American evangelicalism has gone off the rails.
It happened on November 9th, the day they helped elect Donald Trump as president.
Trump is not only a vile, amoral man, he is petty and vindictive, not to mention being completely unqualified to be president. Yet evangelicals went for him to the tune of 81%.
I predict they will never recover from the stunning hypocrisy their vote represents.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that you cannot make moral pronouncements as they have been doing for years and then turn around and throw your support behind a man like Trump and there be no consequences.
Evangelicals may believe they had good reasons for supporting him, but what the public saw was their naked hypocrisy in supporting someone who is the antithesis of what they say they believe and believe in.
Yet, evangelical support for Trump was actually something quite predictable.
One reason is that they are much more Republican than Christian when it comes to politics than they pretend to be, and have been since the founding of the Moral Majority in 1979.
Evangelicals always support Republican candidates. They didn’t even support Jimmy Carter who was – and is – as genuinely Christian as one can be. That alone says all we need to know about why they vote as they do.
But another critical reason is that they are unashamedly anti-intellectual, which means that history, study, and facts play virtually no role in shaping their understanding of faith, morality, or politics.
There was a time when evangelicalism produced some of the world’s best biblical scholars, but the role of scholarship has dramatically declined since anti-intellectual fundamentalism all but took control at the beginning of 20th century and made biblical literalism the cornerstone of evangelical beliefs.
This anti-intellectualism is why they believe the earth is only ten thousand years old, that Adam and Eve were actual people, that God made the world in seven days, that Lot’s wife turned into a pillar of salt, that Jonah lived in the belly of a big fish, or that heaven is a place with a pearly gate and streets of gold, to name a few evangelical claims that defy science, history, and logic.
When you believe these things it is relatively easy to miss or ignore the contradiction between the moral code you say you live by and voting for Donald Trump.
That vote didn’t make any sense to the rest of us, but “sense” doesn’t matter to people who don’t value critical thinking and don’t believe conflict over public issues, especially moral ones, is never simple or easy to resolve.
So evangelicals joined the Republican march to elect Donald Trump without realizing their vote was going to undermine the one thing they had going for them.
Most people found their beliefs too anti-science to be credible, but they did accept the sincerity of their moral convictions.
That is now gone, a consequence of voting for Donald Trump they didn’t anticipate.
And so, while I wish more Americans were alarmed by the level of anti-intellectualism that has led too many people to believe opinions matter as much as facts, one thing about us has not changed.
We do not abide blatant hypocrisy well, especially from people who talk about moral decline as much as they do.
What I suspect that means for evangelicals is that even though they may continue to wield power in the Republican Party, when it comes to our nation’s views and pubic policies regarding moral issues, they will discover that anything they have to say will matter only to themselves because no one else will be paying attention to them.
And, to be honest, I believe the nation will be better for it.
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