Evangelical Politics and the American Spirit

President Donald Trump and MAGA evangelicals are committing murder-suicide. They are attempting to kill liberalism and democracy, but don’t know they are also slaying evangelical faith in an act of mass self-harm. There will be no cyanide-laced cups of Kool-Aid, but rather a slow fall from grace.

MAGA Evangelicals fail to understand that democracy is never a finished product. What makes democracy flourish consists of contingencies, compromises, ambiguities, endless negotiations, and questions — all antithetical to evangelical modes of thought. Evangelicals, impatient for control, obsessed with order, obedience, and conformity, can’t grasp the challenge of democracy.

These evangelicals are dismantling democracy piece by piece. Much of the damage occurs in the silent complicity of MAGA with every anti-democracy statement or action by President Trump and his team. If the death of democracy is required for conservatives to destroy a liberal, plural, and diverse culture, conservatives will take the deal.

There are many types of evangelicals, but it is time to see the real enemy — defined by historian David Blight as “a long-brewing American-style neo-fascist authoritarianism, beguilingly useful to the grievances of the disaffected, and threatening to steal our democracy from under our noses.” I refer to the neo-Calvinists, such as the “Theobros” and the coalition of Southern Baptist Reformed leaders. This includes older leaders like Tom Ascol and the Founders, as well as younger leaders like William Wolfe and the Center for Baptist Leadership.

I think we must go back to John Calvin’s Geneva to understand the MAGA Calvinists and their goals. In Geneva, under Calvin’s rule, civil government blended seamlessly with strong church oversight. Calvin established the consistory composed of two benches: Company of Pastors — 10 to 12 city-paid pastors, with Calvin as permanent moderator, and Company of Elders — lay leaders from elite families.

Not much imagination is required to see a Calvinist-fueled American government consisting of a company of evangelical leaders — Robert Jeffress, Paula White-Cain, Al Mohler, Doug Wilson, Lance Wallnau, David Barton, Franklin Graham, Dutch Sheets, Frankline Jentezen, Greg Locke, and Mike Johnson. And a collection of fine billionaire citizens, adding to Trump’s power.

As unpalatable as I find their Calvinism, it is the threat they pose to democracy that concerns me. The desire among MAGA Calvinists for a sustainable authoritarianism has alarms going off among lovers of democracy. Lurking in the shadows of authoritarianism is a lot of naked antisemitism. And the prospect of an even more fascist Republican Party. Their fear of diversity, religious and political, has pushed them further to the right toward intolerance and authoritarianism. These are, of course, enemies of democracy.

The new Calvinists make a facile promise of national salvation, but it is a puerile discourse of redemption by control and coercion. The fear of the nation sliding into moral decline prompts MAGA Calvinists to emote — to express uninhibited feelings of fear, anger, resentment, revenge, and hatred. They offer nothing but an empty gesture to a mythical Christian past that never existed.

MAGA Calvinists have unleashed four dominating anti-democratic dogmas:

1. The first dogma of religious fundamentalism posits the anti-intellectual “fundamentals” of faith from the early 20th century.
2. The second dogma of free-market fundamentalism posits the unregulated and unfettered market as idol and fetish. Historian Robert McElvaine labels it “the market god.” This is the “Calvinist work ethic,” assuming unregulated capitalism is a virtue and empathy for the poor is a vice.
3. The third dogma is aggressive militarism, from which the policy of unlimited preemptive strikes on any enemy deemed dangerous by the president must result in total obliteration and unconditional surrender. Military might is portrayed as salvific. He who has the biggest guns wins.
4. The fourth dogma is escalating political authoritarianism. Here is where MAGA Calvinists are most guilty of attacking democracy. They have parlayed their love of religious fundamentalism into a defense of Trump’s authoritarian policies.

When it is 1861 again, we will have to fight, nonviolently of course, to protect and promote the abiding principles of democracy. According to historian James T. Kloppenberg, there are three primary principles: popular sovereignty, autonomy, and equality. MAGA evangelicals endanger these democratic principles and premises. For example, pastor Doug Wilson wants to take the right to vote from women, and William Wolfe says he is ready to take up arms against liberal Americans.

These are the indicators of MAGA Calvinists marching slowly to the cedar-lined cemetery as they kill democracy and the faith they are trying to preserve. They are “like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful but inside are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of uncleanness. So you also on the outside look righteous to others, but inside you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness” (Matthew 23: 27-28).

Our anti-Calvinist job is to find all the available ways of making the MAGA Calvinist distortions of religion and politics apparent, so that other preachers of their kind will not be able to perform a similar con job.

 

Rodney Kennedy has his M.Div. from New Orleans Theological Seminary and his Ph.D. in Rhetoric from Louisiana State University. The pastor of 7 Southern Baptist churches over the course of 20 years, he pastored the First Baptist Church of Dayton, Ohio — which is an American Baptist Church — for 13 years. He is currently professor of homiletics at Palmer Theological Seminary, and interim pastor of Emmanuel Friedens Federated Church, Schenectady, New York. His eighth book, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit, is out now from Cascade Books.