Evangelical Credibility and Strategic Alliances with the Morally Compromised

My evangelical friends who voted for Donald Trump last year tended to offer the same explanation: both Trump and Clinton were morally odious characters, but Trump had promised to make pro-life Supreme Court appointments while Clinton was sure not to.

And so, a strategic alliance was forged.

Of course, some evangelicals whitewashed Trump's character in defiance of what strikes me as overwhelming evidence that the man is fundamentally out of touch with anything in the vicinity of Christian values. I suspect that on some level they knew the truth but had a hard time feeling good about voting for him for purely strategic reasons. But most of the evangelicals I know who voted for Trump saw him as the lesser of two evils--meaning they saw him as an evil, but as one they could work with.

They had a deal with him. The entitled trust fund billionaire from New York City who has never been a principled advocate for life (or for choice, since he has no core principles at all) gets to wear the title of president in exchange for enacting legislation and judicial appointments that promote evangelical concerns.

Their vote was about political realism. Sometimes you have to make deals with the devil. Of course, deals with the devil tend to have costs--but if you're making a deal with the devil to serve God's agenda, won't God shield you from those costs?

Apparently not. At least not all of them. And thinking about the costs of making such deals is important.

Fast-forward a year. Roy Moore, who has long posed as a conservative evangelical fighter for bringing God into the public square, is coasting towards becoming the new Senator from Alabama. And then the news breaks: a credible report, well-vetted, by a woman who says that when she was fourteen and Moore was in his thirties, he engaged in sexual acts with her (short of intercourse). More corroborating stories pour in, some more credible than others. It's reported that when Moore was in his thirties he was so active in pursuing teen girls in the Gadsden Mall that he developed a reputation, and security at the mall was on guard when he was there.

There is a brand of belligerent finger-pointing Christianity--a culture-warrior kind of Christianity that attacks those who are Other, that wears Christianity like a visible cloak of righteousness rather than a humble vocation--that is particularly attractive to those who have deep moral flaws but who lack the moral courage to confront and confess with sincere humility. Instead, they try to find righteousness in an ideology of division: there is the in-group, and there's the out-group, and being part of the in-group is what makes you good despite the evils you know are lurking in your soul.

Sometimes, the most vigorous agents of this us-them brand of Christianity are really fighting to justify themselves through the easy righteousness of belonging to the right group (instead of engaging in the deeply frightening task of confronting their sins honestly, feeling sincere remorse and penitence, and making a humble effort to open themselves up to grace).

If you want my analysis of Moore, that's it. But whether this is right or not, it's clear that Moore's Christian warrior persona was masking something dark--and in the weeks before the election, that darkness was exposed.

But Moore was a pro-life Republican, and his opponent in the Senate race, Doug Jones, was a pro-choice Democrat. Whatever Moore's moral flaws, there was again the deal to think about: If Moore loses, then the Republican majority in the Senate shrinks and it becomes harder for Republicans to push through legislation that favors evangelical concerns. Worse, the Senate becomes two Senators shy of a Democratic majority with the power to block judicial nominations.

And so, evangelicals in Alabama were confronted with another deal-with-the-devil scenario. Again, some tried to whitewash: "Adult men dating teens isn't so bad" (!!!) or "It's just a plot of the liberal media to discredit a good Christian man" (etc.). But many evangelicals knew that the allegations against Moore were credible. Not all of the ones that came out in the wake of the original charges perhaps, but enough to form a reinforcing set of reports that were heavily vetted by stringent journalistic standards.

Some of my evangelical friends who voted for Trump based on the strategic-alliance-with-the-lesser-evil argument were hesitant to do the same in the case of Moore, because they were worried about the costs. Others were less worried.

So, here's the question: should evangelicals be worried about the costs of making deals and strategic alliances with morally compromised politicians?

One of the main costs is to credibility. At stake is whether evangelicals will be seen as a credible voice of Christian values in the public sphere.

Today I read a George Will essay, "Trump's Moore Endorsement Sunk the Presidency to Unplumbed Depths," and one paragraph in particular stood out for me. It was a paragraph about Will's take on American evangelicals.

