Category Archives: Evangelicals and Donald Trump

A New Christianity? A Post-Evangelical Progressive Vision (Part 1)

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In the previous two posts I reviewed a book by a far-left representative of progressive Christianity, namely David A. Kaden, Christianity in Blue. Today I will begin a review of David P. Gushee, After Evangelicalism: The Path to a New Christianity (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2020; pp. 225). A Baptist, a “self-identified progressive evangelical” (p. 5) and a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University (Macon, Georgia), Gushee advocates a position much closer to traditional and biblical Christianity than does Kaden. As the book’s title proclaims, Gushee rejects evangelicalism and proposes a “New Christianity,” which he calls “post-evangelicalism.” This “new Christianity” is animated by a spirit of “Christian humanism.”

The book divides into three parts and nine chapters. Part one deals with the question of the sources of authority for theology and ethics. Part two deals with three central theological topics, God, Jesus, and the church. Part three explores the topic of ethics. I will briefly summarize each chapter and for the most part save my critical assessment until we have the entire argument before us.

Part One: Authorities: Listening and Learning

1. Evangelicalism: Cutting Loose from an Invented Community

According to Gushee, modern evangelicalism “was invented through a historical retrieval and rebranding move undertaken by an ambitious group of reformers within the US Protestant fundamentalist community of the 1940s” (p. 15). Evangelicalism, according to Gushee, “was never more than fundamentalism with lipstick on” (p. 27). From the beginning, the evangelical movement set its sights on recapturing American culture from political and theological progressives. By the 1970s, an “identity fusion” (p. 24) between white evangelicals and the Republican Party had been accomplished. However for a minority of moderate to left-leaning evangelicals, the overwhelming support of evangelicals (81%) for Donald Trump in the 2016 election “became a bridge too far” (p. 25). The evangelicalism of today is white, Republican, fundamentalist, sexist, homophobic, and racist. Evangelicalism revealed its true colors in 2016 and thus provoked a “massive exodus” (p. 28) that continues today.

2. Scripture: From Inerrancy to the Church’s Book

According to Gushee, evangelicalism’s union with right-wing politics is not the only thing driving the mass exodus. Its fundamentalist view of the Bible as “inerrant” creates huge intellectual, theological, and ethical problems for many people. Leaving aside the history and detailed description of the doctrine of inerrancy, the bottom line is that evangelicals accept the Bible as the Word of God, true in everything it asserts in matters of faith and morality. Gushee raises six objections to the evangelical/fundamentalist view of the Bible. (1) The Bible is obviously a human product, and “any human product is subject to human limits and various kinds of error” (p. 31). But Gushee does not for this reason reject the Bible as of no use to the church. In place of the doctrine of inerrancy, he proposes a theory of “limited inspiration” wherein “some scriptural texts consistently demonstrate that they are inspired by God because they prove so useful in Christian experience for drawing people to Jesus and his way” (p. 32; emphasis original). These “inspired” texts serve as a “canon within a canon” (p. 33). Jesus’s teaching that we are to love God and our neighbor serves as the criterion for what is canonical. (2) The Bible is a collection of ancient documents, written in three different languages and set in cultures vastly different from ours. Our attempts to interpret the Bible are beset by many exegetical obscurities and translation problems. Understanding the Bible is not as simple as “God said it, I believe it, that settles it” (p. 35). (3) The “Bible does not interpret itself” (p. 35). Human beings do the interpreting. Because human interpreters are “flawed, limited, and self-interested,” a post-evangelical approach “will emphasize a communal process of interpreting Scripture, which occurs in an ongoing conversation between individual Christians, clergy, scholars, and the historic church, with the help of God’s Spirit” (pp. 36-37).

(4) The Bible is the church’s book. These texts became “sacred” to the church “because they were believed to bear witness to Jesus and to help people find salvation through him” (p. 37; emphasis original). Gushee proposes an alternative way to understand the Bible as sacred Scripture to replace inerrancy: “That way is to recognize that the Bible is and always has been the church’s book” (p. 38). What does it mean to read the Bible as “the church’s book”? The next point sheds some light on this question. (5) According to Gushee, Christians can learn much from the Jewish way of reading the Bible. At least some Jews read the Hebrew Bible as “a dialogue between God and God’s people” (p. 39) rather than a one-way communication. Christians have a responsibility, claims Gushee, “to read texts in ways that bless rather than harm human beings” (p. 40). Gushee quotes Elie Wiesel with approval: “If even the most authoritative teaching, the most sacred text, leads to dehumanization, to humiliation, to harm, then we must reject it” (p. 40).

(6) Finally, the doctrines of the inerrancy and all-sufficiency of Scripture distracts us from seeking God’s voice in other places: “These include tradition, science, reason, experience, intuition, community, and relationships” (p. 41). Gushee continues: “The power of a narrow evangelical biblicism must be broken, but you can’t replace something with nothing. We need to open ourselves to other ways of discerning truth” (p. 41).

