The Grey Lady strikes again, and I was even trying to be nice. Drat. Dang, double dang, triple dang. Whatever. One of The New York Times’ reporters, Laurie Goodstein, wrote an informative bit on the Red Letter Christians, a group of evangelicals who emphasize the words of Christ, the dialogue printed in red in fancier Bibles. This proclivity leads them to push back against The Fantasist in Chief. The article was a corrective against the tendency to consign all evangelicals to the same basket.
Laurie Goodstein, “Confronting the Flock over a Zeal for Trump,” The New York Times, 29 May 2018, A11 (www.nytimes.com/2018/05/23/us/anti-trump-evangelicals-lynchburg.html).
It was refreshing and uplifting to meet in Laurie Goldstein’s article a band of Christian evangelicals committed to their faith’s most foundational principle. In a possibly quixotic effort to persuade conservative evangelicals to reconsider their support for President Trump’s most objectional policies, the Red Letter Christians are an embodiment of amor alienum, the absolute love of others, the boundless compassion for the most downtrodden and the least among us. Jesus himself was ultimately a “social justice warrior” of the type now routinely derided by conservatives and misunderstood, perhaps willfully, by Mr. Trump’s more rabid evangelical adherents.
Michael Gerson is among a coterie of Never Trumpers – many of them onetime party apparatchiks – willing to assign some blame for the rise of The Facebook President to movement conservatism, yet not too much blame. If the intention is to deliver a mea culpa, perhaps it should be a mea culpa, not a John Ehrlichman-ish “modified limited hangout.” These political post mortems by Never Trumpers often come across as self-serving. Mr. Gerson’s is no exception. A self-professed evangelical Christian, he tried to explicate the evangelical movement’s seemingly unshakeable bond with the most morally and ethically challenged and irreligious of modern presidents. Mr. Gerson somehow failed to mention the strand of evangelicalism with the most intimate affinity to the Republican message, prosperity gospel. The letter addresses this.
Michael Gerson, “The Last Temptation,” The Atlantic, April 2018, 42-52 (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/the-last-temptation/554066/).
Michael Gerson’s recounting of evangelical Christianity’s recent history is fascinating more for what it doesn’t say than for what it does. A telling omission makes his picture of the movement’s entanglement with politics seem willfully soft-focused and airbrushed.
Mr. Gerson does not devote a single word to prosperity gospel, a strain of evangelicalism exerting outsize influence on GOP politics. John Hagee, Kenneth Copeland, Rod Parsley, Paul Crouch, et al., have no place in Mr. Gerson’s constellation of evangelical leaders. A central tenet of prosperity theology, that tithing and a proper relationship with God produce material benefits, dovetails well with GOP predilections regarding social justice. This belief’s corrosively empowering corollary – affluence as indicator of moral rectitude and poverty as sign of moral depravity – shows that casuistry was not the exclusive province of medieval scholastic theologians.
This omission dooms Mr. Gerson’s portrait of President George W. Bush to incompleteness. He is silent on the Manichaean and messianic elements in Mr. Bush’s weltanschauung, proclivities difficult to disconnect from the president’s response to 9/11 and the country’s descent into the quagmire of Iraq. Giving proper weight to prosperity gospel is not merely necessary in setting the record straight on the Bush administration. President Trump has among his counselors Paula White, a prosperity gospel leading light, and he has an affinity for Joel Osteen, perhaps its most influential apostle.
This is the first of several failures to connect. It is also my maiden effort to send something to a magazine, The Atlantic.
The letter addresses an article by Peter Beinart, a moderately conservative writer. Mr. Beinart, it seemed to me, was suffering from a malady common to Never-Trumpers following President Two Corinthians’ electoral ascent. Horrified by the incivility of it all, he was grappling with how to account for the ugliness of the politics without implicating movement conservatism as a culprit. This is a quintessential grasping-at-straws project. Mr. Beinart landed on cratering attendance at churches and burgeoning secularism as his analytical magician’s wand. The intersection of religion and politics fascinates me, so I dashed off a response.
The critiques to level against Mr. Beinart’s analysis are legion; the letter hits some high points.
Peter Beinart, “Breaking Faith,” The Atlantic, April 2017, 15-17 (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/04/breaking-faith/517785/).
Peter Beinart’s fascinating analysis of the political effects of declining church attendance and growing secularism leaves many germane issues unaddressed. He identifies a coarsening of political impulses but offers no solution, unless one infers a “re-churching” of America as his tacit wish; however, it should not be assumed willy-nilly that even ugly, high-volume political dialogue is a problem or even especially aberrant across the nation’s history.
Mr. Beinart concedes many evangelical voters’ animus toward African Americans, Latinos, Muslims, and the LGBT community, but needs to explain the grand value of those attending church being slightly less intolerant than evangelicals outside church. He might also consider whether non-churchgoing evangelicals were already more intolerant than their regularly attending brethren. Mr. Beinart, moreover, ignores another source of the vitriolic intolerance found in corners of the right: the GOP’s progressive stultification of its voters through rejection of every inconvenient fact and its playing of culturally charged, dog-whistle politics since the late sixties, tactics employed particularly to motivate evangelical voters. The GOP’s seemingly calculated failure to fulfill promises to evangelicals makes locating a wellspring of unreasoning anger unchallenging. Mr. Beinart should also remember that political incivility flows top downward as easily as bottom upward. Has either major party been a paragon of civility in recent years? How many political norms can Mr. Beinart name not yet violated by the country’s elected officials?
Like many right-leaning commentators, try as he might, Mr. Beinart seems unable to resist drawing a fallacious equivalence between the “insurgencies” of the left and the right. A long-persecuted minority culture’s drive to embrace and preserve its identity cannot be equated with a majority culture’s sense of entitlement and prejudice.
Mr. Beinart finally must explain why voters across the political spectrum should not gravitate more toward “revolution” than “reform” when confronted by two corporatist parties awash in donations, neither seeming responsive to the individual voter’s travails. Mr. Beinart seems nostalgic for a mythical past during which politics was played by Marquess of Queensbury rules when in fact, across its history, America’s political game has often been, sometimes by necessity, a freestyle cage match.