Some of my best friends are evangelicals.
I attended Wheaton College—A Christian liberal arts college 25 miles west of Chicago in a tree-shaded suburb. I made friends.
Wheaton is the Harvard of the evangelical world. (Or so we were told.) We read all the famous dead white guys. None were evangelical.
We read Sophocles, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Milton, Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Ibsen, Sartre, Hegel, Darwin, Marx, Freud, Bertrand Russell, and, on the side, Mad magazine.
After Wheaton I attended Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, the premier school of theology for evangelicals. I made more friends.
My evangelical friends were Democrats.
We stood against the Vietnam War. We stood for civil rights, for a woman’s right to choose, for the United Farmworkers, for nuclear disarmament, for McGovern. Many of those friends went on to mobilize against apartheid, for same-sex marriage, for the Paris Agreement, for Black Lives Matter.
We knew our evangelical heritage was morally flawed. But we channeled the best of it.
We respected the revivalists of the early 18th century who “awakened” pride and dignity in poor American colonists. We admired evangelicals at the forefront of the abolitionist movement, women’s suffrage, unionization of workers, and the elimination of child labor.
For 200 years evangelicals had been a force for good, even though (I would guess) 20% or so were despicable. That’s not so bad. I suspect the same percentage applies to Rotarians, Episcopalians, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Amish, atheists, and the Mickey Mouse Club.
Evangelicals had been a force for good.
And then along came the Moral Majority.
Jerry Falwell became the face of evangelicalism, a voice touting racism, homophobia, and Christian nationalism. Evangelicals suddenly sniffed political power and sold their souls to get it.
In college I read Goethe’s Faust. Faust sold his soul to the Devil. The transaction was fiction. Or so I thought. I now know it isn’t. I’ve seen it happen.
Evangelicals compose 25% of the population; 80% of them voted for this president.
I left evangelicalism 40 or so years ago. I still respect its social justice heritage but not its Bible-thumping or its White Republican Jesus.
I cannot forgive evangelicals their betrayal. I cannot excuse their apostasy, hypocrisy, duplicity, and stupidity.
I look at evangelicals today and I don’t see the faces of my friends anywhere.
I would weep if I weren’t so damn mad!
Yes, it’s odd how ‘evangelical’ has become more a political term than a religious one. To evangelize is supposedly to offer something of great value with open arms and open heart. Today, white evangelicals, for the most part, feel they’re protecting themselves and their valuables from the “others.”
The last Democrat who won a majority of the white evangelical vote was Jimmy Carter, who was an actual old school evangelical, not a megachurch zombie. He’s still living his faith. Most self-proclaimed evangelicals are acting out their fear and resentment.
I certainly don’t pretend to know the cultural history of Evangelicals but I certainly recognize the hypocrisy of what I thought all Christian beliefs once had in common. It is maddening and so very sad. Coping means avoiding those faces for now. Thanks, this was interesting.
Power makes people crazy. What else can you call it when they forsake the central reason for their own existence: the Gospel?
For me, evangelicalism was hard to escape. I didn’t even want to escape that safe cocoon of religious subculture until the civil rights movement of the late 60s/early 70s came along. There were friends aplenty in our all-white fundamentalist –leaning church where not a word was spoken from the pulpit or in the classroom about Dr. King or the nightly news.
I couldn’t square that with the picture of Jesus I saw in the four Gospels. So began a long journey of leaving, some intentional and some by happenstance.
Looking back, I was damned lucky to find a way out and, on top of that, to find a new kind of faith that fully embraced social justice.
Many are not so lucky.
I’m mad, too, about the deal with the Devil evangelicals have made for political power. But I yearn for something like an underground railroad to draw more evangelicals like me out of their mental slavery. Many, I think, would travel that path if they could see it.
When I watch this group, which is as little as possible, all I can think about is”what would Jesus say to these folks”??!?
Lord Action had it right: “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” A lamentable situation indeed. Thanks for your insights!
These comments are all excellent; thank you, Randy and Readers. There is one brief comment I want to add. Jesus’ motivation by Love never confused him about the powerful, influential path he walked. Fear, not Love, is what motivates today’s evangelicals, and that’s just the beginning of THAT conversation. It frustrates all hell OUT of me! ?
All religions and their leadership need to stay out of politics no matter the party, democrat, republican or other. People need to make their decisions as an individual and not influenced to follow a group’s decision. Learn about any candidate to understand their goals and plans before voting. Render unto the church the things that are the church’s. Render unto the individuals common sense
Your comments the past three weeks have been enlightening in that I can sense a path to November 3rd of growing intensity, like piquing for the championship game. I’d like to sing “Sympathy for the Devil” in our local tavern on karioke night wearing a Trump mask, but I would probably be shot dead before the second chorus. As far as those false evangelicals their name should be changed to the evangullibles.
It’s all so hard to understand. Makes me think of the shortest verse in the bible. Jesus wept.
400 years ago the Mayflower left Plymouth, England landing in America to be helped, saved by the indigenous people. 60 years later the saintly white separatist Christians were thriving while the indigenous numbers dwindled from 6000 to 400. Such was the desire for power and so it goes on, history repeats. As the song says, ” when will we ever learn.” As my 12 year old granddaughter says, not better not worse, just different, but don’t talk politics with her!!