3. Resources: Hearing God’s Voice Beyond Scripture

It seems to be a defining characteristic of “progressive” Christianity of whatever stripe that it seeks insight into God’s character and will from sources in addition to Scripture. Moreover, progressives are willing to judge and correct Scripture’s teachings about God and morality in view of these other sources. In this chapter Gushee outlines “a new approach to listening for God’s voice and discerning God’s will” in sources other than the Bible (p. 45). He proposes three sources in addition to Scripture to which we should listen for guidance. (1) The first is internal to the church, its tradition, and communal life. Gushee does not advocate treating tradition as an authority to which we must submit our own judgment. He recommends that post-evangelicals “not bow before tradition, or dismiss it with a sneer, but to understand its shaping role in creating Christianity as we know it” (p. 50). That is to say, post-evangelicals need to develop a historical awareness of the forces determining their doctrinal and moral biases and the biases of others. Only then will they be able to listen seriously to the second and third sources. (2) The second set of supplementary sources for discerning God’s will are “reason, experience, intuition, relationships, and community” (p. 51), all of which are located and grounded in natural human capacities. Reason detects and rejects logical and factual contradictions even if those contradictions are found in the Bible. Gushee gives as an example the contradiction between the biblical assertions that God is love and the biblical command to the invading Israelites to wipe out the inhabitants of Canaan. Experience also teaches what is good and bad, healthy and harmful, humanizing and dehumanizing, and what God’s will is and what is not. According to Gushee, the experience of LGBTQ+ people is a source of knowledge of God’s will and must not be denied on the basis of Bible texts and their traditional interpretation. (3) The arts and sciences can also serve as sources for hearing God’s voice. Post-evangelicals must take the conclusions of the sciences with respect to climate change, homosexuality, and other areas of scientific discovery seriously.

The Progressive View of Authority: A Preliminary Assessment

As will become even more obvious in the next chapters, the views that set progressive Christianity apart from traditional/biblical Christianity cannot be derived from the Bible. From where, then, do they come? In part one, Gushee makes it clear that progressive Christianity looks to reason and experience to justify its proposed changes to biblical/traditional Christianity. Hence the church’s traditional teaching that the Bible alone is the ultimate norm of Christian faith and morals must be rejected. To defend their progressive views, progressives reinterpret,* correct, reject, or even condemn the teaching of Scripture. God’s “voice” in personal experience, political movements, culture, and psychology in certain cases trumps Scripture. Apparently the “progress” of progressive Christianity depends on a constant flow of new divine revelations. It should not escape notice that these new revelations track almost perfectly, albeit a few months behind, with advances in secular culture and politics.

*To interpret means to explain an obscure text in other words and concepts clearer to the listener. The goal of interpretation is to unite the mind of the listener with the original meaning of the text along with its full implications and applications. To reinterpret usually means not merely to challenge older, established interpretations but to read an alien meaning into the text with as much plausibility as one can create. It is to hijack the accrued authority of a text and place it in service of a meaning more acceptable to the interpreter. Many reinterpretations involve distortion, deception, and downright lies.

Next Time: We will examine part two, “Theology: Believing and Belonging” wherein Gushee proposes progressive views of Jesus, God, and the Church.

Jesus, John Wayne, and Evangelicals: A Brief Reaction

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Many of my colleagues and acquaintances have praised Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (Liveright, 2021). As of today, the book has received 3,808 reviews on Amazon with a rating of 4.5 stars out of 5. Hence I thought I ought to read it for myself. My “brief reaction” won’t contain a full review, much less a chapter-by-chapter summary, detailed analysis of the argument, or thorough critique. I hope it will nevertheless be helpful for those who have read it or will read it or are thinking of reading it.

The Title

I have to admit that even before I read the book—indeed the first time I heard of it—I had a negative reaction to the title. It seemed designed to be provocative, insulting, and indicting—the kind of book intended to appeal to an extreme faction to reinforce their already emotionally-driven stance. And sure to sell! The subtitle states a thesis that seemed too radical to sustain. How could anyone hope to demonstrate that evangelicals as a group are guilty of corrupting a faith, i.e., the gospel? And are white evangelicals alone responsible for the social and political divisions that plague the country (USA)? Moreover, why add the word “white” to modify evangelicals? Will the book accuse white evangelicals of racism? There is one word missing from the title that I think is implied, that is, “male.” Although there are some women in the book whom Du Mez paints in a bad light (Merabel Morgan and Phillis Schalfly), villains are overwhelmingly male. The cast of scoundrels includes Billy Graham, James Dobson, Chuck Colson, Oliver North, Tim LaHay, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Josh McDowell, Michel Farris, Tony Perkins, and many more. So, being white, male, and a fairly traditional Christian rather than progressive or liberal you can see why I did not resonate with the title.

