High School Students Trying to Understand Evangelicalism
by Susan Trollinger and William Trollinger
Returning to high school was great fun!
Last Friday we had the good fortune of speaking in Ms. Barbara Acker’s three Comparative Religion classes at Oakwood High School (just south of Dayton). We talked about young Earth creationism, and Sue showed slides from the Creation Museum . . . and we were mildly surprised (given that it is only an hour away, and given that Answers in Genesis has billboards in Dayton) to discover that only four students out of the three classes had been to the museum. Of course, Oakwood is a public school; it would be interesting to know what percentage of adolescents visiting the museum are homeschooled or attend Christian schools.
We also talked about evangelicalism and fundamentalism more broadly. And what made this such great fun is that the students had so many good questions for us. Here is a representative sample:
- How do creationists counter all the evidence for evolution and an old earth? Do they say that we simply have to take the idea of a young earth on faith?
- How could Noah have had all those animals on the Ark for a year and they weren’t eating each other?
- How do scholars of the Bible see the book of Revelation? If they do not see it as prophecy, how do they see it?
- Are you fundamentalists? If not, what got you to write about them?
- Will white evangelicalism remain such a powerful political force in America? Aren’t the numbers of evangelicals shrinking?
- Is Donald Trump an evangelical?
- Do evangelicals really think Donald Trump is an evangelical?
- Isn’t it a problem for evangelicals that our generation has a really different view of homosexuality and transgenderism than they do?
- Given that many evangelicals believe in patriarchy, how do they deal with sexual harassment? Is this a problem for them?
Quite frankly, we expected more questions on creationism and the Creation Museum. But as this list suggests, what many of these high schoolers wanted to talk about was politics and sexuality. And that’s telling.
The best research on the rapid rise of the “nones“ over the past few decades – Americans who have no religious affiliation – reveals that it is tightly connected to generational cohorts (the younger the cohort, the more religious disaffiliation). Moreover, a primary motivator for religious disaffiliation is unhappiness with the way in which Christianity has become – in very public ways – tied to a right-wing political agenda. In particular, the “nones” are – as the bright Oakwood student rightly suggested – unhappy with the way in which Christianity has become associated with a rigid opposition to homosexuality.
In short, as Robert Putnam and David Campbell noted in American Grace (2010), “young Americans [have come] to view religion as judgmental, homophobic, hypocritical, and too political” (121). The hypocrisy has really come into play over the last few years, as 81% of white evangelicals – most of whom take a hard moral line on homosexuality – voted for a man awash in sexual immorality. About the same percentage of white evangelicals in Alabama voted for Roy Moore despite his past sexual relationships with underage girls.
Referencing the above Putnam and Campbell quote, just this week Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne observed that
If you want a particularly exquisite hypocritical moment, consider that on Thursday, the very day when Trump had to admit his lies on the Stormy Daniels payoff, the president had a White House commemoration of the National Day of Prayer.
Dionne’s column was entitled “No Wonder There’s an Exodus from Religion.” Right.
Life After Fundamentalism
by William Trollinger
Evangelical colleges are always having to prove – to parents, donors, and evangelical leaders such as James Dobson or Ken Ham – that they are, to quote Adam Laats, “guardians and teachers of a necessarily vague dream of eternal and unchanging orthodoxy.” Sometimes the only way for an evangelical school to reassure doubters is to purge its ranks of supposedly “unsafe” faculty and administrators.
As we describe in Righting America, this is precisely what happened at Cedarville University between 2012-2014. One of those forced out of Cedarville was Carl Ruby, vice president for student life. His departure was a shock to many students, one of whom told The New York Times that Ruby “made Cedarville feel more like Heaven. If you thought someone would be untouchable, it would be Carl.” But as a former Cedarville trustee noted in the same article, Ruby was pushed out because conservative trustees “were threatened by Carl’s . . . ministry to people struggling with gender identification [i.e., LGBTQ students], how he ministers to people on the margins.”
Ruby was but one of 43 administrators, faculty, and staff members who departed Cedarville between the fall of 2012 and the summer of 2014, “some of whom [having been] forced out (having signed nondisclosure statements) while others quit and moved on to less hostile professional and religious climes” (213). This does not include the exodus of 15 members of the Board of Trustees, many of whom left in displeasure over the fundamentalist crackdown.
In our book, that is where the Cedarville tale ends. But it turns out there is more to the story. Take, for example, Carl Ruby.
