The recent death of Christian evangelist Luis Palau, the “Billy Graham of Latin America”, made me think about how the Trump era affected the ability of Christians to share the good news about Jesus’ salvation with a diverse and skeptical world. According to his New York Times obituary, Palau “was especially aware of the common assumption that evangelicals are right-wing radicals”, so he sought to compensate by holding “festivals” in progressive cities. “In New England, when you say ‘Christian’, they think ‘those maniacs on the right,'” Palau told Times in 2001. “I want to show that we are not maniacs, but we have a good education. This is a rational faith, but a faith that encourages you. ”If you believe, as Palau believed (and as I did), that Jesus is” the way, the truth and the life “, then it makes sense to share the good news with Worldwide you can – yes, including university educated planners and progressives. This is what Palau did.
But what happens when so many Christ’s messengers have sacrificed their credibility and high moral standing by allying themselves with a controversial political figure like, say, Donald Trump? What happens when Jesus’ brand ambassadors for many Americans are Donald Trump and Jerry Falwell Jr., not Billy Graham and Pope Francis, let alone Jesus himself? In today’s climate, you can be forgiven for thinking that Christians are, as Palau feared we would be perceived, “maniacs”.
Evangelical Christians thought it was worthwhile to line up behind a Trump; they couldn’t be more wrong. The cost-benefit analysis that led them to support him as the “lesser of the two evils” in 2016 did not take into account the long-term damage he is, in fact, still causing.
I recently wrote about how the Trump era undermined conservatives’ ability to effectively sound the alarm about government spending and debt and deficits, a development that can have serious consequences for our temporal political world. But the consequences of undermining Christian witness are even more serious. For believers who take John 14: 6 seriously and literally, anyone who undermines the church’s ability to credibly evangelize to a fallen world is guilty of sending other human beings – people who might have been receptive to a message of salvation – to eternal condemnation.
Do you think that winning some seats at the Supreme Court guarantees a lasting legacy? Consider the consequences of … eternity. This puts the political trade-offs that so many evangelicals have taken in a broader perspective. It also highlights the potential consequences of one side of the political corridor trying to monopolize an entire religious faith.
According to political scientists David E. Campbell and Geoffrey C. Layman of the University of Notre Dame and John C. Green of the University of Akron, authors of Secular outbreak: a new fault line in American politics, this corruption is already happening. They planned an experiment to test whether the rise of Americans who identify themselves as “non-religious” was the result of a reaction against the Christian right. The experiment involved first asking participants about their views on faith and then exposing them to news that mixed religion and politics; the experiment was concluded by asking participants again about their religious identity.
During an interview with Religion News ServiceCampbell said that just exposing people to one of these stories was “enough to keep a considerable number of people from maintaining a religious affiliation. That is 1 history in 1 point in time, and we can get that effect, ”he said. “Imagine what happens when people are exposed to hundreds of stories over many, many years. This would only reinforce the idea that religion and the Republican Party go together and that, if you don’t like the Republican Party, you don’t want to have anything to do with religion ”.
The connection between Christianity and the Republican Party has existed for four decades. But it is fair to say that associating religious faith with Ronald Reagan’s sunny optimism or George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” does not result in the same level of negative repercussions as embracing the MAGA ethos.
As Daniel K. Williams writes in The Politics of the Cross, “[J]Just as some evangelical supporters of Republican conservatism in the 1970s and 1980s mixed the suburban fears of the white middle class about rising crime rates and welfare costs with Christian principles, some evangelical supporters of the contemporary Republican Party combined the rural fears of the white working class about immigration, gun control and cultural change with Christianity.
“The result may be even more catastrophic for the gospel than the Christian conservatism of the late twentieth century was, because the Christian nationalism of the contemporary Republican Party is even further removed from historical evangelicalism – and certainly further removed from historical Christian principles, at least in its attitude towards immigrants and marginalized racial minorities. “
This problem is not limited to religion only. In my opinion, Trumpism has tainted numerous causes, including (but not limited to) our credibility when it comes to 1) compassionately defending the unborn and the sanctity of life, 2) questioning the wisdom of spending $ 1.9 trillion and up to 3) celebrate the values, traditions and works of art of our Western civilization. In a recent episode of the Bulwark podcast, Charlie Sykes reflected on this development, lamenting that Western civilization was co-opted by “white and racist nationalists”.
To put it in terms of business that a consumer society can understand, we have a brand problem. If you’ve never heard that, Grover Norquist, the conservative anti-tax crusader, uses a very colorful hypothesis to explain the importance of brand management (when it comes to tax cuts): “Coca-Cola spends a lot of time in control quality brand Coca-Cola, ”he says. “Everyone knows what’s in Coca-Cola. And so you can buy a bottle of Coke, take it home, you don’t have to ask what’s in it, or read the ingredients, or ask your friends about [it], “he continues.
“Finding Donald Trump as the de facto leader of his movement – in the eyes of many Americans, at least – is like finding a rat’s head in your Coca-Cola bottle. “
But “if you pass two-thirds of your Coca-Cola bottle and look inside and there’s a rat’s head on what’s left in your Coca-Cola bottle, don’t say to yourself, ‘You know, I’m wondering if I’m going finish all the rest of this particular bottle of Coke tonight. ‘… it hurts the brand. ”
“Republican elected officials who vote for tax increases,” concludes Norquist, “are rat heads in the Coke bottle. They damage the brand for everyone. “
This colorful metaphor can be extended to other realms. Trumpism, I would say, damaged the Christian brand, as well as the conservative brand.
The good news is that Trump does not exist in a vacuum. Others are trying to reach disparate communities and separate the gospel message from toxic politics. In that sense, Luis Palau and his successors (people like Christian leaders, including New York City pastor Tim Keller, and the chairman of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, Russel Moore) provide a ray of hope and a hopeful alternative.
Still, finding Donald Trump as the de facto leader of his movement – in the eyes of many Americans, at least – is like finding a rat’s head in his Coca-Cola bottle. But the consequences are even more bleak. In some cases, Trumpism lasts forever.