Civil Commotion

This is fun. A pastor writing at SBC Voices nails the role of evangelicals in this year’s election.

Simply put, if Donald Trump becomes the GOP nominee, American evangelicals will be largely responsible. There is simply no excuse for this.

Now, recall Albert Mohler’s remark to NPR a few days ago.

We have taken comfort in the fact that there have been millions and millions of us in America. And a part of that evidence has been the last several election cycles, with the evangelical vote being in the millions. And now we’re having to face the fact that, evidently, theologically-defined — defined by commitment to core evangelical values — there aren’t so many millions of us as we thought.

Scan the comments (most of them by pastors) at the SBC Voices post I linked to above, and you’ll see they are nearly unanimous that Trump is unfit for the presidency.

Even stopped clocks are right twice a day, et cetera, et cetera.

Here is what strikes me: The pastors know so little about their flocks, and have so little influence. They don’t understand Trump’s appeal; or that Trump is the voice of their congregations’ subterranean envy and resentment and malice; or that Nietzsche was right: Christianity is the revolt of everything that crawls against everything that soars. Of course their flocks are wild for The Donald; he’s trashing their betters.

I can sympathize with the pastors’ confusion — a little. You can’t blame a pastor for wondering, Why do they come sit in my church every Sunday morning when their idea of a great man is a cheap blowhard like Donald Trump?

I’ve wondered for years: Are these guys idiots who actually believe all this crazy stuff, or are they cynical whores who service idiots who actually believe all this crazy stuff? Given what I am convinced is genuine bafflement at Trump’s appeal, I think the answer must be the former: They’re idiots. They’ve no idea who is sitting in their pews, or why they’re there.

As anybody with a brain the size of a dried-up pea could have predicted, interest in do-it-yourself abortions is on the increase as evangelical-dominated states piously make abortions more difficult to procure in the name of protecting women’s health.

Nobody should be surprised, either, to learn that the trend is strongest where the churches are strongest — in the Bible Belt.

The same areas will undoubtedly be highlighted when abortion-related deaths of healthy women are next tabulated.

This is one issue on which Bill Clinton actually got something right: Abortion needs to be safe, legal, and rare. But the evangelicals will never go along; they think outlawing abortion is a hill to die on, all the while telling themselves, and anybody stupid enough to listen, that it’s all about love-love-loving babies. It isn’t. It’s about punishing women who have control of their lives.

Valeria Tarico notices that the evangelical brand has gone bad with the ascent of Donald Trump, and that some of the leadership think it’s time to remake the image.

Laid out like this — sex-obsessed, arrogant, bigoted, lying, greedy, ignorant, predatory and mean — one understands why a commentator like Croft might say that Trump is Evangelicalism. But reading closer, it becomes clear that Trump and Cruz and Rubio are not the problem.

The Evangelical brand is toxic because of the stagnant priorities and behaviors of Evangelicals themselves. Desperate to safeguard an archaic set of social priorities and theological agreements, Evangelical leaders bet that if they could secure political power they could force a halt to moral and spiritual evolution. They themselves wouldn’t have to grow and change.

Right. Trump is not evangelicalism. But Trump is what they always wanted.

And it would be a big mistake to let Moore, Mohler, et. al., off the hook, to let them go around calling themselves something else and disavowing all knowledge and responsibility for the ugliness that completes their ambitions.

The Wartburg Watch takes up the sad story of disgraced pastor Mark Driscoll’s latest headache — a RICO suit contending his former Mars Hill Church was nothing but a criminal enterprise.

Driscoll’s thuggish behavior makes that plausible, but proving it in court is a whole ‘nother thing. Good luck to the plaintiffs.

I want to draw attention to just a brief passage near the end of the post.

In 2009, when we started this blog, we were critical of Mark Driscoll. And boy did we ever get hammered. Our local seminary, SEBTS and professors were quite supportive of Driscoll. We were told, point blank, that something was wrong with the two of us since we were down on Driscoll when so many seminary leaders supported him. We were called, get this, prudes for being concerned with the *trajectory (a really cool Calvinista term)* of his lectures on college campuses which often brought up the gospel™ subjects of anal sex and pole dancing.

