“I often tell my mom, ‘You guys won an election, but you just lost a generation.’” She adds, “It’s not like they’re all becoming progressives. They’re just leaving the church.” – Carol Howard Merritt
Michael Brown, in his response to John Piper’s condemnation of Trump acknowledges this mass exodus, but blames it on the rejection of “biblical values,” asking if the church must “compromise our views on these issues so as to avoid offense?”
Social science surveys do show the connection between changing mores and the rejection of the traditional church by the emerging generation. But blaming the exodus on this rejection alone is like blaming a poor performance of the Messiah when only the alto line is sung. There’s much more to the story and as Paul Harvey used to say, its “the rest of the story” that really counts.
The same research suggests that the strong association between a nationalistic identity, Christianity and the Republican Party may actually be fueling this generational flight. This generation understands what the research shows: a syncretistic Christian nationalist worldview is the best, most reliable, predictor for an allegiance to Trump as well as for harmful American attitudes related to gender, mask-wearing, race, Islam and sexual issues.
I received a link this week to a Biden commercial encouraging Muslims to vote while promising an end the Muslim ban once in office. It was part of a private discussion about my previous post entitled A Letter to my Pro-Trump Friends.
One side saw this as “chilling to the bones” unless you are completely “uninformed.” I saw it as a WWJD move, an outcome of seeing everyone through the lens of imago deo, made in the image of god. After all, there is neither Jew nor Greek…in God’s economy and for an ekklesia committed to serve one another, we should seek the good of everyone in the city including Muslims.
Overall, I was pleasantly surprised by Michael Brown’s response to Piper. Brown can be bombastic, but he was on his best behavior in this response and there is much that I could agree with. But there were some dealbreakers too.
Brown never really addresses, however, Piper’s most devastating point which is about the nation and culture corrupting influence of Trump.
As David French said on a podcast this week: “It’s the cruelty. It’s the sheer malice that exists.” That cruelty is a marker of Trumpism and “you feel it very keenly.” “What animosity breeds is absolutely the worst of us emerging.” That last phrase takes us out of the balls and strikes mode and into a deal breaker mode because of how the yeast of fear and division – Trump’s main political strategy – has continued to work its way through our already divided nation and then throughout the church, God’s chosen priesthood called to show the world what our God is like.
Of course, there is cruelty on both sides, but only one candidate is pouring gasoline on it.
Or as Kevin Williamson of the conservative journal National Review also said this week: “Trump’s low character is not only an abstract ethical concern but a public menace that has introduced elements of chaos and unpredictability in U.S. government activity ranging from national defense to managing the coronavirus epidemic…Trump is frequently wrong on important policy questions (including trade, foreign policy, entitlements, health care, and many others) and frequently incompetent even when trying to advance a good policy. His vanity and paranoia have made it very difficult for him to keep good people in top positions, and this imposes real costs both politically and as a matter of practical governance. Trump’s problem is not etiquette: It is dishonesty, stupidity, and incompetence, magnified by the self-dealing and cowardice of the cabal of enablers and sycophants who have a stake in pretending that this unsalted…sandwich is filet mignon.”
For many, however, none of that ultimately matters, with ~80% of white evangelicals still supporting Trump and with Southern Baptist luminary Al Mohler now taking a pro-Trump position for the 2020 election. Four years ago, Mohler characterized Trump as an “excruciating” “sexual predator” that imposed a “crises of conscious” on voters, especially those who cared about “family values.”
Today, Mohler sees this election as being “forced into a calculus of greater loss, greater gain in the measurements of making a political decision. And, in that sense, once you’re into procedural democracy, you have to enter into some kind of utilitarian calculus, but you have to do so in such a way you keep your soul.”
Mohler’s journey from a virtue-based to a utilitarian-based ethical universe reminds me of encountering icebergs off tidewater glaciers while boating in Alaska. There’s more hidden than seen and it’s that hidden part that gives you pause.
