Evangelicals Are Graded on a Curve (and That’s a Problem)

Over the past four years, the media has sought to crack the puzzle of evangelical support for Donald Trump. Why, they ask, are evangelicals supporting a man who brags about sexual assaulting women; who puts children in cages; who can’t even respond to a  global pandemic without treating it as a giant conspiracy? How did evangelicals get here? What can possibly explain evangelical support for Trump?

In recent weeks, a number of readers have expressed concern that I write about evangelical Christianity in a way that they argue is naive. They ask why I write as though I am surprised to find that evangelical Christians’ view share not consistent, or shocked to learn that evangelical Christians support horrific, dehumanizing things. In their view, these things should be obvious, not a shock or surprise. To these readers, this is simply what evangelicals have been, and done, for decades.

There is something to this. It is absolutely the case that treating evangelical Christian support for abhorrent policies today as some sort of abnormality completely out of proportion with everything that has come before risks normalizing past evangelical support for policies just as abhorrent. Take evangelical Christian opposition to same-sex marriage, for example—or their support for the criminalization of sodomy as recently as two decades ago.

Why, then, does 2016 feel like such a turning point? Why are evangelical actions since 2016 treated as different from their actions before 2016? The answer, I think, is that evangelicals are graded on a curve.

I’ll start with myself as an example. I recently read the following statements Trump’s current and latest press secretary Kayleigh McEnany made to media:

“I know the person I am. I know what I stand for. And I stand as a Christian woman, someone who believes in equality and truth and loyalty and honesty. It’s the values I’ve lived by my whole life.

“People will malign you. It comes with the job, but I know who I’m ultimately working for and it’s the Big Guy upstairs. And my mission in life is that when I pass that He will look at me and say, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’”

When I first read these comments, they reminded me of something I wrote last week about damaging one’s “witness.” (That’s evangelical lingo for harming one’s reputation among nonbelievers. For example, if someone says they’re a Christian but they go out drinking and carousing at night—or if they curse and swear—they are damaging “their witness.”) I wondered whether McEnany is aware that evangelical Christians have no witness left. She can stand there and say she’s up there as a Christian woman all she wants, but due to her support for Trump—and his lies and his policies—her comments are not going to make anyone on the secular left think well of evangelical Christianity.

But as I started to write this, I paused. Ten years ago, evangelical Christians were putting enormous amounts of energy into banning same-sex marriage. Since the 1980s, evangelicals have dismantled welfare; called AIDS God’s just and righteous punishment on gay people; supported all manner of coups against democratically elected governments abroad; and opposed women’s right to work outside of the home. They did all of this well beset with controversies over televangelists—and ongoing controversies involving megachurch pastors who fleece or abuse their flocks and then get caught.

Did evangelicals have much of a witness before 2016? Long before 2016, the secular left recognized a wide range of evangelical positions and actions as abhorrent—and these positions were abhorrent! How is denying a same-sex couple the right to marry somehow less bad or less shocking than turning away desperate asylum seekers at our borders, or separating immigrant children from their parents?

It’s not surprising, then, that some raised in secular or left-leaning homes might look at the current dismay over evangelical Christians and wonder what is actually new here. This isn’t evangelicals’ first rodeo, they note. Evangelicals have supported terrible policies that have caused very real and present harm to millions of people for decades. 

In the initial draft of my response to McEnany’s comments—the draft I scrapped to write this instead—I wrote as follows:

I sometimes wonder about our ability to practice self-deception. I wonder, too, about the power of information bubbles. I was an evangelical Christian ass a teen and young adult; given my youth and other factors (such as being homeschooled), the information I had access to was limited. But that is not the case for McEnany. She supports a present who brags about assaulting women and puts children in cages, a president who jokes about roughing up protestors and thinks a global pandemic is about him—surely she has to be aware that all of this has ensured that those on the secular left (and far beyond it) won’t touch evangelical Christianity with a ten-foot pole?

The trouble with this take, I realized, is that the secular left didn’t actually think any better of evangelical Christians a decade ago, when they were focused on fighting against marriage equality, demonizing LGBTQ people, and blocking women’s access to low-cost birth control. This brings up other questions: Does showing shock and dismay at evangelical Christians’ support for Trump suggest that we are too quick to overlook the many harmful things evangelicals did and said before 2016?

I grew up in an evangelical Christian home. I left evangelical Christianity not because of its values and ideals, but rather because I lost my beliefs. It was the mid-2000s, the heyday of the New Atheist movement; logically, the existence of a God stopped making sense to me. I knew evangelical Christians opposed abortion and same-sex marriage, and I came to see that opposition as very deeply wrong, but it was at least familiar—these were positions I had grown up with, and because of that, rightly or wrongly, evangelical positions and actions in these areas did not shock me. These were simply their beliefs.

