For many, Christianity and Trumpism are synonymous. These evangelicals are pushing back.
Lynchburg, Virginia, became the site of a battleground over the future of American evangelicalism last weekend.
On one side of the conflict was Liberty University, the evangelical Christian college founded by Moral Majority leader Jerry Falwell (who died in 2007) and now run by his son, Jerry Falwell Jr.
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Liberty has become a de facto stronghold of pro-Trump evangelicals, and the younger Falwell has frequently spoken out in support of both the president and his policies. In 2017, he called Trump a “dream president.” Just last month, as debates about campus gun violence rocked the nation, the university opened a new gun range for students, celebrating it as a triumph of Christian values.
Leading the other camp was Shane Claiborne, the self-described “radical evangelical,” author, and activist, who lives in a faith-based intentional community in Philadelphia.
The “Red Letter Revival” he co-organized — a direct repudiation of Falwell’s values — exhorted the people in attendance to divorce evangelicalism from politicized Christian nationalism and white supremacy.
Featuring a Native American prayer for the land, a Christian rapper who presented a prayer in poetry, and an openly bisexual speaker, the Red Letter Revival was diverse (only two of 18 presenters were white men) and passionately political.
Its speakers repudiated what Pastor David Anderson called “evangelicals ... more committed to the amendments than to the commandments.”
One Charlottesville pastor, Brenda Brown-Grooms, spoke up to declare “Christian nationalism” a form of “apostasy”: a serious and willful deviation from the Christian faith.
Their goal of the event? As Claiborne put it in an interview with Vox: “a Christianity that looks like Jesus again.” The racialized rhetoric of Trumpism, he said, meant that “the words of Jesus are getting lost in white evangelicalism.”
The revival was relatively small. Its approximately 350 attendees paled in comparison to the 8,000-odd on-campus Liberty students. But Liberty’s response was swift — and intense.
According to Claiborne, he invited Falwell to the event, and asked Falwell to pray with him as a show of unity. The university immediately responded with a letter from its police department, informing Claiborne he was barred from campus and that he would be arrested for trespassing if he set foot on campus. (Claiborne posted the exchange, including both letters, on Twitter.)
According to Covey, after she reached out to Falwell via email for comment about the event, he responded by telling her: “[L]et’s not run any articles about the event. That’s all these folks are here for — publicity. Best to ignore them.” Covey told Religion News Service that senior administrators frequently killed articles from the student newspaper. Because the university is privately owned, they have the right to do so.
Liberty University officials have not responded to Vox’s request for comment.
Liberty’s outsize response to the Red Letter Revival points to a wider, and increasingly important, issue for evangelicals: the degree to which opposition to Trump is an unacceptable viewpoint in many pockets of the evangelical community. Support of Donald Trump — and of policies on immigration and gun control — is, to certain bastions of the evangelical right, seen as a necessary element of Christianity.
Evangelicalism and Trumpism have become synonymous in certain evangelical areas
Two years ago, the idea that the old-guard evangelicals would treat Trumpism as a tenet of their faith was unimaginable. According to a FiveThirtyEight poll, only 44 percent of white evangelical Republicans supported Trump during the primaries. But in the months and years since Trump won the Republican primary, evangelicalism, (white) nationalism, and Trumpism have become increasingly closely linked. Eighty-one percent of white evangelicals voted for Trump in the general election.
Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Channel, as I have previously written, has become a de facto mouthpiece for the Trump administration, lobbing softballs at administration officials in exchange for access. Members of Trump’s evangelical advisory council, including prosperity gospel preacher Paula White, have gone on the record telling listeners that God has ordained the Trump presidency.
Robert Jeffress, the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas and Trump’s evangelical right-hand man, even turned “Make America Great Again” into a hymn. As historian John Fea put it in a Washington Post op-ed, these are “court evangelicals,” who see Christianity and political power as going hand in hand.
As a result, across the evangelical spectrum, those who have vocally opposed Trump or his policies have often met with strong backlash. After Southern Baptist Convention leader Russell Moore — president of the convention’s policy arm — made vocal opposition to Trump a hallmark of his public persona, hundreds of Southern Baptist churches threatened to withhold funding from the central convention. (While Moore kept his job, he was forced to apologize for some of his remarks about Trump.)
