One of the unforeseen consequences of the Trump era is the renewed debate about the intersection of religion and politics, driven by the sustained support of self-identified evangelicals for Donald Trump and the Republican Party.
A host of commentators have written in major media – many quite thoughtful – trying to make sense of the seemingly nonsensical: how followers of Jesus of Nazareth and the Christian Bible can support policies that seem opposite of Christian values and act in such a hateful manner.
As a political junkie who has lived most of my six decades in the evangelical world, I applaud the effort to wrestle with subjects that have consumed my thinking. That said, in my view most of these ruminations miss the mark, and almost all for two main reasons:
- For one thing, they are premised on the idea that religion and politics are two separate things. Framing the question as “how can Christians believe X and vote Y?” is a failure to understand that politics and religion are not separate spheres but have always represented expressions of cultural views and practices.
- Secondly, they assume that there is an objective ideal Christianity when in fact Christian history is extraordinarily fluid when it comes to both theology and the role of Christians in society.
Religion was Always Politics
I first wrote about evangelicals and Trump in the summer of 2016, when many expressed shock that churchgoers would support an irreligious man with a history of immoral behavior. I wrote before the 2016 election that Trump’s “Make America Great Again” rhetoric coincided almost precisely (and I think unwittingly at the beginning) with what I’ve been hearing in evangelical churches for decades.
This idea is that America was a great place until the 1960s, when the hippies and intellectual college professors ushered in an era of moral relativism and tore down cultural norms, where men were men, women and minorities were kept in their place, and we dared not question tradition. This mindset relies on faith and appeals to authority rather than facts and science, embraces conspiracies and paranoia, and despises the media and intellectuals. Far from receding, this cultural backlash seems to be gaining steam — witness the growing and increasingly violent attacks on the LGBTQ community.
Those who either aren’t intimately familiar with evangelical culture or want to maintain an idealistic view of it thus have a difficult time reconciling how people who identify as evangelicals embrace ugly political positions. Congressman Adam Kinzinger, one of the select few Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, lamented in a tweet: “Many people will leave a church that doesn’t match their politics, but rarely leave their politics because it doesn’t match their church.” Peter Wehner, who wrote a mostly perceptive essay in the Atlantic titled “The Evangelical Church is Breaking Apart,” in which he said: “How is it that Christianity has become, for too many adherents, a political religion?”
More recently, Tim Alberta wrote in The Atlantic that evangelicals decades ago set in motion the political fervor of evangelicals: “Not only were Christians conditioned to understand their struggle as … fixed on earthly concerns, a fight for the kingdom of this world – all of which runs directly counter to the commands of scripture – they were indoctrinated with the belief that because the stakes were getting so high, any means were justified.”
Here's the thing: as much as I respect these writers, the assumption that religion and politics are different (or counter to “the commands of scripture”) displays a misunderstanding of history AND scripture. The Judeo-Christian religion has been rooted in politics from the start. Israel was a collection of tribes that conquered its neighbors based on the idea that it was God’s will to occupy a particular plot of land. Like all religions at the time Judaism was formed, the power of the tribal God was directly correlated to the success of the tribe in battle.
Example: in the book of Exodus, Moses confronted Pharoah and threw down a staff that God turned into a snake, the Egyptian priests threw down their own staffs. What happened? Did the Egyptians’ staffs just lie there because they were merely wooden sticks in the service of a fake deity? No, the priests’ staffs also turned into snakes, which presumes that Egypt’s deities had their own power. The snakes unleashed by Moses ate the Egyptian snakes. The point of the text is not that other gods didn’t exist, but that Israel’s god was more powerful.
In the Bible books that relate Israel’s history – including Joshua, Kings and Chronicles -- the success and failure of Israel is based on the faithfulness of the Jewish kings and people. All those authors would be surprised to know that religion and politics were separate disciplines.
I can hear Christians thinking: but our religion is different, a “new covenant,” right? Sorry. Jesus was born and grew into adulthood in a toxic political brew in which decades/centuries of tension between Jews and their “pagan” overlords had come to a boiling point. A central tenet of the Jewish religion – that obedience to God’s precepts would lead to prosperity on earth – was at stake. Devout Jews felt that because they were faithful, that the time had come for God to overthrow the oppressive Romans. They expected God would provide for a miraculous victory, like he did in the histories outlined in their sacred writings.
Such an environment was ripe for prophets such as John the Baptizer, Jesus, the apostle Paul, and Jewish writers such as we read in the Dead Sea Scrolls, all of whom preached that God would intervene to create a new order on earth ruled by righteous Jews. Ancient writings newly uncovered in the last century in caches such as the Dead Sea Scrolls reveal that the teaching of these foundational Christians was echoed by Jewish sects of the day.
Jesus’ first recorded sermon was about politics. He stood up in a synagogue in Nazareth and read from Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” In our context-free Bible analysis today, we read that as flowery words, but at the time talking about the poor, the prisoners, and the oppressed meant calling out the government (that eventually killed him for his politics).