Keep in mind that Will has long been a standard-bearer of conservatism in American public life. While his essays often mask logical leaps with brilliant rhetorical flourishes (and while he loves the art of the creative insult), he has been an eloquent defender of conservative political values for decades. He is not a fan of the Democratic Party, of the Clintons, of the progressive political agenda that evangelicals oppose. So it matters what Will thinks of evangelicals in way that it doesn't matter what, say, Bill Maher thinks of them. It speaks to whether evangelical credibility in public discourse is eroding.

Here's what George Will says:

Moore has been useful as a scythe slicing through some tall stalks of pretentiousness: The self-described “values voters” and “evangelicals” of pious vanity who have embraced Trump and his Alabama echo have some repenting to do before trying to reclaim their role as arbiters of Republican, and American, righteousness. We have, alas, not heard the last from them, but henceforth the first reaction to their “witness” should be resounding guffaws.    

Resounding guffaws. I am a Christian. I do not label myself as an evangelical (although I belong to the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America), because even though I embrace the term in its original meaning it has come to be associated with a kind of Christianity that isn't mine. Nevertheless, it pains me a little to hear George Will, a conservative staple, speak of evangelicals as a proper target of derision. I know that for many, evangelicals are the public face of American Christianity. They stand in for Christianity as a whole, such that derision directed towards them spills over onto Christianity more broadly.

The Christian faith is too beautiful, too important, to become the object of mockery. And to the extent that it becomes such an object, it loses far more than it can gain through short-term political alliances.

At its best, Christianity transcends partisan politics, nurturing a kind of human community that is not about the ugliness of political campaigns and us-vs-them conflict but aspires towards a beloved community that seeks fellowship across all such divisions. The the extent that evangelicals have become mired in partisan politics, tying their fate to one political party, they have lost touch with something essential. The same is true, of course, for progressive Christianity, which often weds itself too closely to the political successes and failures of the democrats.

But the problems become even deeper when Christians of any stripe are unwilling to be honest about the deep flaws of "their" candidate. When credible accusations against "their" political candidate are dismissed or whitewashed or trivialized in favor of political expediency, Christianity becomes a political movement infected by the partisanship and ugliness of politics, rather than a different kind of movement.

A movement defined by values at odds with the divisiveness of politics.

A movement that replaces the tribalism of human life with the understanding of all humanity and all creation as beloved children of the same God of love.

A movement that follows Christ, who refused to play partisan politics, who rejected in-groups and out-groups, who sought a different path than the path of political power--choosing instead to die for the sake of those who rejected and despised him.

Only when we reclaim Christianity as a non-political movement can we reclaim the moral authority to transform humanity's partisan impulses rather than be transformed by them. And this is hard to do. I am preaching as much to myself here as I am to anyone else.

As Christian voters we may be forced to choose between the lesser of two evils--and we will often disagree about which is which. Sometimes both evils presented seem sufficiently grave we may be obligated to "throw away our vote" on a third party candidate or a write-in; sometimes one evil is so grave compared to the other that we should choose the lesser evil. Again, we will disagree about when we face which kind of dilemma. 

But we should avoid, I think, political alliances and deals with what we take to be the lesser evil. Instead, we must retain the independence and groundedness in moral principle to speak against whatever evils remain in our political life. As soon as we choose the lesser evil, we must stand against the evil that resides in what we have chosen--and this is not something we can do if we make deals with the evil we have chosen, and so have been co-opted by the system of partisan politics.

(It goes without saying here that the "evil" should not be identified with a person, who is a creation of God, beloved and precious, but the wicked character that corrupts, the sinful agendas that can do so much harm, etc.)

We live in the world, and so we must engage with politics. But we need to find a way to engage while rising enough above it so that we can critique and transform it. And we must always think about the credibility and moral authority that is essential for that task.

Was C.S. Lewis a Heretic?

In a recent guest post on Andy Gill's website, Tylor Standley offers a list of Christian luminaries who--by the standards currently invoked by some conservative Evangelicals--should be dubbed heretics.

