As I have watched the rapid destruction of constitutional checks and balances and liberal democratic norms over the past month, I have continued to reflect on why so many (though thankfully not all) of my fellow evangelical Christians in the United States support this eradication of institutional safeguards.
The destruction of democratic norms did not come as a surprise. On the morning of Donald Trump’s inauguration last month, I issued this warning in Current magazine: “When the second Trump administration takes office, it is likely to engage in the most systematic dismantling of established institutions in nearly two hundred years.”
And if I expected this from Trump, I was equally certain that most evangelicals would support these actions, because evangelicals have a long history of anti-institutional thinking, even as they have avidly championed democracy.
For much of their early history, many evangelicals were enthusiastic promoters of democracy, because they were deeply suspicious of the elite. Nathan O. Hatch’s The Democratization of American Christianity demonstrates that the populist, low-church, evangelical movements of the early nineteenth century were also the most avid supporters of Jeffersonian republicanism and Jacksonian democracy. Michael Kazin’s A Godly Hero: A Life of William Jennings Bryan shows that this same anti-elite faith in democratic populism was present nearly a century later in Bryan’s Democratic presidential campaigns and in his crusade against evolution, both of which appealed to large numbers of low-church evangelicals in the South and Midwest.
But evangelicals’ deep suspicion of the “elite” and their institutions led not only to a populist faith in democracy but also to a skepticism of the very institutions – including constitutional separation of powers – that ultimately kept democracy alive and prevented it from devolving into authoritarianism.
For many years, evangelicals’ anti-institutionalism didn’t seem to matter much in national politics, because if evangelicals lacked an interest in institutions, mainline Protestants were usually thoroughly institutional – and there were enough mainline Protestants to keep the nation’s institutions functioning. If evangelicals of the mid-to-late twentieth century were often deeply skeptical of the United Nations, liberal Protestants were often its most enthusiastic defenders. Evangelicals might complain that liberal Protestants were using institutions – such as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) or the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) – to crush evangelical enterprises, but as long as liberal Protestants retained political control, there wasn’t much evangelicals could do about it.
Until now, that is. Today the political influence of liberal Protestants is arguably weaker than ever. As a result, conservative evangelicals have been able to join forces with a larger coalition that has succeeded in electing an administration that is determined to dismantle the institutions that liberal Protestants and their allies spent decades creating.
Right now, some evangelicals are excited about this possibility. But I think that evangelicals who delight in dismantling governmental institutions would do well to reflect on the Christian principles that prompted other Christians (especially mainline Protestants) to create these institutions in the first place, because without the institutions that are rapidly being destroyed, the democracy that evangelicals have long claimed to support will not be able to survive.
Because I have been writing about this theme for several years, I want to quote a few excerpts from articles and blog posts I wrote before the second Trump term began but which are now more relevant than ever as we seek to make sense of what is happening to our country and how various groups of Christians have responded to it.
Just over two years ago, in October 2022, I wrote these lines in “The Forgotten Christian Cause: Preserving Democracy,” which was published in Christianity Today online:
“In the United States, evangelicals have often been more interested in fighting for particular political issues than in preserving the democratic process itself. And when they believe strongly enough in the righteousness of their cause, some of them demonize their opponents to the point where they’re willing to use antidemocratic measures to keep their preferred party in power.
“For the past 200 years, American evangelical political campaigns have often focused on using the vote to fight evil. There’s a lot of merit to this view. Scripture does portray government as an agent of justice. Romans 6 and numerous passages in the Old Testament make that clear.
“But if we focus only on the government’s role in bringing about a righteous order, we might miss an insight that many mainline Protestant Americans have historically held: The preservation of the democratic process is just as important as the creation of just laws, because it allows us to make sure that each person is treated as a divine image-bearer whose voice matters.
“In other words, the democratic process can be a way for us to love our neighbor as ourselves.”
From my Anxious Bench post in January 2024, “Can an Authoritarian Political Regime Happen Here?”:
“In 2016, Harvard history professor James Kloppenberg published a massive global comparative study of democracies in which he concluded that the key to a democracy’s success is the willingness of voters to look beyond their own narrow self-interest. In the United States, he said, voters have done that primarily because of the influence of liberal Protestantism, which encouraged even affluent, privileged people to care about the rights of the marginalized and less fortunate. But now that liberal Protestantism and the values associated with it are in decline, the future of American democracy seems more perilous.
“In the 1930s, plenty of people outside the liberal Protestant establishment did not share these values, and some of those people seemed like they could be open to exchanging American democratic pluralism for some of sort of fascist-like authoritarianism or anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. But in the end, the presidential nomination process was controlled by people who tended to gravitate toward practitioners of the liberal Protestant social ethic – that is, toward people like the Episcopalian liberal Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose New Deal was a call to extend the nation’s economic safety net to the poor and the marginalized.
