longing for an era that never really existed in the first place.
Now, what's fascinating about Trump is for many white evangelicals that political playbook was always associated with a Republican candidate. In the minds of most white evangelicals, they believed that person would be of moral character. A Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush or John McCain or Mitt Romney were, in the eyes of white evangelicals, people of moral character. As compared to Donald Trump, they would not be tweeting out lies every day. Yes, they were liars, but they weren't doing it to the extent of Trump. Most evangelicals would admit Donald Trump does not have the same kind of character as a Reagan or a Bush. Would the evangelical political playbook survive with a person that most evangelicals believed was not a person of moral character? As we discovered, the answer is yes.
You can see, sadly, that nothing has changed.
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John Fea’s blog