A virtue-based worldview comes from within, an outgrowth one’s moral foundation and a visible testimony of the ethical compass that directs one’s path. A utilitarian worldview is outside-directed, a calculus of balls and strikes where the greatest good, as determined through integrating a set of outcomes, directs one’s path.
Mohler argues that conservative Christians should vote based on a party’s view on abortion, Supreme Court nominees and protecting religious liberty. Not all balls and strikes are the same and the widening partisan divide has created a type of parliamentary system where leaders matter less than party platforms. Here, the choice is clear as his “biblical” worldview draws him like a tractor beam towards the Republican platform.
David French pushes back, saying “Christian political engagement is about more than an issue checklist…and when vulnerable Americans suffer mightily from the health and economic consequences of a global pandemic the president minimized, the response can’t be the checklist.”
French is, of course, making the obvious case that the gospel must address the whole of life. In fact, it’s impossible to read the gospels and then construct a worldview that sees the Republican platform through a single issue or even a three-issue checklist.
To do that requires a long list of presuppositions woven together into a narrative that we then apply our motivated reasoning to change the strike zone according to the particular ball being thrown. That’s hard to do when your strike zone is anchored in a virtue-based non-partisan gospel ethic. But it’s easy to do when we’re set adrift in a utilitarian world that then makes us vulnerable to a distorted identity now shaped by our tribes (e.g., political parties) who, in Haidt’s language, “bind and blind.”
We all do this, of course, because at our very roots, we are storytelling people and social scientists such as Kahneman have shown that the coherence of our story is all that really counts. It comes at a cost, however, and that cost shows up through regular, predictable errors in judgment which are very difficult to anticipate and overcome.
The demonization of Democrats as godless socialists, a common refrain across the conservative evangelical landscape, provides a great example of how our stories distort the gospel. It’s a predictable outcome of a tribalist fealty which introduces a dichotomous mindset of “we the good,” “they the enemy.” Such a Manichean worldview, reinforced daily through motivated reasonings such as confirmation bias, occupies a secure foothold in much of American Christianity and is one of the main reasons I started this blog – to show how our tribalism and cognitive biases distort the gospel. I wonder what Jesus would think about calling the vast majority of black evangelicals who identify as Democrats as anti-God socialists promoting a godless agenda?
I find value in both party’s platforms. I have always been anti-abortion, but being anti-abortion doesn’t make somebody pro-life. The Jesus we know personally and read about in the gospels cared about the whole person, from birth to death and a single-issue perspective just isn’t faithful to the whole of the gospel. In a number of policies such as health care, climate change and immigration, I find Democratic ideals, albeit imperfect in form, to be much closer to the gospel than Republican. To wit: embracing climate change is pro-life; denying it is not, and health care for all is a flat-out WWJD move.
Did you know, for example, that the U.S. infant mortality rate is the highest of any developed country and if you just take the state of Mississippi, it’s somewhere between Bahrain and Botswana? Then if you drill down you find that most of this is on black women: white women generally do fine. Yes, let’s talk about pro-life. My heart yearns to see the flourishing of all people created in the image of God and for an ekklesia all in on that, shunning single issue politics to embrace the whole of life and of the person. When you read the gospels, do you think Jesus would do otherwise?
French and Williamson are correct. Character matters. It acts like a yeast, penetrating every nook and cranny of our individual lives as well as the public square, affecting everything we do and say. And it must be the foundation for any subsequent calculus about balls and strikes in that public square.
The Southern Baptists used to believe that, responding to Clinton’s sins in their 1998 Convention by saying: “Tolerance of serious wrong by leaders sears the conscience of the culture, spawns unrestrained immorality and lawlessness in the society, and surely results in God’s judgment.”
We all used to believe that. In all aspects of life too, recalling what Einstein once said: “Most people say that it is the intellect which makes a great scientist. They are wrong: it is character.”
We’ve come a long way baby!