When Jesus died, he cried out to God: “Why have you forsaken me?” Paul wrote of Jesus leading an army of freshly resurrected righteous people who would meet Jesus in the sky and then come down from heaven to create an everlasting kingdom on earth, presumably in line with Jesus’ teaching. As years went by without this second coming, Paul’s nervous followers asked what would happen to those who died before this intervention from heaven occurred. Did they miss out on the kingdom? Later first-century Jews were so zealous some took matters into their own hands and started a revolution, which ended badly with the burning of Jerusalem in the year 70. Christians were said to have fled the city by then because, like Jesus and Paul, they expected a miraculous intervention that would lead to a Roman defeat, at which time they would return to the city.
Cramming centuries of history into few paragraphs requires a great deal of winnowing and oversimplification. The point, however, is that when Judaism and Christianity were birthed, religion and politics were the same thing. To lament today that politics is ruining religion misses ignores the fact that they part and parcel of cultural identity and cannot be separated, not only now but from the time and circumstances in which they were birthed.
What is Christianity, Anyway?
The other misconception is that there is an objective ideal of Christianity that some evangelicals are missing. Wehner writes: “For many of us who have made Christianity central to our lives, the pain of this moment is watching those who claim to follow Jesus do so much to distort who he really was.”
While I have much respect for the moral standards of Wehner and others who have this lament, the problem is that such sentiment presumes to know how Jesus would act today and what represents true Christian behavior. Since the time of Jesus, however, there has been no consensus as to who he was and what it means to follow him.
Immediately after Jesus died, there were dozens of ferocious debates among followers recorded in the New Testament alone. Paul was so angry at the views of his rivals for leadership who argued that non-Jews needed to be circumcised that he wrote in Galatians that he wished they were castrated (accidentally of course). Even more strands of Christian belief were found in other ancient gospels — such as the Gospel of Thomas — that were rediscovered over the past century. In the first few centuries post-crucifixion, Christians forged no consensus about issues such as Jesus’ relationship to God, whether he was an appointed human representative or whether he was divine, what happened to people after death, whether it was necessary to maintain Jewish customs such as circumcision, and so on. There also was fierce debate about whether to participate in pagan civil religious practices that prompted accusations that Christians were atheists and led to persecution recorded by church fathers.
Again, this is not the space to outline 2,000 years of church history, but many thousands of Christian denominations have formed during that span. Christians over the years have embraced forced conversions at the point of a sword, burning of heretics, Crusades, slavery, and thousands of other things we recoil from today. At the same time, Christianity has inspired missionaries that have performed wonderful acts of charity such as crusading the abolition of slavery. In many times and locales Christianity has fueled the improvement of human rights and freedoms.
How does one make sense of the dichotomy? I always come back to the principle put forth by Albert Schweitzer in his 1906 book “The Quest of the Historical Jesus.” Schweitzer studied centuries of theological developments and came to the realization that each generation reinvents Jesus to fit their own cultural beliefs. In practice, people read their own cultural views into Scriptures.
Old Testament scholars point out that the writings of the Hebrew Bible represent a debate among authors with varying views. In some loose way they correspond to our debates today. Ancient “conservatives” contended that God wanted the Jews to be harsh to the unbelievers, leading to events such as the bloody march to the Holy Land filled with war. More “liberal” authors believed that God wanted the Jews to act with justice, mercy, and hospitality, which is reflected in books such as Jonah and the prophets.
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is an example. In Genesis, the author seems to use the story to illustrate God punishing cities for rampant sexual misconduct. The prophet Ezekiel, however, says that God’s punishment was judgement for the cities’ inhabitants inhospitality and ill treatment of the poor. Setting aside historicity, how does one reconcile the discrepancy, except that the authors told a story in a way that justified their own cultural practices and beliefs?
In the same way today, right-leaning Christians read authoritarian views into the Bible, with a Jesus who divided the sheep and the goats and sharply called out doom on his enemies. Liberals focus on the parts that discuss love and forgiveness, emphasizing the “hippie” Jesus who talks about peace, love, and charity. Neither are “wrong.” Both elements are in the Bible, which is a collection of writings of people at different times in different cultures with different beliefs whom I believe would agree on little if brought back to life and put in a room together.
Religion is as Religion Does
One of the problems with this debate is that there is no accepted definition of evangelical. There are many “evangelical” denominations with divergent beliefs. Even surveys that discuss evangelical support for Trump rely on self-identification, which is not an exact science. The New York Times published an article in 2021 that noted that the term evangelical had become so synonymous with the Republican party that people who either practice other religions or are unchurched identify themselves as evangelical because they support Republicans.
While that poses analytical problems and makes survey results more than a little problematic, it also confirms the idea that religion and politics are not separate spheres but expressions of culture. Politics and religion constantly evolve to reflect the cultural views of adherents. (A trivial modern example: when I was young, rock ‘n roll music was widely seen in evangelical churches as a tool of Satan. Now those same churches who denounced rock music have elaborate praise bands with guitars and drums.)
The upshot to me is that Trump and Republicans reflect the attitudes and beliefs of people who identify as evangelicals. Trying to determine if that reflect some ideal of Christianity is a fools game because no such thing exists. In any event, Christianity is not a fixed thing and is constantly changing. In the light of those two tenets, both the evangelical support for Trump, and the opposition of the political left, makes a lot more sense.