Departing Cedarville, Ruby founded Welcome Springfield (OH) a non-profit organization that serves immigrants while also encouraging community members to sign a “Statement of Support for Immigrants in Clark County” that says in part:
While I recognize and support reasonable steps to ensure our national security, I also stand opposed to all forms of communication and policy that fail to recognize the human dignity and innate value of our global neighbors, especially those fleeing hardship, violence, poverty, and persecution.
While maintaining his position with Welcome Springfield, in the fall of 2014 he accepted the position as pastor of Central Christian Church in Springfield, which describes itself as a church where “we strive to keep Jesus at the center” and where “we care about justice” and “love our neighbors.”
In Springfield, where there are two mosques, “neighbors” includes Muslims. In an effort to build bridges between the Muslim and Christian communities (and as featured in a CBS Faith in America documentary) in May 2017 Central Christian members attended Friday prayers at one of the mosques and Muslims attended Sunday worship at Central Christian. As Ruby reflected on his Red Letter Christians blog,
I was overwhelmed by the strong sense of human connection. [Emphasis Ruby’s.] The events did not feel like an awkward mingling of strangers who were working hard at being polite and finding things to talk about. It felt like a reunion of longtime friends. There was an eagerness on both sides to connect and to love one another.
On the Central Christian website Ruby does not mention Cedarville or the purge, but he does describe – in winsome and gracious fashion – the journey he has been on:
I grew up in churches that tended to be pretty conservative. I met many beautiful people and learned lots about scripture, but I also encountered a tendency to neglect certain areas of the gospel such as our mandate to care for the poor and to commit ourselves to issues of social justice. I also experienced a church culture that added many rules and expectations that are not found in scripture . . . God didn’t save us just so that we could go to heaven. He saved us so that we could go to work trying to help bits of heaven to break through into our world through the sacrificial service of the body of Christ.
Life after fundamentalism, indeed.
The Specter of Jesus
by William Trollinger
The fact that white evangelicals have given us President Donald Trump has forced a significant minority of American evangelicals into profound self-examination. Some are simply abandoning the label. One of the most prominent is David Gushee, Distinguished University Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University:
Some of us have begun to face the fact that white evangelicalism is no longer our religious community. We must grieve, deeply. Perhaps we are now to be called post-evangelicals, or ex-evangelicals. Whatever we call ourselves, it is time to move on . . . We leave our morally bankrupt religious tribe. Find new community. State our clear dissent and give good reasons for it. Practice resistance where we can. Stand in solidarity with the oppressed. This is what we do now. At least, it is a start.
Others have responded by attempting to rescue evangelicalism from the Christian Right. As we noted in the last post, one group is the Red Letter Christians (RLC), an organization that seeks to take evangelicalism away from culture war politics and back to the teachings of Jesus.
Christian Right leaders are concerned. When the RLC held a “Red Letter Revival” in Lynchburg, VA, Jerry Falwell, Jr. threatened RLC leaders that if they stepped onto the Liberty University campus, they would be arrested. More than this, he commanded Liberty’s student newspaper not to report on the revival. “Ignore them.”
Falwell is not the only Christian Right leader spooked by these Jesus-following evangelicals. See, for example, Answer in Genesis (AiG) CEO Ken Ham.
In a recent blog post, entitled “Should We Sacrifice the Gospel on the Altar of Social Justice?,” Ham takes aim at the RLC:
Missing entirely from their ‘about us’ page is something rather important – the gospel! . . . The gospel is utterly absent and replaced, instead, with the social gospel. The social gospel is all about solving temporary problems such as poverty or racial division. Christians should be (and usually are) on the forefront of fighting these things, but they aren’t the most important issues. They are temporary consequences of the Curse and will pass with this world. Our primary focus, as we care for the poor and needy, is to preach the gospel so people will have their biggest problem – sin – solved! [Emphases in original.]
As Ham sees it, the RLC has “many things wrong, and I would caution people to stay away from this group.” And everything “this group” has wrong can be summarized in their rejection of biblical authority:
It’s no surprise that on their website they have a blog post criticizing biblical creationists . . . They’ve abandoned God’s Word as the ultimate authority beginning in Genesis, so why not pick and choose which parts of the Bible you like and which parts you want to ignore?” [Emphases ours.]
It is interesting that Ken Ham would level this charge, given that the whole point of the RLC is that Christian Right evangelicalism has chosen to ignore the teachings of Jesus.
Ham’s Creation Museum is the perfect example. After a decade of virtually nothing on Jesus, last May the museum added three rooms entitled “Christ,” “Cross,” and “Consummation.” In these rooms there is much on biblical prophecy, much on Jesus the blood sacrifice, much on Jesus’ power to perform miracles, much on the eternal judgment in hell that awaits all those who do not accept Jesus as Savior.
