Saving Democracy from Its Evangelical Foes
Political Puzzle
Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash
Why do so many white evangelical voters support former President Donald Trump? Two thirds of them do, according to a recent Pew Research Center survey. That’s one of the big puzzles in American politics today.
At least it’s a big puzzle, and a disturbing one too, if you’ve thought evangelicalism puts a premium on personal conversion, moral uprightness, and faithfulness to the Bible’s account of Jesus’ life and teachings. By both instruction and action, Jesus taught his disciplines to live in love: to love God above all and their neighbors as themselves (Matthew 12:28-34, Mark 12:28-34, Luke 10:25-37). How can those who devoutly follow this way of love support a lying and egotistical bully—a pathological narcissist, according to my blog post “Waking Nightmare”—who daily spews hatred toward any person or institution that gets in his way?
For answers, I’ve turned to authors who are closer to the evangelical world than I am. Here I think of columnists like David French in The New York Times, whose Easter Sunday post is titled “Trump Is No Savior,” and scholars like Kristin Kobes Du Mez, whose bestselling book Jesus and John Wayne exposes a politically potent masculinist ethos in American evangelicalism. Recently I added another resource to my list: David Gushee’s Defending Democracy from Its Christian Enemies (Eerdmans, 2023).
Global Trend
David Gushee is a lifelong evangelical who currently holds chairs in Christian social ethics at Mercer University in Atlanta and the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. At a book launch for Defending Democracy in Grand Rapids on March 15, he and Du Mez talked for an hour about evangelical threats to American political democracy. Here’s a link to a video of this event.
I took away three main points from their compelling conversation. First, white evangelical support for Trump belongs to a worldwide revival of what Gushee calls authoritarian reactionary Christian politics. Second, fear and resentment strongly motivate such politics. Third, to resist fear-driven religious support for authoritarian political figures, Christians—and not only Christians—need to recover the democratic elements within their own religious traditions.
Gushee’s book lucidly elaborates each of these points. I urge everyone to read it. Gushee shows that current religious support for an authoritarian political leader in the United States is neither exceptional nor acceptable. Historically, we can find a similar pattern in Nazi Germany. More recently, the same dynamic has played out in Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Brazil.
Photo by Matt Howard on Unsplash
What Gushee in his conversation with Du Mez called a “growing fireball of resentment” ignites reactionary political movements around the globe. This is common now, and authoritarians such as Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán have successfully harnessed it for antidemocratic ends. And that makes white evangelical support for Trump even more unacceptable. Indeed, not simply unacceptable but downright dangerous.
Authoritarian Reactionary Christianity
Gushee prefers the term authoritarian reactionary Christian politics to more familiar labels like “white Christian nationalism” and “religious right-wing populism.” His term clearly situates American politics in a global context. It also effectively highlights what makes white evangelical support for Trump so dangerous to American political democracy: it’s a form of authoritarian and reactionary politics.
As Gushee describes it, political authoritarianism is inherently antidemocratic (see Defending Democracy, pp. 30-35, 44-48). It concentrates power in one person or group; it undercuts the rule of law and subverts free and fair elections; it attacks political rights such as the freedom of speech; and it tramples over hard-won civil liberties such as the legal right to same-sex marriage. Trump and his supporters have made no secret about their desire to accomplish all of this and more. And, according to the Washington Post, Trump’s “envoy” Richard Grenell, a native of Grand Rapids, Michigan, is already firming up partnerships with authoritarian leaders around the world.
When people regard changes in society as threats to their own way of life, it’s easy for antidemocratic politics to fuse with a reactionary stance. This stance has a long pedigree. It goes back to traditionalist responses to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Gushee describes it as “a strongly negative reaction” to modernity, democracy, pluralism, and other developments that progressive forces “treat as great advances” but “traditionalist Christians reject.” When their rejection “hardens into a permanent posture of Christian disdain for modernity and democracy,” then we can call it reactionary (pp. 49-50).
Trump supporters marching on the U.S. Capitol, January 6, 2021. Photo by TapTheForwardAssist, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
This reactionary posture easily combines with resentment over losing cultural or political influence, fear about perceived threats to Christian communities, and a desire to regain power. That’s when Christians “can prove susceptible” to authoritarian and antidemocratic “Christian theocratic politics” (p. 51). Then their political struggles become an apocalyptic battle over good and evil. Nothing less than total victory will suffice, even if this requires violent attacks on fellow citizens and democratic institutions. Set against this backdrop, both the events of January 6, 2021 and ongoing evangelical support for Donald Trump begin to make sense.
Still, I have a hard time imagining my own relatives violently attacking the U.S. Capitol or happily applauding if Trump shot someone on Fifth Avenue in New York—as he boasted he could do without losing voters, in a speech given at Dordt University on January 23, 2016. (Kristin Du Mez talks about this incident in Jesus and John Wayne, pp. 1-5. Here’s a link to the entire event.)
Call to Conversion
Many of my relatives are evangelicals. Some ardently support Donald Trump. They’re good people. I love and respect them. Yet no matter how I try, I don’t understand their politics. I can make sense of their worries about abortion, gender, family values, education, and the like, even though I neither share these worries nor draw the same political and legal implications. But I can’t grasp why they think an overtly authoritarian and antidemocratic “leader” and his political toadies would actually address their worries in a politically constructive manner.
So I shake my head in horror at the prospect that, with rabid support from far too many Christians, Trump could return to presidential power. That would be a disaster for democracy. It would be a calamity for Christianity. And, in a conflict-ridden world where authoritarian forces are gaining power, it would be a global catastrophe.
This post, then, is not merely a polite inquiry into a political puzzle. It’s also a passionate call for personal-political conversion, addressed to every Trump-supporting Christian: please turn away from the politics of hate, resentment, and fear. Turn instead toward a genuine pathway of love. Love your enemies (Matthew 5:43-48, Luke 6:27-36)—and don’t treat political opponents as hateful foes. Care for the hungry, clothe the destitute, and welcome the stranger (Matthew 25:31-46)—and don’t resentfully pursue policies that punish the poor or sexual minorities or the desperate immigrants in our midst. Live in trust and hope (Matthew 6:25-34, Luke 12:22-34)—and don’t let fear drive you to seek salvation in an authoritarian false messiah.
That’s my altar call to Trump-loving Christians. To everyone else I offer an urgent reminder: despite the obvious flaws in American political democracy—it is, as a previous post says, a precious mess—let’s do all we can to make sure authoritarian reactionaries do not prevail.
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