Historian John Fea has written a book titled Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump in which he seeks to understand why so many people who call themselves evangelical Christians voted for Donald Trump and at the same time chastise them for doing so.
Fea is himself an evangelical Christian who teaches at Messiah College in Pennsylvania, but he's "shocked", "saddened", "frustrated" and "angry" that 81% of his fellow Evangelicals pulled the lever for a man whose moral character should've disqualified him among voters who believe that the nation's leaders should be above reproach.
Fea is rightly critical of Christian "leaders" who, in one way or another, sought during the campaign to excuse Mr. Trump's well-documented prevarications, debaucheries, and vulgarities. He also offers some interesting, although perhaps not entirely relevant, historical insight into the oft misunderstood role of Christianity in the nation's founding, as well as the sometimes embarrassing relationship between Christian leaders and the White House.
In assessing the book these can all be set on the positive side of the ledger. On the negative side, unfortunately, there's much in Fea's book that I think is unfair to those in the 81% who, distressed by the choice between two very flawed candidates, chose to vote for the one whose political promises most closely aligned with their own hopes.
On page 73 he relates an incident in which a lady approached him after a lecture on this topic and said that she herself was a member of the 81% and she wanted Fea to tell her, given what we knew about the moral shortcomings of both candidates, how an evangelical could select between them if character was to be the deciding factor.
This was, I think, the salient question facing many Christians in November of 2016, and for reasons I elaborated upon in a couple of posts written around the 2016 election (See here and here), many saw the moral issue as a wash and chose instead to cast their ballot for the candidate whose policies were, if implemented, most likely to lead the nation out of the morass, both social and economic, it had fallen into during the previous decade.
Fea seems to recognize this motivation but chose to give it little attention, perhaps because he doesn't believe it's the chief reason why so many evangelicals lent their support to Trump. He may be right about that, but to lump those for whom it was a major consideration with those for whom it wasn't strikes me as somewhat simplistic and unfair.
In any case, he writes on page 7 of the Introduction that:
For too long, white evangelical Christians have engaged in public life through a strategy defined by the politics of fear, the pursuit of worldly power, and a nostalgic longing for a national past that may have never existed in the first place. Fear. Power. Nostalgia. These ideas are at the heart of this book, and I believe they best explain that 81%.In succeeding chapters he unpacks these three ideas in a way that sometimes makes them seem ignoble or unseemly motivators for Christian action. He suggests, for example that fear - of change, of the future - belies a lack of trust in God's providential control over the doings of men. "Fear," he quotes author Marilynne Robinson, "is not a Christian habit of mind."
Be it as it may that fear shouldn't be a mental habit, it's nevertheless difficult to agree with Fea that fear, in the sense I understand him to be using the word, is always an unbecoming motive for a Christian or an indicator of a lack of trust in God. In fact, I suspect, that Fea doesn't think this either.
After all, he himself must've been fearful - fearful for the future of the country - when he realized on election night that Trump was going to prevail. Otherwise, why be frustrated and angry with the 81% of evangelicals who voted for the president-elect? In fact, why else write such an impassioned book if not motivated by fear for what Christian support for Trump was doing to the church's witness?
Fea says that fear has no place in the life of one who trusts God, but if he truly believes that then when he realized on election night that Trump was winning why did he not just trust that this was God's will and that He had everything under control? Why get angry with those Christians who gave Trump his victory? There seems to me a dissonance between his standard for the 81% and his own reaction to Trump's election.
Fear, though it shouldn't control us, is nevertheless a perfectly reasonable and appropriate response to certain threats. The question is whether a particular threat or set of threats justify a fearful response. The 81% saw the threats posed by liberal progressivism, some of which Fea himself agrees are ominous, as ample justification for their fear of a Hillary Clinton presidency. Fea disagrees, though, that the threat reached a sufficiently high level of seriousness to warrant support for Trump, but he doesn't satisfactorily explain why a Clinton presidency should not arouse fear among Christians while the threats he believes to be posed by a Trump presidency should.