But when it comes to the “red letter” teachings of Jesus, when it comes to the Sermon on the Mount, there is virtually nothing here.
The Creation Museum is much less interested in teaching us how to live as Jesus taught us to live, and much more interested in threatening us with eternal damnation. Toward that end, the museum provides a placard with a quote from Matthew 25:41: “Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels.” Interestingly, on their website the Red Letter Christians include Matthew 25 as a particularly significant “red letter passage.” But while the RLC quotes the entire passage, the Creation Museum – which claims to stand for “biblical authority” — mentions just verse 41.
Why? What is the Creation Museum ignoring?
The highlighted section below is what is quoted at the Creation Museum; the following verses (42-46) are what the museum has chosen to omit:
“Depart from Me, you cursed, into the everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and gave me no food, I was thirsty and gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not give me clothing, sick and in prison and you did not visit me. Then they will also answer, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry or thirsty or naked or sick or in prison, and did not take care of you?” Then he will answer them, “Truly I tell you, just as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.” And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
As we point out in Righting America,
A “plain sense” reading of Jesus’s teachings in Matthew 25 would suggest that, at the very least, how one treats the thirsty, the hungry, the naked, the sick, and the imprisoned will be an essential component of how one’s life will be judged. (Righting 226)
It would seem that social justice is not extraneous to the Gospel. It is the Gospel.
Of course Jerry Falwell, Jr., Ken Ham, and other leaders of the Christian Right steer evangelicals away from the RLC. Of course they want to keep evangelicals from reading the Bible on their own. Because if evangelicals start reading the Gospels, well, they might encounter Jesus. And that prospect is frightening.
The specter haunting the Christian Right is Jesus.
A Specter is Haunting the Christian Right
by William Trollinger
It has been well-documented that the 2016 election of Donald Trump as president – and the fact that 81% of white evangelicals voted for him – has produced consternation and soul-searching within a segment of American evangelicalism. Some disaffected evangelicals (particularly, evangelicals of color) have disavowed the label. More than this, the evangelical attachment to culture war politics seems to be accelerating the disaffection of younger Americans, as the percentage of Americans under the age of 30 who are white and evangelical has dropped to 8%.
But there are those who are working to rescue evangelicalism from the clutches of the Christian Right. One such group is the Red Letter Christians (RLC), a name that refers to the fact that in many Bibles the words of Jesus are in red. Founded by evangelical activists and authors Tony Campolo and Shane Claiborne,
The goal of Red Letter Christians is simple: To take Jesus seriously by endeavoring to live out His radical, counter-cultural teachings as set forth in Scripture, and especially embracing the lifestyle prescribed in the Sermon on the Mount . . . What we are asserting, therefore, is that we have committed ourselves first and foremost to doing what Jesus said.
A few weeks ago the RLC held revival meetings in Lynchburg, Virginia. The choice of location was not a coincidence, as Lynchburg is, of course, home of Liberty University, a Christian Right citadel that is presided over by Trump apologist Jerry Falwell, Jr. Lynchburg’s “Red Letter Revival” nevertheless included the participation of a number of Liberty students, including one frustrated undergraduate who complained that Falwell’s administration “exhibits ‘toxic Christian nationalism.'”
Tony Campolo gave the altar call, an altar call strikingly different from what one typically hears at evangelical revivals:
Are you ready to say I’m going to commit myself to Jesus? I’m going to be committed to the poor? I’m going to stand up for the refugee? I’m going to speak for those who feel oppressed by our society?
While the RLC is committed to resisting the Christian Right’s appropriation of evangelicalism, it is also determined not to participate in the culture war binary of us vs. them. In this spirit, revival organizer Claiborne invited Falwell to join with him and other RLC leaders in a prayer meeting.
Falwell’s response was to threaten Claiborne with arrest and a $2500 fine if he stepped foot on the Liberty campus. Falwell prohibited the student newspaper, the Liberty Champion, from covering the event:
Let’s not run any articles about the event. That’s all these folks are here for – publicity. Best to ignore them.
Ignore them. Keep them off Liberty’s campus. Threaten arrest if necessary. Really?
What is so frightening to administrators at this well-funded and politically well-connected institution about this relatively small group of Bible-believing, Jesus-following evangelicals?
Jerry Falwell, Jr. is not the only Christian Right leader spooked by the Red Letter Christians. More on this in the next post.
