Most people are not used to the words “prostitution” and “Christianity” being used in the same sentence.
But the metaphorical meaning of “prostitution” is “to debase yourself” or “to sell out.” Used in this sense the word is more than appropriate to describe what has happened to a segment of American Christians called evangelicals who have sold out to Donald Trump and everyone else who identifies themselves with him.
By “sold out” I mean they have conformed what they believe as Christians to embrace the political message Trump is preaching that condemns the LGBTQ community, a woman’s right to choose, attacks all things politically liberal, divides, demeans, and then has the audacity to elevate Christianity to a political status that violates both the Constitution and the Bible.
It didn’t start with Trump, of course. I wrote a book ten years ago entitled, Evangelicalism and the Decline of American Politics, in which I traced the co-mingling of evangelical Christianity and the Republican Party to Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority movement that laid the foundation for today’s toxic politics.
Falwell was a preacher from my hometown of Lynchburg, Virginia who helped solidify Christian fundamentalism’s takeover of evangelicalism that led to the demise of an theologically informed evangelicalism and the rise of a partisan Christianity that is more political than Christian.
In truth, there is hardly anything actually Christian about American evangelicalism today when compared to what the gospels say Jesus said and did.
Just after the Charlie Kirk funeral where Christian clergy and laity cheered the absolutely un-Christian speech Trump gave, The Reverend William Barber, the most prominent prophetic Christian voice today, wrote: “The painful reality that the spectacle of Charlie Kirk’s memorial service forces America to face is that the language, the music, and the symbols of Christian faith have been hijacked by a religious nationalism that does not serve Jesus Christ, but Donald Trump.”
There are various reasons evangelicals have prostituted Christianity in order to sit at Trump’s feet, but a critical one is theological. I know, you hear the word “theological” and you start to glaze over, but bear with me for a minute.
Today’s evangelicalism begins and ends with the absurd claim that God wrote the Bible and, therefore, every word in it must be accepted as inerrant and infallible.
I use the word “absurd” intentionally because it means “ridiculously unreasonable, unsound, having no rational or orderly relationship to human life.” That describes exactly what biblical literalism is, an unreasonable and unsound claim that becomes more absurd the more you learn about it.
It is a perversion of Martin Luther’s “sola scriptura” (“scripture only”) argument for the authority of the Bible over the authority of the Roman Catholic Church he had left (or, more accurately, was pushed out) that turned the Bible into a sword to use against all non-Christians.
Biblical literalism took hold here in America in the 19th century among conservative ministers who wanted to protect the Bible against both the advances in science and the growing influence of the historical critical analysis of it by German theologians.
Using biblical literalism as its source of authority, modern evangelicalism insists Jesus died for the sins of the world, making salvation from hell possible, but only for those who believe in Jesus.
That claim inevitably leads Christians into seeing themselves as the “elect” of God, God’s favorites, whose beliefs must be embraced by everyone else who doesn’t want to face God’s condemnation when they die.
Sadly, this was the Christian message for centuries until progressive Christian theologians began to take the validity of religious pluralism seriously. Gradually they understood that it was theologically indefensible for Christianity to argue that God saves the worst baptized Christian but condemns the best non-baptized person to hell.
Christian theology has been undergoing a transformation ever since in search of a way to believe in the teachings of Jesus without the need to insist that God’s grace shines only on Christians, making Christianity the only legitimate religion in the world.
Unfortunately, evangelicals have never gotten the message (or refused to hear it) so they continue to live in the past as if Christianity dominates the world as it once did still when it could demand allegiance from kings and paupers alike.
In the 1980s Ronald Reagan convinced Falwell and company that the Republican Party would assist in Christianizing the nation if evangelicals would help elect them. That’s when both evangelicalism and the Republican Party went off the rails, creating a partisan evangelicalism (what I am calling “prostituted Christianity”) that clings to its anachronistic theology to justify its loss of integrity.
The upshot of partisan evangelicalism and evangelical Republicanism is that both groups (that are often one and the same) live in fear of facts, and, therefore, truth. And they abhor compromise, believing it is a temptation to compromise their principles.
At the time ultra-conservative Arizona Republican Senator Barry Goldwater saw the danger this co-mingling of Christianity and the Republican Party represented and tried to alert his party to the trouble ahead, warning, “Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they’re sure trying to do so, it’s going to be a terrible damn problem.”
He went on to add, “Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can’t and won’t compromise. I know, I’ve tried to deal with them.”
Well, the “terrible damn problem” is now upon us, and under Trump it is worse than any of us imagined it would be, in large part because even if he doesn’t believe he is god, he does believe he is the greatest president in our history and the only man God has anointed to solve all our problems and make America great again, including elevating Christianity to the status of America’s unofficial state religion.
That is why evangelicals have prostituted Christianity at the altar of Trump’s desire to rule America. They want to rule with him.
Trump will, of course, fail to achieve his goal of ruling America, and evangelicals will fail with him. Christianity will never be declared America’s official state religion. If anything, today’s evangelicals are turning more people away from Christianity rather than attracting them to it.
That said, for the moment both Trump and evangelicalism’s prostituted version of Christianity are a terrible damn problem for the country.
That is why we must keep fighting against both until they suffer the level of revulsion and rejection both deserve.
You may find it hard to believe that day is coming, but I can assure you, it is. I say that because, as I repeat often, we Americans may tolerate extremism, but in the long run we do not embrace it.
linnposts.com 