It's a pretty effective post. The aim, of course, is not to encourage Evangelicals to "excommunicate" C.S. Lewis, Martin Luther, St. Augustine, Billy Graham, and others. Rather, it's to invite them to rethink the rigid criteria of Christian orthodoxy that they impose. Do you really want to adopt a standard of what it means to be a "true" Christian that's so narrow you'd do well to bar your children from reading The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, lest they be led to heresy?

I personally found the comments on the post as instructive in their way as the post itself. Rather than concede that these heroes of the faith would have to be judged heretical by the current standards so many Evangelicals impose, several commenters tried to rescue their heroes from the charges.

For example, Standley "accuses" Billy Graham of being an inclusivist--that is, a Christian who thinks that non-Christians might actually be saved. Why think that? Well, in a 1997 interview, Graham said, "They may not even know the name of Jesus but they know in their hearts that they need something that they don’t have, and they turn to the only light they have, and I think that they are saved and they are going to be with us in heaven."

Just in case anyone doubts it, Standley links to a video in which Graham utters these words. A commenter responded by questioning the authenticity of the video, noting that "voices can be pretty easily impersonated." (Another commenter responded that they knew the quote was authentic because they wrote down his words when he said them.)

But of particular interest to me was the response to the claim the C.S. Lewis was an inclusivist (of the same sort as Graham) and that he denied the penal substitutionary theory of the atonement in favor of the Christus Victor theory. Standley points to The Chronicles of Narnia in support of both claims.

I don't want to get bogged down in the details of rival theories of the Atonement and the way that Lewis's The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe reflects the Christus Victor view. The careful and systematic parallels between the Aslan-sacrifice story and the Christus Victor interpretation of the Christ's Atonement are vivid and unmistakable, as Greg Boyd nicely articulates here.

What interests me is that, rather than concede that a Christian might legitimately favor the Christus Victor theory, several people chose instead to challenge Standley's evidence for Lewis's supposed heresies...by arguing that the Chronicles of Narnia are a work of fantasy fiction, not theology, and so cannot be taken as representing Lewis's actual theological views.

Really?

It is true, of course, that some fiction writers toy with worldviews not their own, and shape stories defined by ways of seeing things that they don't personally endorse. These aren't the stories that make believers out of people--usually they have a very different effect. But when Lewis wrote his children's fairy tales, he was quite deliberately shaping the fruits of his imagination and the form of the fairy tale into a Christian allegory. He wanted his books to be a mode of Christian education. And every Christian Evangelical out there knows as much. That's why they're so eager to have their kids read the Narnia books.

But just in case there's any doubt, Lewis told us as much himself. In a 1956 New York Times essay, "Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's to Be Said," Lewis put it this way:

I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past certain inhibitions which had paralyzed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did I find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the suffering of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to... But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons? I thought one could. 

Lewis saw quite clearly the power of stories to shape the heart and to give rise to religious feeling. As such, he chose to put his storytelling to the service of his faith--using the form of the fairy tale to "steal past the watchful dragons" that keep children (and adults) from experiencing the real potency of Christian teachings.

Would he do this work in service of theological perspectives at odds with what he believed to be true? I suppose, in attempting to sever the connection between Lewis's fiction and his theology, you could make such a claim. But then you'd render Lewis something worse than a heretic.

There are plenty who have trouble with Lewis precisely because of what he admits to in the 1956 essay: He knows he can shape the hearts and minds of others through storytelling, and he sets out consciously to do so. Some think this is little better than religious brainwashing.

I think that's a harsh judgment. While there are reasons to worry about indoctrination of susceptible minds, I think every good story and every effective storyteller has a message that, precisely because of the emotive and immersive power of story, can "steal past the watchful dragons" and hit us in a new and transformative way. Whether that's a good or a bad thing depends a lot on the message and the motives of the messenger.

Imagine how much worse our judgment of Lewis would be if, instead of telling allegorical stories in support of what he believed, in order to nurture feelings of wonder and reverence in relation to what spurred those feelings within himself, Lewis was in the business of using the power of storytelling to serve messages he thought were false.