Young Earth Creationism in Austria
by Kiersten Remster
Kiersten Remster is a 2017 University of Dayton graduate with a Bachelor of Arts in art history. Following graduation from UD, Kiersten won the prestigious Austrian Federal Ministry of Education Teaching Assistant Award, which is administered by Fulbright Austria. Thankful for this opportunity, she has been working with students of all ages at two schools in the village of Hollabrunn –not far from the Czech Republic border. Upon finishing teaching, Kiersten is headed to New York University to commence graduate work in European and Mediterranean Studies.
Recently, a colleague who teaches biology mentioned that he was working with our 8th graders on a lesson about creationism. I immediately recalled many memories with the University of Dayton’s Core Integrated Studies Program, when we learned about Ken Ham’s provocative theories regarding a 6000-year-old universe, and we experienced first-hand both Bill and Sue Trollinger’s academic expertise on young Earth creationism.
Having visited the Ark Encounter last year, I asked my biology colleague if I might be able to join his class and offer a lesson to the eighth graders on the American culture surrounding young Earth creationism.
Since the main school I work at is a private Catholic “Aufbaugymnasium,” or secondary high school, I was unsure of how students might perceive the content. Certainly there is a wide spectrum of spirituality and religious practices among them. As part of the curriculum, students are required to take a religion class, in addition to reading a morning prayer together before beginning each school day.
I began the lesson with a brief introduction on the Catholic Church’s position regarding evolution and some Pope Francis quotes that acknowledge the reality of evolution while not confronting evolutionism/creationism controversy in a direct manner.
We then discussed the beliefs of young Earth creationists: the Earth is only a few thousand years old; the “apparent age theory” that justifies their dismissal of fossils and geology as evidence of an old Earth; human beings lived alongside the dinosaurs.
The students were astonished to learn that a considerable number of Americans align themselves with young Earth creationism, or at least are skeptical of evolution.
Constantin, an eighth grader who grew up in a Catholic family and is active in church mission trips across Europe and the Middle East, explained his perspective of hearing about this extreme side of creationism.
In religion we already heard something about it [creationism]. However, I didn’t know the dimensions of young Earth creationism. I think as well as the Catholic Church that religion does not exclude science and the other way around. They discover reality from different perspectives. I think God doesn’t want to hide himself through the apparent age theory, but he wants that we discover him through the complexity and beauty of nature!
After going through some of the statistics regarding how far young Earth creationism has spread across the US, I showed the students the budget, design, and layouts for the Creation Museum and the Ark Encounter.
Something that is always a highly controversial topic in our class is how Americans are generally less concerned with being eco-friendly, yet seemingly might be paying the most in the future for their commodity-driven lifestyles. Thus when I informed the class about the amount of wood used in order to build this fantastical Ark, many found it unbelievable.
Marie-Teres, another eighth grader in this class, commented on this notion of environmental friendliness:
I was a bit mind-blown at first because it is against everything we have learned our entire lives. Comparing it to Austria, being really encouraged from a young age on to recycle, save water, electricity, etc., this ark construction is nothing that would ever be considered building here. It sure is something else and not comparable to our Austrian standards.
We ended the lesson reviewing some of the text and placards that occupy the walls throughout the Ark Encounter’s exhibits. I was quite proud when my 8th graders quickly recognized that the same font type used to describe the days of creation is seemingly identical to the infamous Lord of the Rings font.
Overall, the lesson came as quite a shock for most of the class in regards to how we (as Americans) are educated, given that many Austrians believe that the US has an advanced education system. Many students look up to the United States; most listen to American music, watch American shows on Netflix, or have shown a recent interest in the future of American politics.
I think it was valuable for them to learn about this young Earth creationist minority in American culture. Perhaps they learned that the grass is not always greener on the other side of the fence.
Sitting in the Dark at Willow Creek
by Susan Trollinger
The #MeToo movement is beginning to have an impact on American evangelicalism. The most recent example is at the megachurch of megachurches, Willow Creek Community Church, where founder and senior pastor Bill Hybels has been forced to retire early in the wake of allegations by seven women that Hybels has taken advantage of his position to engage in inappropriate behavior.
While Willow Creek now includes eight “regional congregations” in the Chicago area, the original Willow Creek church was founded in 1975, holding services in the Willow Creek Theater in Palatine. Sue was there in the early years of Willow Creek. This is her story.
