Evangelicals Already Had the Greatest Story in the World, Until They Revised It
by Rodney Kennedy
Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. He pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton (OH) – which is an American Baptist Church – for 13 years, after which he served as interim pastor of ABC USA churches in Illinois, Kansas, New York, and Pennsylvania. He is now a full-time writer, and lives in Louisiana. His seventh book, Good and Evil in the Garden of Democracy, has recently been published. And book #8, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, will appear soon.
Evangelicals have a powerful story to tell about the relationship between religion and America, but it’s not the one they are telling. God’s people have committed two grievous sins: They have forsaken the story of the church for the politics of lies and violence, and they have written a new false story – a story with more holes in it than a “cracked cistern that can hold no water.”
A Battle of Stories
Humans are the culmination of their stories. Therefore, it is imperative that we tell each other only true stories. This is one reason history matters. Our story gives us our backbone, our spirit, and our soul. The American story has guided us through tremendous triumphs, glaring flaws, world wars, a great depression, an array of rights movements. That story kept us warm on the cold days of defeat. Our sense of identity, our values, and our commitments have been carved out of our stories. The American story has helped us make progress in fulfilling the idealism of the founding fathers that all humans are created equal.
The difficulty with the evangelical version is that it makes the original American story unintelligible. And it is not even a complete story. Mostly it is a choppy, piecemeal story, as the tellers of the revisionist American story have leafed through American history books like biblical literalists piecing together the false narrative of the rapture or condemnations of gays with a few verses of Scripture snatched out of context to force the Bible to align with the story they already embraced.
Politicians like Josh Hawley, Tom Cotton, and Marjorie Taylor Greene are opportunistic con artists and hucksters offering maps to “freedom,” hawking road atlases for America. These “Christian nationalists” delineate where we are with a new bravado. Employing a kind of intellectual colonialism, these new cartographers rename entire regions of our experience and annex them to Christianity and nationalism, flattening the world by disenchantment.
The supposed evangelical Christianity of the founding fathers is always a highlight of this tour.
America has many stories told in many voices, not all of them English. No one gets to make up a story to replace the American stories. Stories are meant to be shared so that differences are turned into common core commitments.
But the current evangelical project involves the attempt to produce a people who believe that they should have no story except the single story made up for them by D. James Kennedy, David Barton, and Robert Jeffress. These false prophets have told their people that they get to believe – against all historical evidence – that America was founded as a Christian nation by evangelicals. This is what these false prophets mean by “freedom.”
A central feature of this story they have made up about America is that it involves the effort to wash the American past as pure as snow, without attention to the manifold atrocities of Americans (including evangelical Americans), without any sense of repentance and responsibility. This can’t possibly be a Christian story, can it?
The story that you should have no story except this story produces people like Hawley, who says things such as, ” “Some will say now that I am calling America a Christian nation. And so I am. And some will say I am advocating Christian Nationalism. And so I do.”
The problem is that the Christianity in Christian nationalism is not shaped by the Gospel. And not only does Christian nationalism fail to be Christian; it also fails to be good nationalism.
A Better Story Already Existed
Evangelicals could tell the story of the positive role of religion in modern democratic discourse. While the contributions of religious communities to democratic theory and practice are often minimized, the reality is that religious leaders often inspired democratic reform movements. Historian James Kloppenberg says, “Many partisans of democracy, from unconventionally Christian thinkers such as John Locke and John Adams to champions of the rights of women such as Mary Wollstonecraft and abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass drew inspiration from their religious faith.”
Tell me the story of Christian love and empathy. “Write on my heart every word.”
David Bentley Hart, in Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, offers evangelicals a much more truthful and stirring account of the influence of Christianity on the world. Hart notes
how enormous a transformation of thought, sensibility, culture, morality, and spiritual imagination Christianity constituted in the age of pagan Rome; the liberation it offered from fatalism, cosmic despair, and the terror of occult agencies; the immense dignity it conferred upon the human person; its subversion of the cruelest aspects of pagan society; its (alas, only partial) demystification of political power; its ability to create moral community where none had existed before; and its elevation of active charity above all other virtues.
Christianity qualifies in every sense as a revolution; a “truly massive and epochal revision of humanity’ prevailing vision of reality.” Evangelicals are part of this great revolution, and should be celebrating it..
“They Shall Know We Are Christians by Our Love!”