It seems to me that the defining feature of a propagandist is indifference to the truth. Propagandists want to cement the power of their political faction or increase sales of their product--and will propagate whatever message serves these goals. Storytellers who love the true and the good, and who tell a story that honestly express their vision of the true and the good, are a different creature altogether.

This is what I take Lewis to be. And if that's what you take him to be, then you can't dismiss the theological ideas that emerge so vividly in his stories. Yes, they are fantasy. Yes, they are fiction. But they are fantasy fiction with a purpose--and if you're convinced that the purpose is heretical, you don't do Lewis a favor by saying he didn't really mean it.

Faith, Doubt, and Sex

Rachel Held Evans has an interesting new blog post, "Is Doubt an STD?", that addresses a worrisome practice she's observed in some evangelical Christian communities: treating the religious doubts of young adults as if they were nothing more than a symptom of a guilty conscience--more often than not guilt about having sex.

Although she does an excellent job of critiquing this practice, there's one point she doesn't make (at least not in this post) that I want to raise here. But first, let's look a bit more closely at the worrisome practice. The idea underlying it is, roughly, this: If you feel guilty about something you did that's condemned by your inherited faith, you may decide to strike back at what's condemning you--by challenging the tenets of the faith. 

And, of course, since we're talking about young adults here, the "something you did" is usually sex.

So, rather than take a young adult's doubts about their inherited faith at face value, a pastor or religious mentor cuts to the chase and asks, "So who have you been sleeping with?" And this, of course, is supposed to uncover the root issue--guilt. The questions will be answered through repentance, the doubts laid to rest once one has confessed to getting laid.

Hell, Bell, and Christian Sales Tactics

As most people interested in the Christian universalism-vs-hellism controversy already know, Rob Bell's recent book (and the conservative backlash to it) sparked Time Magazine to do this week's cover article, "Is Hell Dead?", on the topic. As I was reading the article, I was particularly struck by journalist Jon Meacham's account of what lies behind the "traditionalist" resistance to questioning the doctrine of eternal damnation:

If heaven, however defined, is everyone's ultimate destination in any event, then what's the incentive to confess Jesus as Lord in this life? If, in other words, Gandhi is in heaven, then why bother with accepting Christ? If you say the Bible doesn't really say what a lot of people have said it says, then where does that stop? If the verses about hell and judgment aren't literal, what about the ones on adultery, say, or homosexuality? Taken to their logical conclusions, such questions could undermine much of conservative Christianity.

Now the second part of this account covers issues I've discussed before. I've talked quite a bit about biblical inerrancy and literalism on this blog, and my recent RD article about the conservative backlash to Bell focuses mostly on the motivations that spring from a failure to distinguish one's own beliefs about God from the truth about God--a confusion (or deliberate blurring of distinctions) that seems to underlie much of the impetus for treating critical questions as anathema.

But what struck me first when reading this passage was the first part--the part which asks why anyone should bother to accept Christ, to confess Jesus as Lord, if it isn't true that all non-Christians roast for eternity in fiery torment of the most horrific imaginable kind. I mean, why should I bother to tuck my kids in at bedtime if failing to do so doesn't mean eternal anguish in the pits of hell? Why eat breakfast if I could skip breakfast and yet still avoid unremitting agony? Clearly, everything I choose to do would be pointless if the alternative to doing it weren't damnation.

Of course I'm being sarcastic. The point is that we do all kinds of things without being threatened with damnation if we don't do them. I tuck my kids in because I love them and because I enjoy tucking them in, not because I'm trying to avoid some bad result (let alone one of eternal duration and ultimate horror). And while this shows that the rhetorical question Meacham poses is only marginally coherent, it doesn't mean that Meacham is wrong to pose it as part of what lies behind traditionalist resistance to universalism. I've heard rhetorical questions of precisely this sort often enough from Christian conservatives to know that there is something in the vicinity of these questions that truly worries them.