It is my opinion that these professors and leaders were secretly delighted with Driscoll’s garbage because they thought it made them appear cool. What it really made them appear is uninformed and biblically weird. As time has gone on, it is patently obvious that we two women knew more than many seminary professors, leaders, celebrity Calvinista pastors and good old boys looking for an excuse to indulge in porno jokes.

Mark Driscoll has embarrassed the Christian community. It is now clear that many seminary professors don’t understand the Gospel as much as two middle aged women without seminary training. It is the Driscoll fiasco that has convinced the two of us that seminary training does not prepare these men (since women are rarely listened to) to accurately spot a loose canon or was that cannon?

Enjoy the Mafia references, gospel™ leaders. You egged him on.

The crude thuggishness of Mark Driscoll has much in common with the crude thuggishness of The Donald; they operate in different spheres, but are otherwise interchangeable.

And both have enjoyed broad support from evangelicals.

Why do evangelicals gravitate toward crude, ham-handed, mafioso-like men? Short answer: Because once you look past the marketing lies about love-love-love, you see a lot of resentment, envy, and malice simmering at the bottom of Christian thought — and that’s who they, themselves, wish they had the nerve to be.

Oh, when you were young
Did you question all the answers
Did you envy all the dancers who had all the nerve

Look around you now
You must go for what you wanted
Look at all my friends who did and got what they deserved

Wasted On The Way
Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young

A lot of the evangelical subculture consists of people who never got past the envy and found their own path, and then turned their failures into tokens of exceptional virtue. This is what you get.

Now that the malice and ignorance of evangelicals has driven the execrable Donald Trump to the front of the Republican pack, Russell Moore and Albert the Pious think it might be time to rebrand.

First Mohler, who complains that Trump supporters aren’t r-e-e-e-a-l evangelicals, but concedes that maybe ‘evangelicals’ aren’t the big bad voting bloc he thought.

GJELTEN:   It may be that evangelical has become more a cultural label than a religious label. Albert Mohler of the Southern Baptist Seminary says that would mean the true evangelical bloc is smaller than he and others realized until now.

MOHLER:   We have taken comfort in the fact that there have been millions and millions of us in America. And a part of that evidence has been the last several election cycles, with the evangelical vote being in the millions. And now we’re having to face the fact that, evidently, theologically-defined – defined by commitment to core evangelical values – there aren’t so many millions of us as we thought.

GJELTEN:   So what is motivating the evangelical voters who are supporting Trump if it’s not their faith?

Moore ducks the question, taking refuge in the lie that Christians drove the civil rights movement.

MOORE:   As a matter of fact, the Scripture tells us that we are to engage with people who disagree with us with kindness. That ought to be the message that drowns out any hint of bigotry or hatred in our lives. And as we’ve seen, over the centuries, Christianity has been a vibrant force against racism, for instance.

The grim truth is that it was the Southern Baptists, Moore’s and Mohler’s denomination, that provided the theological justification for slavery — and they condemned those who opposed it as not r-e-e-e-a-l Christians.

And hung in effigy that handful of brave southern pastors who supported the civil rights movement.

But, now, anybody with two eyeballs can see who evangelicals are — the malicious ignoramuses who think Donald Trump’s empty trash-talk is just what the Good Ol’ U.S. of A. (A Christian Nation, don’t you know?) needs. Sorry Albert, Russell … y’all damn sure are evangelicals, and the disaster of Donald Trump is on your heads.

This would not be a bad time to remember this passage from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged:

Are you now crying: No, this was not what you wanted? A mindless world of ruins was not your goal? You did not want us to leave you? You moral cannibals, I know that you’ve always known what it was that you wanted. But your game is up, because now we know it too.

We do, indeed, know it now. And shame on all of us if Trump’s success is not the end once for all of creatures like Mohler and Moore.