The Book’s Mood

It’s been a long time since I’ve read such a depressing book. The book begins and ends with what Du Mez considers irrefutable proof of white evangelicals’ hypocrisy and corruption, that is, their overwhelming support for the twice-divorced, serial adulterer, misogynist, racist, xenophobic, islamophobic, arrogant, foul-mouthed Donald Trump in the 2016 election (Preface, xvii). Enthusiasm for Trump is the definitive refutation of evangelicals’ sincerity in all their talk about morality, faith, and family; it is proof that “evangelicalism must be seen as a cultural and political movement rather than as a community defined by theology” (p. 298). Between these bookends she tells story after story of white, male evangelical leaders’ political intrigue, ambition, duplicity, hypocrisy, and sexual misconduct. According to Du Mez the animating heart of evangelicalism is patriarchy, “heroic white manhood” (p. xvi), “militant masculinity” (p. 3), and white nationalism. Perhaps I missed it, but I don’t recall Du Mez mentioning a single positive quality or redeeming feature of her evangelical villains. It’s a story of meanness, betrayal, and hypocrisy. That’s all there is. I could not detect in Du Mez’s portrayal a smidgen of empathy. No nuance. No grace.

After reading 300 pages describing dirty laundry and exploring skeleton laden closets, you begin to doubt that there is any goodness left in the world. It took me a whole day to recover my sense of perspective. As a professor of religion, I shudder to think what reading this book would do to the mind and heart of a young college student who knows nothing else about the history of American Christianity.

The Argument

Given the subtitle of the book I expected hear an argument for her thesis. But the adverb “how” in the subtitle should have given me a clue that I would be disappointed. The “how” announces that the fact of white evangelicals corrupting the faith and fracturing the nation is taken for granted. Evangelicals’ support of Donald Trump proves it. Her task is to show how this happened and why we should not be surprised that it did:

History makes clear that this should come as no surprise. Evangelical support for Trump was no aberration. For many white evangelicals, the values Trump embodied aligned with the militancy at the heart of their faith (p. xvii).

With the fact of evangelicals’ betrayal of the gospel established beyond doubt by their association with Trump, all Du Mez needs to do is construct a narrative illustrating how the post WW II evangelical movement was animated from its beginning and throughout its history by ideals of militant (white) masculinity and submissive femininity. The narrative portrays evangelicals’ defense of the Bible and orthodox doctrine and its rhetoric of morality, marriage, and family as serving the basic instinct of (white) male superiority, a will to power masked as theological faithfulness. Evangelicalism, Du Mez contends, is “a cultural and political movement” not “a community defined by theology” (p. 298). This conclusion, I think, is the central point of the book. It is to disempower the male dominated evangelical movement by unmasking the ulterior political motives hidden by its theological rhetoric. It is to imbue her readers with suspicion of sanctimonious rhetoric and free them—especially women—from the linguistic cage constructed by male evangelical architects.

Will it work? Yes. For some people it will. Those who already hate Donald Trump, those burned by evangelical churches, those already leaning leftward in their politics, and theological liberals and progressives will enjoy reading about the sins of their political enemies. As I said at the beginning of this essay, the title of book tells you who the book is meant to entertain.

Critical Assessment

Do I have anything good to say about Jesus and John Wayne? Yes. Having read extensively in American church history and theology, I know most of the stories and characters discussed in the book, but not all. I learned some new things. The book is well-researched and meticulously documented. Her book testifies to her impressive ability to create a narrative out of thousands of facts. Concerning the facts it recounts, I do not doubt its historical accuracy. And it’s pretty well written. But….

On the other hand, I believe the book is deeply flawed. Though the facts are accurate, the narrative is misleading. Her obsession with debunking evangelicalism root and branch is too obvious to overlook. She explains everything evangelicals say and do as manifestations of their lust for power. This thesis makes historical explanation too simple and mechanical. All the characters are rendered as one dimensional ciphers. They don’t even have the virtue of being flawed. They are just bad. As far as readers can tell from Du Mez’s narrative, evangelicals did nothing good; their causes were unjust, their fears unfounded, and their actions divisive.

I began this essay with my apprehensions about the title of Du Mez’s book. Reading the book did nothing to remove them. Despite all the facts marshalled in its support, I don’t accept her narrative. If you read the book, ask yourself two questions: (1) can the evangelical movement really be as unambiguously evil as Du Mez portrays it? (2) If it is legitimate to deconstruct evangelicalism and reduce it to the will to power, is it not legitimate to ask what “metanarrative” or hidden motive controls De Mez’s narrative reconstruction?