Of course, part of what may really worry them is that Christ is being rendered inessential for salvation--which they think undermines Christ's life and sacrifice, trivializing the Incarnation and Atonement. But this worry is clearly misguided, since Christ is hardly made inessential by supposing that the scope of His success in achieving the salvation of humanity is universal. Christian universalists do not hold that all are saved apart from Christ's saving work, but that all are saved because of it.

Perhaps, then, what is made inessential is our subjective response to Christ--what evangelicals have in mind when they speak about "accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior." But this doesn't follow from universalism either. The universalist could believe (and many Christian universalists do believe) that eventually everyone comes to make this subjective response--if not in this life, then at the moment of death or in a future state when the truth becomes clear to them in all its joyous glory (and the universalist might very well hold that this realization occurs only after a period of denial and rejection, during which they arguably suffer the natural consequences of living in alienation from God--a finite hell--and so come to see the intrinsic undesirability of such a condition).

(I won't pursue the free will arguments for eternal rejection here--if you're interested in why I find them unconvincing, buy John's and my book when it comes out, or look at a briefer version of the argument in my article in Universal Salvation? The Current Debate).

In any event, the point is this: Universalism neither entails that Christ is unnecessary for salvation nor that a subjective response of acceptance is unnecessary. It does, however, seem to entail that conversion to Christianity in this life, participation in Christian life, church attendance, etc., are unnecessary for avoiding eternal hell. If Gandhi--who had nice things to say about Jesus but remained a Hindu all his life--is not in hell, then being a Christian in this life is not necessary for avoiding hell.

But this brings me back to my original sarcastically-expressed point about the rhetorical question, "Why bother becoming a Christian if non-Christians are saved?" This question assumes that the only good reason to convert to Christianity in this life is what happens in the next, and more specifically that becoming a Christian in this life is the only way to avoid damnation in the next. But do Christians really believe that? Do they believe that there is nothing positive to be gained in this life from participation in Church life, nothing worthwhile that is gained during our earthly tenure by being a part of a Christian communion, by living with a sense of God's presence, by meditating on the gospel narrative, etc.?

Do any Christians seriously want to say that? If not, then the rhetorical question collapses on itself--because there are all sorts of reasons why someone might "bother" to embrace a Christian life even if the ultimate destiny of those who embrace a secular life, or a Hindu life, or a Buddhist life, is the same in the end.

For all these reasons, the only sense I can make of the rhetorical question so many conservatives ask is this: What they are really worried about (although they may not be fully conscious of this) is that they will be deprived of a tried-and-true sales gimmick that many Christians have been using for centuries in their efforts to swell the ranks of Christian churches. Specifically, the gimmick of making people scared of the consequences of not participating in Christian communities.

This is not a new conclusion for me--and I think I may have made the same basic point more eloquently in a post from a couple of years back, Selling Christianity. Nevertheless, it is a point worth making again. And if this is what is really going on, then Bell may have realized something that conservative evangelicals like John Piper haven't quite caught onto yet: This sales gimmick isn't working anymore.

Rather than being a selling point for participation in Christian life, the doctrine of eternal damnation is increasingly becoming a liability. In our pluralistic world, to cleave to a religion that says everyone else is going to roast is to cleave to something that is hard to see as anything but ugly. And the old theological arguments that try to paint it as something other than ugly, and that try to represent our uneasiness with the doctrine of hell as nothing more than a suspect side-effect of a demonized "enlightenment philosophy" (as if enlightenment philosophy were entirely divorced from the ethical ideas of the Christian culture in which it was born)--well, those arguments are sounding increasingly implausible.

I'm not suggesting that Rob Bell is just a salesman with a better marketing campaign. Rather, I am suggesting that Bell may better represent the values of the emerging generation of evangelicals--a point that finds support in a great recent essay by Rachel Held Evans. If so, then when the conservative establishment rails against Bell with cries of heresy and excommunications by Tweet, what we may be witnessing is a once-privileged group scrambling desperately to cling to a position of authority that is steadily slipping from their grasp.

I don't know if that is true, but I really think it might be.