“But today we don’t have a majority liberal Protestant culture to protect us, and we don’t have a presidential nomination process controlled by party leaders with the power to give the nomination to someone who longs to inspire people to look beyond their own self-interest. Instead, we just have the voters as the only barricade now holding the nation back from an anti-democratic authoritarian turn.
“It’s now up to the voters to show the foresight and selflessness necessary to preserve the nation’s democracy. And if they don’t, we no longer have much reason for confidence that an authoritarian turn ‘can’t happen here.’”
From my Anxious Bench post, “An Evangelical Defense of Institutions,” September 2020:
“Trump’s anti-institutionalism is probably not the main reason for his popularity among white evangelicals, but it plays a role – especially because contemporary white evangelicals are deeply suspicious of at least two major institutions in the United States: the “mainstream media” and the federal government. A 2018 survey conducted by the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College found that approximately half of all American evangelicals “strongly believe that the mainstream media produces fake news.” The study also found that the more active an evangelical is in church, the more likely the person is to distrust the mainstream media. Likewise, a 2014 Pew survey found that 64 percent of evangelicals would like a “smaller government” with “fewer services.” Not all white evangelicals want to replace mainstream media institutions with their own alternative news sources or take an axe to the government bureaucracy, but it appears that a majority of them do.
“Where did this evangelical suspicion of the “establishment” and its institutions come from? Perhaps it has something to do with evangelicalism’s inordinate emphasis on the individual. To a greater degree than nearly any other Christian movement of the last two thousand years, American evangelicalism is intensely individualistic, and has been so from its inception.
“American evangelicalism had its origins in the First Great Awakening’s emphasis on personal conversion, which was presumed to occur independently of church or sacrament. It gave far less emphasis to the creeds than most Reformed Protestant churches did, and it was even more strongly devoted than the Reformers were to the notion of “sola scriptura” – that is, the Bible as the only authority, this time mediated by no interpreter other than the Holy Spirit-filled individual believer. And the gospel, as preached by evangelicals, focused almost entirely on the offer of individual salvation and warnings against individual sin. Was it any wonder, then, that evangelicals who gave such primacy to individual conversion and the individual right of conscience were individualistic in their approach to politics as well?
“This is the story that Hatch’s book tells, but the movement arguably became even more individualistic in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, after Hatch’s narrative ends. At the end of the nineteenth century, a sizeable number of liberal evangelicals, who eventually became known as mainline Protestants and largely abandoned the evangelical label, gave increased emphasis to the social dimension of Christianity, and in the early twentieth century, they created large ecumenical organizations, such as the Federal Council of Churches, to carry out this social mission. And they were deeply committed to the institutions of democratic governance. By contrast, fundamentalists, who represented the conservative wing of the movement, were suspicious of the social gospel and continued to give primacy to individual conversion, which they believed the liberal Protestants had deemphasized. In the 1920s, when the two groups fought with each other for control of denominations and church colleges, fundamentalists lost most of the battles – which meant that the majority of church institutions were now hostile to their point of view. Their influence in governmental institutions and the nation’s newspapers and broadcast media was also limited, compared to the influence of mainline Protestants.
“Many fundamentalists who adopted a theology of premillennial dispensationalism perceived this loss of influence in apocalyptic terms. President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was a dangerous harbinger of the antichrist, fundamentalists warned. In the next generation, the children of the depression-era generation of fundamentalists issued similar apocalyptic warnings about American foreign policy institutions and the public educational system.
“One might have expected that as a higher percentage of white evangelicals entered the middle and upper-middle class in the 1960s and 1970s by earning college degrees, taking jobs in all sectors of government and the private sector, and earning comfortable incomes, their sense of alienation from American institutions might have diminished.
“But this did not happen. Evangelicals had a selective attitude toward institutions; many expressed strong support for the military, for instance, but often remained deeply suspicious of academia, even if they themselves had earned graduate degrees. Unlike mainline Protestants, their vision for American democracy was much more populist than institutional. Perhaps this was partly because they sensed that their particular moral values, especially in the areas of gender and sexuality, were out of step with a sizeable number of Americans, and they therefore found it easier to adopt the anti-institutional attitude of a self-perceived persecuted minority than the pro-institutional mindset of mainline Protestants who, for the most part, did not sense the same degree of cultural alienation. But it may have also been rooted in evangelicalism’s longstanding individualistic emphasis on each believer’s personal connection to the Holy Spirit and ability to discern God’s truth directly from the Bible. If Catholicism located the Holy Spirit’s communication in the magisterium and mainline Protestantism grounded it in a more vaguely defined experiential work of God in the church and society, evangelicalism rooted it primarily in the individual believer’s personal interpretation of scripture, which was unmediated by any institution.