I was not yet officially a high school student. But in the summer of 1978, I was given special permission to participate in Sun City—the youth ministry run by Willow Creek Church in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. I was so excited. Living in the suburbs (we were really in the exurbs) was tough—especially if you did not yet have your driver’s license. I didn’t. Living in the exurbs without a driver’s license meant spending altogether more time at home with mom and dad than even mom and dad wanted. So, every Thursday night, I very happily went off to Sun City. We’d meet at the Palatine YMCA in the evening, but while the sun was still up. If the weather was good, we’d engage in some competitive outdoor game against another Sun City youth team. We were the Navy team (the teams were identified by colors). And we meant to win. What we were supposed to win, I don’t recall. When the outdoor games were done, we’d all head into the gym at the YMCA. We were all pumped from our outdoor activities. We’d find our seats among the rows and rows of folding chairs with our team and start clapping to the music offered up by the praise band. After a skit, an on-screen cartoon (depicting some valuable biblical lesson), and some more music, we’d settle in for the “message” for the night.
Over the course of the next few years, I became heavily involved in Sun City. I joined the “Core” group of my team, attended weekly Bible studies (in which we memorized Bible verses—for more team points), and enjoyed fellowship with that small group of committed young Christians. Along the way, I became smitten with a young fellow who regularly attended. It was all very good.
Then one fall evening I was taken a bit aback. What unfolded that evening was not what I was used to. I should say that for the folks at Willow Creek, I was considered among the “unchurched.” That is, prior to coming to Willow Creek, I had very little experience within organized religion. I had been to church now and again when I was small, but by the time I was in first grade, my family had stopped going to church. So, my knowledge of church was quite limited. That’s important because on the night I am describing I experienced something I did not have a word for.
We did the usual—we competed in some game outside and then came into the gym and took our seats. We clapped to the music, sang along with the lyrics projected on the overhead screens, contemplated the cartoon (also projected on the screens), reflected on the drama performed on the elevated stage, and then settled into our folding chairs for the youth pastor’s wisdom.
I no longer recall what the youth pastor said that night. What I do remember is that he brought his message to a close in a most dramatic way. He directed the lighting technicians to turn off the stage lights. So, we were sitting in the dark. And then he asked us all to close our eyes. And then he gave us a task.
We were to look into our hearts and ask ourselves if Jesus had come into our hearts. Had Jesus come to us, he asked? And were we ready to commit ourselves to following him? If Jesus had come and if we were ready to follow him then we were to leave the gymnasium and head out through the doors to a hallway where already-committed Christians were ready to receive us. They would pray with us as we dedicated our lives to Jesus. Until we had that clarity, we were to remain in the gymnasium. In the dark.
I took this challenge very seriously. Not having grown up going to church regularly, I really didn’t have a good idea of what it meant to look into my heart to see if Jesus had come into it. That just didn’t make a lot of sense to me. But the question about whether Jesus had come to me—that made sense. Had Jesus come to me? I thought and I thought and I thought. And as much as I really wanted to say that he had, I couldn’t. I was pretty darn sure that if Jesus had come to me, I’d know it. I’d for sure remember it. He hadn’t. I knew that. So, I sat there for a while longer. In the dark. And then, finally, I got up out of that folding chair, walked through the door, walked past all those earnest Christians who obviously had been touched by Jesus and left the building. I never returned.
Surely, if Jesus had wanted to touch me he had had ample opportunity in those years as I attended Sun City every Thursday night and memorized Bible verses among the members of our core team. Obviously, Jesus was not interested in me. I had not passed the test. And so years passed before I crossed the threshold of a church again.
So Much Good Stuff to Read (about Evangelicals and Donald Trump): Part Two
by William Trollinger
One of the few benefits of the Donald Trump presidency that many smart journalists and scholars are now writing about white evangelicals in an effort to understand these Christians who make up his most loyal constituency.
The challenge is that so many great articles are appearing that it is difficult to keep up. We had originally planned to emulate what we did in the last post, and provide links to and brief comments about two of the best articles that have appeared in just the last three weeks. But two more excellent articles have just appeared, and thus we also include them here, but with briefer commentary.
- Sarah Jones, “The Invisible Free Speech Crisis,” The New Republic.
In this article Sarah Jones cogently argues that, while the mainstream press has highlighted the alleged suppression of free speech by leftists at secular universities, it has completely ignored the ways in which the Christian Right routinely suppresses free speech at evangelical institutions such as Liberty University, Cedarville University, and Wheaton College, as well as at the Franciscan University of Steubenville, the headquarters of what some refer to as Catholic fundamentalism. Jones knows whereof she speaks. A Cedarville graduate, she provided (and we quote her in Righting America) some of the best commentary on the school’s 2012-2014 “purge” of insufficiently fundamentalist faculty and staff. But while many students and professors at evangelical schools find the restrictions on speech to be oppressive (even dangerous, when it comes to fears about reporting sexual abuse), the folks running these schools and donating to these schools do not see restrictions on free speech as a problem. As Adam Laats observes, the point of establishing these institutions “was to police faculty belief and student thought. Evangelical colleges that restrict speech these days don’t face a crisis. They fulfill a promise.”