The people who would be known by their love have marched across the past twenty centuries with unprecedented and still unmatched moral triumphs. Its care of widows and orphans, its almshouses, hospitals, foundling homes, schools, shelters, relief organizations, soup kitchens, medical missions, charitable aid societies, and so on were not simply expressions of normal human kindness. These accomplishments were connected to the Christian conviction that “Jesus is Lord.” These were the people who turned the world upside down.
As Kloppenberg notes,
There are multiple reasons for taking seriously the role of religion in modern democratic discourse. Historically it is undeniable that the source of the animating ideals of modern democratic movements in the Atlantic world has been the Christian principle of agape, selfless love for all humans because all are created in God’s image, which lies beneath the democratic ethic of reciprocity.
Kloppenberg goes on to point out that “Christian ideas of humility, mercy, forgiveness, and equal respect for other persons form the backdrop against which modern concepts of autonomy and equality emerged, and they remain a crucial part of the cultural inheritance of North Atlantic democratic cultures.”
Evangelicals already possess an eternal, universal value: The Golden Rule. The admonition to treat your neighbor as you would like to be treated yourself dates back at least to the tenth century BCE. Early versions of The Golden Rule appeared in the law codes of the ancient Near East, and the oldest books of the Hebrew Bible contain variants on the theme. Norman Rockwell’s iconic illustration, Golden Rule, hangs in the headquarters of the United Nations. The work—originally presented to the UN in 1985 as a gift on behalf of the United States by then First Lady Nancy Reagan—was restored by Williamstown Art Conservation Center.
This painting acts as a defining trope of what most offends evangelical sensibilities. It flies in the face of the white supremacy that is implied in the notion of Christian nationalism. Pluralism, diversity, multiple races, women, different nationalities: all are part of the story evangelicals are fighting to destroy.
Religious experience has been a constant companion of democracy in America. Democracy requires deliberation, pluralism, and reciprocity. In a democracy, deliberation is central to how American citizens make decisions. Deliberation is required to resolve disputes over values.
A pluralistic society requires rhetorical, public space for the views of others. No one view has the authority to “lord it over” the views of others. Jesus expressly forbade such behavior among his followers:
You know that the rulers of the gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. It will not be so among you, but whoever wishes to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave, just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many (Matthew 20:25 – 28).
Democracy operates in a pluralistic society. Good citizens broaden their perspectives instead of narrowing them. In this regard, perhaps the most difficult of the tropes of democracy for evangelicals to practice has become reciprocity, in which all persons are to be treated with respect and their perspectives and aspirations are to be given due consideration.
Instead, the evangelical story created by folks like Barton and Jeffress frames all disagreements as all-or-nothing apocalyptic struggles between good and evil, a story which blinds evangelicals to the reality that negotiation and compromise are at the heart of democracy.
In short, evangelicals have put themselves in the untenable position of fighting against the values of toleration, personal autonomy, individual rights, pluralism, distributive justice, and religious neutrality in the nation.
The false evangelical story – riddled as it is with misinformation, false claims, and outright lies – is not the story of America. No matter how many copies of the Ten Commandments adorn public schools in some of the states, no matter how many Bible courses are offered in public schools, the false evangelical story is not America’s story.
And evangelicals already have a story. A story that they share with other Christian traditions and with the other great religious traditions. The Golden Rule story.
Would that they would abandon their false story.
Buddhism: Treat not others in ways that you yourself would find hurtful. (Udana-Varga 5.18)
Christianity: In everything, do to others as you would have them do you; for this is the law and the prophets. (Jesus, Matthew 7:12)
Hinduism: This is the sum of duty: do not do to others what would cause pain if done to you. (Mahabharata 5:1517)
Islam: Not one of you truly believes until you wish for others what you wish for yourself. (The Prophet Muhammad, Hadith)
Jainism: One should treat all creatures in the world as one would like to be treated. (Mahavira, Sutrakritanga)
Judaism: What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor; When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God. (Hillel, Shabbat 31a; Leviticus 19:33-34)
Sikhism: I am a stranger to no one; and no one is a stranger to me. Indeed, I am a friend to all. (Guru Granth Sahib, 1299)
Taoism: Regard your neighbor’s gain as your own gain, and your neighbor’s loss as your own loss. (T’ai Shang Kan Ying P’ien, 213-218)
Zoroastrianism: Do not do unto others whatever is injurious to yourself. (Shayast-na-Shayast, 13.29