“When evangelicals entered politics, therefore, they were almost always more concerned about advancing a moral cause than preserving political institutions. This approach led to litmus-test voting among Christian Right activists, where what mattered was not the long-term effect that a particular presidential administration might have on the American nation and its political institutions but rather, where the particular presidential candidate stood on the narrow set of moral issues that concerned the Christian Right. The Supreme Court became only a means to an end; what mattered was not the preservation of the institution itself but instead, only the effect that Court rulings might have on abortion policy or religious freedom.
“Anti-institutionalism and an anti-establishment political orientation are rooted in white evangelicalism’s nearly three-hundred-year history of individualism. I do not expect this to change anytime soon. But just because it probably will not change does not mean that it should not.
“On one level, of course, a healthy Christian skepticism of human institutions is a good thing, because the Bible is filled with warnings about the ultimate destiny of all political and social institutions that defy the Lord. But the Bible is also filled with admonitions about the foolishness of individuals who act as their own authorities, in defiance of God. Both individuals and institutions are prone to evil – which means that an anti-institutionalism that replaces the sins of established tradition with the sins of an innovative populace acting outside institutional constraints is not likely to be an improvement.
“There is a reason that God expected saved individuals to be part of an institution – the church – and endowed that institution with pastoral leadership that was given the power to hold individuals accountable. Even according to an evangelical ecclesiology – an ecclesiology that is admittedly much less institutionally focused than some Catholic theologians might want – the institutional church is still given some degree of authority over the individual. The institutional church can correct straying members in a way that would never happen if each individual Christian was accountable only to their own conscience. We evidently need those constraints. And although this is not true to the same extent of secular institutions, which are not built on the same foundation as Christ’s church, the same principle of correcting the wrongdoer through the apparatus of a bureaucratic institution applies even to a non-Christian government, as Romans 13 suggests.
“Institutions can certainly be wrong – and when they are, we should not hesitate to say so. They can be agents of injustice. But institutions can also be reservoirs of tradition that represent a collective wisdom that is far greater than any individual can attain. At their best, institutional bureaucracies can constrain the foolishness of an individual and prevent the chaos that ensues when rules can easily be bypassed. And ultimately, institutions provide a mechanism through which Christians can show love to their neighbors and work for justice.
“I would encourage evangelicals who are skeptical of established institutions to continue speaking out against the abuses that institutions inevitably perpetuate. But at the same time, I would also encourage them to adopt the humility needed to see the value of institutional constraints. As a sinner, I need to be constrained by my church, my university, and sometimes by my government. I need bureaucracies; I cannot be a law unto myself. This is something that neither the extreme left nor the extreme right in our nation seems to recognize. But any Christian who believes in the existence of original sin should acknowledge the need for institutional restraints.
“So, rather than call for the demolition of institutions, I want to seek reforms to make institutions more accountable, while also preserving the institutional mechanisms that constrain individual recklessness. There is wisdom in maintaining an institutional system of checks and balances. James Madison was not an evangelical Christian, but his view of the need for a system of checks and balances in government (which may have been influenced by a view of human nature that he learned from Princeton’s Reformed evangelical president, John Witherspoon) was probably more consistent with a biblical view of human sinfulness than evangelicals’ unconstrained individualism often is.
“Human institutions cannot be equated with the kingdom of God, but until the full consummation of God’s kingdom, we will need human institutions to constrain us. Evangelicals, therefore, should rethink their longstanding anti-institutionalism. It’s wise to be wary of placing too much faith in a human institution, whether in government or anywhere else. But if the only alternative to governmental institutions that we have to offer is radical individualism, we probably need to reread the Bible’s teachings about the individual sinful proclivities that make institutions a necessary part of our fallen world.”
Three and a half years after I published those words at the Anxious Bench, we’re now in the midst of an all-out assault on the traditional institutions of governance. Perhaps there’s little that we can do about it as individual citizens at this particular moment. But as Christians, we can defend the theological principles that gave rise to these institutions – and we can reflect on their value, even if some of our fellow Christians take a different view.
Because we worship a sovereign God, we know that God’s kingdom will triumph regardless of what happens to these institutions. But that doesn’t mean that these institutions were pointless. Their loss will be deeply felt, even by some evangelicals.
It was these institutions that sustained our democracy – and now that they are being trimmed back, the restraints that kept sinful individualism from plunging the nation into chaos are no longer present. The evangelical fantasy that democracy could flourish without institutional safeguards will likely prove to be badly misguided. And what is most tragic about this is that evangelicals, of all people, should have known this, based on their orthodox Christian theology of original sin that corrupts every human heart.
Evangelicals’ deep antipathy toward “elite” institutions may accord well with their history, but in this case, the particular political application of that anti-institutional skepticism does not accord well with wisdom or with an orthodox Christian theology of human nature. Evangelicals may have wanted democracy without the institutions to protect it, but it was the height of naivete to imagine that in a sinful world, democracy could flourish without institutional safeguards. Now the whole nation will likely pay the price for this evangelical theological oversight.
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