- Rodney Hessinger and Kristen Tobey, “President Trump Gets a Stormy Daniels Bump with Evangelicals,” cleveland.com
These two John Carroll University professors address a very interesting question: why has white evangelical support of Donald Trump grown dramatically (61% to 78%) in the wake of the Stormy Daniels revelations? For Hessinger and Tobey, there is nothing surprising about this. As they provocatively argue, sexual scandal has always been part of evangelicalism, to the point that “forbidden sex” is “essential” to the evangelical enterprise. Put another way, sexual sin is eminently forgivable, while challenges to patriarchy – the true “family value,” as the authors note and as we note in Righting America – are not. This is a fascinating and well-argued piece. But while the authors suggest that we should stop charging white evangelicals with hypocrisy – given that it simply feeds their sense of persecution – they leave out the salient point that the white evangelicals have routinely lambasted the sexual sins of “others.” And this hypocrisy may be a factor in the declining numbers of white evangelicals, particularly evangelical youth.
- Alec MacGillis, “How Liberty University Built a Billion Dollar Empire Online,” The New York Times
This wonderfully written and powerfully documented article provides a fascinating and horrifying peek into the Liberty University Online. LUO is a gigantic money-making operation that – with its combination of astonishingly low spending on instruction combined with a relentless recruiting of students who default on their loans at an alarming rate – seems much more of a scam than an educational enterprise. MacGillis quotes a Liberty senior at the end of the article: while the residential campus is “’beautiful,” the truth is that “it’s funded by the online program that’s sold to people who can’t really afford college.’”
- Michael Massing, “How Martin Luther Paved the Way for Donald Trump,” The Nation.
While the article’s title is a stretch, Massing’s argument is convincing. Despite all those (the authors of Righting America included) who argue that the theology and practices of the Christian Right are very much at odds with the teachings of Jesus, there are real parallels between Martin Luther, on the one hand, and politicized fundamentalists and the president they enthusiastically support, on the other. To quote Massing: “Trump’s insults, invective, and mocking tweets against enemies real and perceived seem a long way from the Sermon on the Mount, but they very much mirror the pugnacity, asperity, and inflammatory language of the first Protestant.”
We hope you, our readers, share your thoughts on these pieces or any other reporting on evangelicals that folks might find informative. Feel free to leave a comment below.
So Much Good Stuff to Read (about Evangelicals and Donald Trump): Part One
by William Trollinger
One of the few benefits of the Donald Trump presidency is that many smart journalists are now writing about white evangelicals in an effort to understand these Christians who make up his most loyal constituency.
The challenge is that so many great articles are appearing that it is difficult to keep up. In this post and the next we will provide links to and brief comments about four of the best articles that have appeared in just the last three weeks. One note: given Trump’s appalling treatment of women and the apparent lack of concern on the part of white evangelicals, it does not seem mere coincidence that all four of these articles are written by women (there is one male co-author in the mix).
- Meghan O’Gieblyn, “Exiled: Mike Pence and the Evangelical Fantasy of Persecution,” Harper’s.
The fact that O’Gieblyn is a former evangelical contributes to the power of this remarkable article, which is the cover story in the current Harper’s. She cogently explains how Pence and his Christian Right supporters draw upon the story of Babylonian exile to tell the story of their own persecution in America and the return of the persecuted to power, the latter thanks to a pagan leader (then Cyrus, now Trump) who is carrying out God’s plan to protect His chosen people (then the Hebrews, now the evangelicals). It will seem incredible to many readers that Pence can straight-facedly claim that – as quoted by O’Gieblyn – “no people of faith face greater hostility or hatred than followers of Christ.” However bizarre it may seem, the persecution trope is now commonplace in American evangelicalism, and Pence is simply channeling leaders such as Ken Ham who believe that, as we report in Righting America, “in what was and should be Christian America, true Christians are in the minority, true Christians are the downtrodden and the persecuted, true Christians are portrayed as the enemy, and true Christians are seen as ‘fair game’ for ‘brazen’ attacks that ‘are vicious, slanderous, and full of lies and hatred’” (162-3).
- Katha Pollitt, “Why Evangelicals – Still! – Support Trump,” The Nation.
