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.