Fea strongly and, to a large extent, rightly criticizes Christians for aspiring to positions of power within the current administration. This aspiration can certainly be both disreputable and dangerous. It has seduced some evangelical "leaders" into excusing or rationalizing some of Mr. Trump's egregious behavior, behavior that should never be excused and which was rightly and roundly condemned by these same "court evangelicals," as Fea aptly labels them, when similarly engaged in by President Clinton.
In pointing out this hypocrisy Fea is excellent, but his analysis of "power seeking" when applied to the broader mass of the 81% is vague, and his use of the word "power," at least when applied to the hopes of the majority of Christian Trump voters, is unfair and gratuitously pejorative. "Influence" would've been a more charitable word choice, I think.
In other words, setting aside the court evangelicals - the handful of prominent leaders who have in some cases sold their souls for a mess of pottage - the average evangelical voter, like everyone else, hoped to gain some influence over the policies issuing forth from Washington, and surely there's nothing dishonorable with wanting to influence today's leaders, any more than there's anything dishonorable with wanting to teach history and write books to influence tomorrow's leaders.
Indeed, if the desire for influence is somehow nefarious then no Christian should ever run for political office, but surely Fea would not endorse such a principle.
The Trumpian slogan "Make America Great Again" is Fea's springboard for his critique of evangelical nostalgia. He focuses on the word "again" and rightly points out that any past era to which one directs one's gaze may have been "great" for some but not so great for others. As much as whites might pine for the "good old days" of the fifties, Fea observes, most African Americans would not be particularly nostalgic for those years, nor wish to return to them.
True enough, but I think this misses the point. It's not a particular era to which anyone wants to return in toto, it's rather particular qualities of the past that many, both blacks and whites, would like to recover while retaining the best of the present.
For instance, there was a time, prior to the 1960s, when for both blacks and whites families were stronger, neighborhoods were more secure and more communal, drugs were a much less serious problem, public education (even in segregated schools) was in many ways better, movies and music were less coarse and vulgar, babies in the womb were safer, the economy was sound, and religious liberty was not under assault.
When candidate Trump spoke of making America great again a lot of evangelicals reflected on how far we'd strayed from this historical reality and saw in Trump a hope that we might get some of it back. To suggest that MAGA was a "dog whistle" or "code" for reinstituting Jim Crow or undoing all the salutary social progress that's been made in America over the last fifty years, as some of Trump's critics have done, is simply specious and unfair.
Finally, Fea approvingly cites University of Virginia sociologist James Davison Hunter's call for Christians to refrain from becoming activists in the culture war. In his introduction, he writes that, "Christians were never meant to change this world; instead they are called to .... [be] a 'faithful presence' in their local communities and neighborhoods."
This sounds a lot like a veiled call to Christians to surrender meekly to the forces of cultural decay and degeneration sweeping over our society. I wonder whether Fea would've urged William Wilberforce and the Clapham sect to abstain from fighting for the abolition of slavery, or for Martin Luther King and others in the American civil rights movement to have declined to fight for the right to vote for politicians who would advance the cause of racial justice, or for Christians today who fight on behalf of immigration reform or environmental causes to desist from their protests and political efforts.
I doubt it, but surely these are all as much cultural issues as are abortion, pornography and gay marriage.
I'm quite sure that Christians who campaigned for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were not seen by Professor Fea as doing anything untoward. Why is it that it's only when Christians involve themselves in what are seen as conservative political or social issues that they're accused of bringing disrepute to the name of Christ? Why is it only conservative Christians who are called upon to be conscientious objectors in the culture wars?
Fea argues that had evangelical Christians spent as much money on simply being a faithful witness for the sanctity of human life rather than dirtying themselves in the political mud pit by seeking to elect politicians who would overturn Roe they'd be a lot more effective and compelling ambassadors for Christ, but this is a false alternative. There's no reason Christians shouldn't do both, and indeed they are doing both.
There's nothing wrong with Christians working to overturn unjust laws and to scrub some of the social toxins from our culture, but, to be sure, this is a task that must be undertaken as irenically and with as much integrity, civility, and winsomeness as possible.
If the world remains nonetheless repelled by such activism and advocacy then that's the world's problem, not the church's. So, too, was the world repelled by the ancient prophets.