The print version of this scathing article is entitled “Church of Hypocrisy.” Pollitt convincingly argues that evangelicals have willingly sold their souls to the staggeringly immoral Donald Trump for the promise of ending Roe v. Wade, rolling back gay rights and civil rights legislation, and breaking down the wall separating church and state. For Pollitt, the silver lining is that this Trumpian bargain has brought “the discrediting of evangelical Christianity,” as now “everyone is laughing” at their jaw-dropping hypocrisy. Some readers will be discomfited by Pollitt’s harsh tone and her glee at the unmasking of conservative Protestantism – but there is no getting around the fact that she accurately describes how many Americans now see evangelicals, and for good reason. More than this, and this is not something Pollitt discusses, many evangelicals – particularly evangelical youth – are equally appalled by what the embrace of Trump has revealed about white evangelicalism in the United States. Who knows what all this means for the future American evangelicalism in the future . . . but surely evangelicals do not need to be told that selling one’s soul never works out in the end.
Making College (and America) Great Again!
by William Trollinger
If you want to understand why 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, schools are a very good place to start.
Here at the University of Dayton (UD) approximately 60 people – faculty and students from UD as well as from local evangelical colleges – gathered in Sears Recital Hall this past Wednesday afternoon to hear Adam Laats present on “Making College Great Again: Evangelical Higher Education from Darwin to Trump.” Borrowing from his newly-published Fundamentalist U, Adam traced the long-standing tradition in white evangelical higher education of combining conservative evangelical faith with a particularly intense form of American nationalism. Using Biola University, Bob Jones, Gordon College, Liberty University, Moody Bible Institute, and Wheaton College as his examples, Adam clearly and energetically traced the history of white evangelical commitment to making America great again from the early 20th century to the present.
It was a tour de force. One sign of this was the very good questions that emerged in the Q and A period. Here are a few:
- Is there a difference between fundamentalism and evangelicalism, and is the fundamentalist movement losing steam?
- How do Pentecostals and Pentecostals fit into this story?
- Are white evangelicals thinking for themselves and consciously choosing the Republican Party, or is this attachment so deep that it is simply assumed – a matter of conforming with other evangelicals?
- When in his presidential campaign Trump, a la Nixon, called out to the “silent majority” to support his campaign, were white evangelicals this silent majority?
- How have evangelical colleges viewed and influenced Catholic higher education? (Note to reader: Keep in mind that UD is a Catholic university!)
- As regards the linking of evangelical faith and American nationalism, what about the fact that during the Cold War conservative evangelicals were obsessed with the idea that the United States was the force of Light in a battle with Satan and the Communist menace? (For Adam’s response to this question, see his blog post, The Devil Made Them Do It.)
Perhaps the most challenging and important question was asked, in different ways, by a couple of people in attendance:
- How could any Christian of any denominational background ever mix up their priorities so badly? How could any Christian confuse his/her (primary) devotion to religion with his/her (secondary) devotion to country?
After the presentation Adam and Bill continued to discuss this question, the focus being the great organizational mastermind of 1920s fundamentalism, William Bell Riley. Riley was a Baptist, and as a Baptist of that time he claimed that he was committed to the separation of church and state. And yet, when one reads what Riley wrote, it is very clear that the government and schools he wanted and expected was government and schools in line with his own conservative Protestant commitments.
What gives? The simple story is that in many ways evangelicals ran the show in nineteenth century America. But with the immigration of Catholics and Jews (and others) in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and with the advance of “unchristian” ideas such as Darwinism and higher biblical criticism (historicism), conservative Protestants felt as if they were losing “their” country. This sense of loss has only deepened over the past century, with the increasing religious pluralism, and with increasing percentages of Americans who are people of color. And this sense that America and its schools have been stripped from white evangelicals, that America has been taken from its rightful proprietors, animates much of politicized fundamentalism today.
It wasn’t much of a leap . . . to mix together a patriotic faith in the United States with a religious devotion to evangelical Christian values. Defending traditional Americanism was entirely equal to defending true evangelical religion, and vice versa. When the eternal mixed so profoundly with the national, it was not at all difficult or unusual for white fundamentalists to mash together their religious faiths with their patriotic fervor.
And so we get the Christian Right, and President Trump.
The T-Word in Evangelical Higher Education
by Adam Laats
Adam Laats is Professor of Education and History (by courtesy) at Binghamton University (State University of New York). His most recent book – which just came out – is Fundamentalist U: Keeping the Faith in American Higher Education (Oxford UP). His earlier books include The Other School Reformers: Conservative Activism in American Education (Harvard UP, 2015) and, with co-author Harvey Siegel, Teaching Evolution in a Creation Nation (University of Chicago Press, 2016). Adam blogs at the wonderfully named I Love You But You Are Going to Hell.
