I wrote this almost exactly a year ago. It’s time to say it again.
“I’m on a diet and lifestyle change to lose weight. I have broad guidelines, but narrow choices. Among those choices are that I exercise more and eat less, and when I eat, I avoid starch-heavy, fat-heavy, chemical-laden foods, and instead opt for fresh vegetables, fruits, fish, and sometimes chicken. But yeah, I’m also at McDonald’s twice a day and my exercise consists of reaching out to the drive-thru window. Believe me, I’m fully committed to my beliefs.”
What are your values here? What you say they are, or what you actually are doing?
I hope you’re not stumped by this question. I hope you can say “you express your true values by what you do when you have the freedom to do whatever you want to do.” You cannot hide your real self behind great words and solemn oaths. You might not want to see what is happening about you—but everyone around you sees it. No one can read your mind or know your intentions. We can only see your actions.
I think of this when I hear the phrase “Evangelicals voting for Trump are betraying their values.” I have gone along with this for a long time because I thought we Evangelicals all held the same general beliefs. Voting for a man who not only acts to destroy the value of human beings but also destroys the integrity of those who align with him (Josh Marshall calls him a “dignity wraith”) seems to be entirely against the historic values of Evangelicals (which, to be honest, go back only a few years, given the erasure of where Evangelicals came from): elevating the cross and Jesus, obedience to Jesus’ words, displaying in our own lives the very works of Jesus in grace and mercy and love.
I have to see what they’re doing and stop paying attention to their professions and their oaths, and even the infidelity of Evangelicals lustily cheering on Trump is an aberration of their faith.
I have to see what they’re doing and stop paying attention to their professions and their oaths.
What Evangelicals are doing, right now, in 2020 with their 80% alliance with Trump is a complete display of their real values.
This is who they are.
We can go into a long history of the birth of Evangelicalism, which started as a white religious system. It didn’t come into existence from nothing: it is from the roots of white American-Christian Fundamentalism, which is an outgrowth of White Christian Councils (later renamed “White Citizens Councils”), which is an outgrowth of conservative white Christian rage over losing the American Civil War, which is an outgrowth of white supremacy birthing white American Christianity, which is an outgrowth of European male exceptionalism. Evangelicalism is firmly, deeply, thoroughly based in both Americanism and white supremacy (which are different ways to say the same thing).
But Evangelicals don’t want to know their history. They’ve developed this idea that they kinda came into being sometime in the 80s, de novo, sprung fully formed from the head of Athena, and allied on a single issue. To that goal Evangelicals have fully subsumed themselves, turning their religious principles of rejecting the state and staying faithful to God to becoming agents of a “Christianized” government that seeks to elevate and empower white Christian males as rightful owners of America.
And here’s the thing: that’s always been the context, but it was hidden. You don’t get the objective words in a church service. It takes a while to understand it—so much of what you experience is amenable to your well-being and comfort. But go to a Bible study, to a Bible college, to a seminary, to anything that is related to “growth” and “development” and you’ll be learning from a curriculum developed by white leaders and white thinkers and white theologians—mostly male—and what you’ll pick up and imbue yourself with is the unquestioned idea that white Christian male domination is God’s plan for America.
Trump embodies this belief, so much so that Evangelicals twist themselves into theological knots explaining that Trump is a “Christian” of very new faith (while excluding Obama, a confirmed believer who openly has borne witness of his saving faith in Jesus), excusing his destructive, immoral actions as those of a “baby Christian.”
Well.
It’s not how I was taught all those years. My earliest memories of Christianity come from a sermon I heard way back in the mid-50s, at Walteria Methodist Church, a word about the Prodigal Son. Hand to God, that has stayed with me my entire life: we are all, always welcomed home. All. It explains why the words of Robert Frost have stayed with me ever since I heard them quoted at a church service two decades later: Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to let you in.
It is why I embrace my brothers and sisters in the community, of all beliefs and lives and origins and orientations.
It is why I am energized in my words and my actions, why I seek to find ways to push for acceptance and welcome for everyone.
It took me too long to wake up to the ways that the Evangelicals whom I was raised with really have stopped believing in this. Acceptance, welcome, embrace, fidelity, honor, belief—well, that’s gone, replaced by lusty support for Trump and an incredible fear of the “other”: gays, feminists, Muslims, migrants, Black people and People of Color, sick people, poor people, broken people, addicts . . .
Whatever your beliefs are about redemption and salvation and even universalism—Jesus was always with those who are most despised and feared by Evangelicals. They’re the people he had meals with. Their homes were his resting place. They were whom he wept for.
So when I see and hear Evangelicals supporting Trump and voting in astonishingly high numbers for Trump, I no longer think they’re betraying their values.
It is the most unfortunate truth in the world, but it is true: Evangelicals supporting Trump and voting for Trump are simply showing what they’ve believed all along.
Don’t look at the creeds and dogmas and teachings and doctrines. Look at what they do.