A number of prominent evangelical writers, including Katelyn Beaty and Skye Jethani, have written about disavowing the term “evangelical.” Even Russell Moore has suggested going by the term “gospel Christian.” For these thinkers, the evangelical community has become synonymous with support for Trump and the white nationalist policies they see him represent.
So too the growing exodus of black evangelicals from the evangelical movement, many of whom report feeling pressured to vote for or support Donald Trump in spite of his statements on race.
As Doug Birdsall, chair of the international Lausanne organization of evangelicals, put it to the Washington Post: “When you Google ‘evangelicals,’ you get Trump.”
But nowhere has the conflation of Trumpism and evangelical Christianity been stronger than at Liberty. And nowhere has the pressure on anti-Trump evangelicals been more severe. As I’ve written previously, the younger Falwell’s political stance has caused discomfort among faculty and students alike.
In 2016, Mark DeMoss, the former chief of staff for the elder Falwell, was forced to resign from Liberty’s board of trustees. His crime? Publicly criticizing Falwell’s endorsement of Trump. In October of that year, Falwell censored a student op-ed critical of Trump and his comments about women on the infamous Access Hollywood tape.
And in 2017, Liberty officials forcibly removed an anti-Trump activist and pastor, Jonathan Martin, from campus after a student group invited him to pray with them. At the time, Liberty senior Dustin Wahl expressed concerns to Vox over the division between Liberty’s leadership and its student ethos, pointing out that a tiny proportion of Liberty students voted for Trump in the Republican primaries. Wahl said: “many have misconceptions about what we’re really like, due to Falwell’s misusing his platform ... Falwell has been somewhat successful in leaving the impression that Liberty itself is behind Trump, which is one of many reasons I believe dissent here is so necessary.”
Wahl also noted that a number of faculty members disagree with Falwell’s politicizations of Christianity but are afraid to speak out due to fear of losing their jobs. (Liberty faculty are not tenured.)
The Red Letter Christian movement seeks to divorce evangelicalism from Trumpism
The Red Letter Christian movement — named for the red lettering used to denote Jesus’s words in many Bibles — is, in many ways, a direct repudiation of Falwell’s brand of Christianity.
For these thinkers, the evangelical establishment’s embrace of Trumpism — unbridled capitalism, xenophobic nativism, and a willingness to engage with white supremacy — goes against everything Jesus stands for.
“Jerry Falwell [Jr.]’s dream is a nightmare to our most marginalized people, those whom Jesus called the ‘least of these,’” Claiborne told Vox in a telephone interview.
The Red Letter Christians aren’t alone among evangelicals uncomfortable with the way GOP politics and Christianity have become intertwined. There are signs that in the wider community, dissenting voices, particularly over Trump’s seeming embrace of white supremacists, are growing. In July 2017, for example the Southern Baptist Convention near-unanimously passed a resolution condemning the “alt-right.” And last December, Roy Moore, an open proponent of Christian theocracy, lost a special election for US Senate in Alabama.
Still, it’s important not to overstate the evangelical opposition to Trump. A recent poll found that 70 percent of white evangelicals still approve of the job Trump is doing as president — not that much smaller a percentage than that of white evangelicals who voted for him. But it’s also vital to recognize that evangelical Christianity isn’t a monolith. Within the evangelical community, a number of voices have been actively advocating for a Christianity that contends with the racism and nationalism in its ranks — and in its history.
As for the Red Letter Christians, they’re planning their next revival. Clairborne suggests the next rally location might be Dallas, where Jeffress of First Baptist Dallas does double duty as Trump’s evangelical mouthpiece.
After all, Claiborne told Vox, “I don’t think ‘Make America Great Again’ was ever meant to be a worship song.”
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The cognitive dissonance between "following Christ" and "following Trump" should drive anyone who tries to do both insane within minutes.
The inevitable conclusion is that "Trump Evangelicals" have abandoned Christ.
Looks like I need to rethink my views on the Southern Baptist Convention.
And what we also see here is suppression of alternative views.
The SBC is in crisis. In danger of losing sight of Christ, entirely...
Russell Moore only represents a very small minority in the SBC. Most folks like him left long ago.
There are ACTUAL Christian movements who do not want to be aligned with Trump? Praise be!