Who Is Their God?

I recklessly thought that if something could save this election, it would be the faithfulness of Christian followers on a spiritual journey of seeing creation as God does – worth fighting for. Christians would be the ones exercising their witness in order to defeat a whiteness that does not care whom it has to destroy on its path towards power, and ultimately toward a perverse kind of deification . . . God’s followers are supposed to rebel against this idolatrous notion. I hoped that most white Christians would resist this idolatry, that they would refuse to join their white identities with the ideology of whiteness. I was wrong. Oluwatomisim Oredein, “White Christianity, and How Hope Was Wrong”

Late in the evening of Election Day, as Jeanne and I watched a slow-motion train wreck unfolding before our eyes, the results of exit polls kept reminding us of which demographic was responsible, despite virtually every poll running up to the election, for what appeared to be happening. “I’m really getting tired of white people,” I said. Nothing that has happened over the days since has changed my mind. But there’s one particular subset of my skin-tone demographic that I particularly am confused by. White Christians.

Over the past many months, I have occasionally written on this blog and social media outlets about my confusion as to why evangelical Christians were supporting Donald Trump in large numbers. Truth be told, though, I treated it as first a humorous, then a puzzling phenomenon, but never seriously thought it would be ultimately more than a curiosity and a footnote to this strangest and nastiest of campaigns. But upon learning in the aftermath of the election that more than eighty percent of self-identified white evangelical Christians voted for the President-elect, I find myself suffering from a severe case of cognitive dissonance and general sadness.

Paragraphs such as the following from an article a few days ago in The Washington Post don’t help:

In the age of Trump, what is a Christian?

“It really makes you feel great to be a Christian,” one person told The Washington Post. “I think Christians took a big stand this time and said we’re going to stand up for our faith,” said a second. Referring to Trump, a third said, “I feel like we actually have an advocate now in the White House.”

Perhaps as a Christian I should not admit this, but everyone time I read or hear something like this, I have a serious WTF?!?!? moment. The problem is that I know the evangelical Christian world intimately. I was raised in it, the foundations of my faith and my moral code were laid in it, and many members of my family whom I love are still squarely in the middle of it. Although for various important reasons I have not placed the adjective “evangelical” in front of my Christian commitment for decades, I have been regularly grateful for much that I learned about my faith, about scripture, and about myself under the tutelage of conservative, evangelical Christianity. But what I learned did not include xenophobia, racism, misogyny, sexual abuse, boorishness, or building walls. I must profess that I am thoroughly and profoundly confused.

I was reminded when reading a similar article in The New York Times a couple of days ago of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s famous 1963 “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” a text that I used to teach frequently toward the end of the final semester of my college’s four-semester “Development of Western Civilization” course that I regularly participate in. From an Alabama prison cell, Dr. King wrote that when he was drafted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Ala., he believed that the white Christian church would support him. Instead, he discovered some white ministers were outright opponents; others were “more cautious than courageous and . . . remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained glass windows.” In the face of blatant racial and economic injustice, King expressed disappointment at seeing white church leaders “stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities.” He spoke of travelling throughout the South and looking its “beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward . . .     Over and over I have found myself asking: ‘What kind of people worship here? Who is their God?’”

I have wondered the same things many times over the years, but never as frequently as during the past two weeks. I understand the various reasons why people might have voted for the President-elect, although I think their choice is one that they and our country will soon bitterly regret. But packaging such a vote as a resounding victory for Christian belief and commitment not only baffles me—it offends me. I have always believed that the Christian faith is a large tent. It must be if someone like me can accurately call himself a Christian. But I’m not sure that any tent is large enough to cover both a person who believes our President-elect is a God-given answer to prayer and me. If the President-elect is truly a standard-bearer for how the Christian faith is to look in practice, count me out. I want nothing to do with it. But because I am convinced that this is not the case, and since—as I often say—I am a liberal because I am a Christian, I continue to believe that Jesus does not call us to exclude everyone but those most like us, does not call us to build walls, and would have us neither disrespect women nor mock persons with disabilities.

In an opinion piece written less than a week after the election, the former editor of the largest evangelical Christian publication in the nation wrote the following:

I was an evangelical magazine editor, but now I can’t defend my evangelical community.

The night that Donald Trump was elected president, I got very little sleep. Surely the wine I sipped as a wave of red swept from east to west across that horrible, televised electoral map didn’t help. But I managed to have one vivid dream. In it, I’m standing on a stage in a stadium full of fellow Christians. And I’m telling them that they voted for the wrong candidate, and that Trump’s presidency will prove to be a grave mistake.

Wednesday greeted me as it did half the voting population, with waves of grief. But since then, the grief has turned into a more complex emotion — something like soul abandonment.

I pray for healing, clarity and enlightenment for persons of all faiths, as well as those of no faith, as we seek our ways forward.