And we are excited to announce that Adam will be speaking here at the University of Dayton this Wednesday afternoon, on the topic: “Making College Great Again: Evangelical Higher Education from Darwin to Trump.” Adam’s talk is open to the public – please join us for what should be a lively presentation! More information below.
Adam Laats will present “Making College Great Again” on Wednesday, April 11, 2018 from 4-5:30pm at University of Dayton’s Sears Recital Hall.
Brave truth-speaking or despicable racism? Bold Christian witness or cowardly hate-speech? Love it or hate it, the publication of an originally anonymous conservative newsletter at Taylor University has provoked ferocious responses. While the content is certainly enough to raise hackles, there is a more fundamental issue at stake, one that has always caused evangelical colleges to clamp down hard on anonymous newsletters.
As RACM has noted, the Excalibur/ResPublica newsletter met with an immediate reaction. President Paul Lowell Haines condemned the “discord and distrust” that the anonymous publication fueled.
As I’ve noted elsewhere, I found in the research for my recent book about evangelical higher education that these sorts of anonymous newsletters have a long history. Sometimes the writers—as at Taylor—are from the fundamentalist right. Other times they’ve come from the evangelical left. In either case, however, the administration has felt compelled to react loudly and aggressively.
Why? Why do these anonymous religious/political/cultural screeds generate such reactions? It might seem easier for administrators to write off these newsletters as mere ideological wackiness—an unfortunate but harmless outburst from over-caffeinated evangelical intellectuals.
Administrators do not have that option. For decades now, anonymous newsletters at evangelical colleges have been met with immediate and sometimes surprisingly ferocious administrative responses. For instance, in 1963, Wheaton faculty members wondered why their school had punished students so relentlessly for publishing an ideologically charged magazine. The students, after all, had broken no rules. But they had tapped a third rail of evangelical colleges, the same third rail that has sparked such heat—if not a lot of light—at Taylor.
At Wheaton in 1963, the students had been banned from the official student newspaper. So at their own expense, they published and distributed an independent student newsletter, Critique. It wasn’t entirely anonymous; two editors included their names. But they left out the bylines for the rest of the contributors.
“Critique,” the student newspaper from Wheaton College.
In a nutshell, the student activists protested against Wheaton’s fundamentalist traditions. The writers criticized Wheaton’s “‘protective’ approach” to Christian education. Students who were banned from reading certain books or hearing certain speakers, they argued, “have no choice but to reject Christian education.”
Another writer warned that religious disagreements could never be crushed. Only “competent criticism” could convince people of religious truths, not “coercion.”
And, as another anonymous evangelical activist wrote, “The truth must bear all light.”
The students were right to be cautious. The two identified editors were suspended for an entire year, even though they had officially broken no rules.
Why such a harsh punishment? Wheaton’s faculty wondered. As one put it,
We must face frankly the undeniable inconsistencies between our talk and our walk. When we espouse critical thinking in the classroom and require party-line expression in publications we create a trap for students.
And as another faculty member asked pointedly,
Is not one year’s leave of absence an extremely severe penalty to inflict for this type of crime?—especially since [we] have suspend[ed] students for two weeks only, even though those students were admittedly guilty of drinking and violating their own personal integrity. . . I am concerned lest we shall come to that place where we consider the sin of opposing ideas the greatest of all sins. [Emphasis in original.]
If Wheaton’s rebels had this kind of faculty support, why did they still receive such harsh punishments? As at Taylor, the Critique episode provoked such extravagant response because it touched an intensely sore spot for evangelical colleges.
Namely, all evangelical colleges have an absolute, non-negotiable need to be seen as “true.” In order to maintain the faith and trust of their community, evangelical schools need relentlessly to police their reputation as steadfast enforcers of their evangelical, cultural, and political beliefs. This is not a luxury, but an existential necessity. If a school loses its reputation as “true,” it risks losing students’ tuition dollars and alumni donation dollars. Losing one’s reputation as “true” is a life-and-death threat for evangelical institutions.
Certainly, the details change over time. No student these days would be punished at Wheaton for wondering if students should engage with ideas outside the fundamentalist tradition. But though the specific boundaries may change over time, the basic need for all evangelical colleges to be seen as “true” remains as strong and as binding as ever.
In Taylor’s case, that means an anonymous newsletter charging moral decay and institutional slackening can’t be treated as a mere oddity. It can’t be dismissed as a wacky howl from a small group of campus cranks. Rather, because it raises the question of Taylor’s status as a “true” institution, this newsletter must be treated as a serious charge, an accusation deserving an immediate and reassuring response