This, I would argue, is the starting point many in the media use for grading evangelical Christians—sure, they oppose abortion and same-sex marriage, and sure, they oppose birth control and women being in the workforce, but that’s just because those are their religious beliefs. You can’t judge someone for their religious beliefs, can you? Sincerely held religious beliefs must be treated with some modicum of respect. Right?

Even evangelical Christian opposition to the welfare state and social safety nets can be viewed as part of their religious beliefs—evangelical Christians argue that churches should be the ones offering people assistance, and given how complicated and hard it is to access welfare—and how generous evangelical Christians are in donating to charity—this is understandable, isn’t it? Except, of course, that welfare is complicated to access because Republicans, with the full support of evangelical Christians, made it difficult to access. Except, of course, that evangelical charity almost always comes with strings attached.

But the narrative holds nonetheless.

As long as harmful evangelical positions and actions are portrayed as simply part of their religious beliefs, they receive a pass. Many evangelical Christians would disagree with this—I, like them, was raised to believe that we were part of a benighted, persecuted minority. It is true that evangelicals are often portrayed as oddities or weirdos. Still, though, the media is usually willing to take evangelicals’ beliefs at face value—and to treat these beliefs as something that needs to be grappled with fairly.

What changed in 2016, exactly? For one thing, evangelicals supported a candidate who boasted about sexually assaulting women. Some evangelicals would say this was merely strategic—they wanted the appointment of anti-abortion judges, they insist—but their response to Bill Clinton in the 1990s has made it difficult for the media to view their’ actions as anything other than rank, blatant hypocrisy. The media is not typically sympathetic to hypocrisy—perhaps especially religious hypocrisy. That, though, is yet another example of the media taking religious beliefs seriously—hypocrisy only looks like serious malfeasance if one assumes that the beliefs being violated were sincerely held in the first place.

The other thing that changed is evangelicals’ support for Trump’s racist, xenophobic ranting on immigration. What felt different about this, perhaps, is that it wasn’t based on religious beliefs. Evangelicals were doing, saying, and supporting utterly horrific things—calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals and arguing for the importance of keeping America a majority white nation—but this time the harmful things they supported weren’t connected to their religious beliefs.

There’s the curve I was talking about—Evangelical Christian support for horrific polices based on their religious beliefs has often been treated as somehow understandable, or at least as something that is sincerely held, something that must be fairly reckoned with. This didn’t fit that framing.

There is nothing in the Bible that says to reject the refugee or rip children from their desperate parents. Suddenly, the media portrayal of evangelicals as individuals who support regressive, perhaps harmful, antiquated positions based on their somewhat odd and old-fashioned religious beliefs fell apart.

(I should note that there have been plenty of people, and some media networks, calling evangelicals out for the harm they have caused with their religious beliefs for decades. What I’m grappling with here and trying to explain is why the tenor of that conversation changed so completely in 2016.)

But what if—stay with me for a moment here—what if it was the other way around all along? What if evangelicals’ religious beliefs are more shaped by their cultural and political views than vice versa? What if evangelicals argued in the 1970s that women should be homemakers not because the Bible says that, but because evangelical leaders and much of the evangelical laypeople were culturally conservative and believed that having women in the workforce was disruptive and created an unordered society?

What if evangelicals began opposing abortion in the late 1970s not because the Bible says abortion is wrong—it actually doesn’t—but rather because they equated abortion with a rejection of women’s role in the home, a view they held—again—for cultural reasons? And what if their stated view today that fetuses are persons from the moment of conception is not based on the Bible but rather on their personal feelings on the issue—feelings shaped over decades of evangelical condemnation of abortion?

What if evangelical Christians’ religious beliefs follow their cultural and political views, and not the other way around?

During the 1950s and 1960s, evangelicals across the South and also in the North argued that “race mixing” went against God’s will and that the Bible inveighed against marrying outside of your race. They argued that segregation was biblical and that any attempt to integrate was against God—and was probably due to communist interference. Today, only a small number of evangelical Christians hold these views. In fact, many evangelical Christians argue that the Bible teaches racial equality.

The Bible didn’t change. Evangelical Christians’ cultural views changed, and that changed how they interpreted the Bible.

While evangelical Christians who oppose homosexuality claim that their position is grounded in the Bible, there are many Christians who argue that the Bible says the opposite. There are Bible verses that say one thing, and other Bible verses that say another. In their opposition to gay and lesbian “lifestyles” and transgender identities, evangelicals are actively choosing between two sets of interpretations. In other words, it’s not the Bible that is guiding them; it’s their cultural opposition to homosexuality.

(I know evangelicals would claim that the Bible is actually clear on this issue, but I can read the Bible myself, and it’s damn ambiguous. The Bible isn’t a catechism that lists sins, it’s a collection of disparate writings, and these writings are not always either consistent or terribly clear.)

Even evangelicals’ opposition to government social programs doesn’t come from the Bible—it comes from fundamentalists’ alignment with the Republican Party in the 1920s and 1930s, which resulted in a marriage between capitalism and evangelicalism. That’s yet another example of cultural and political positions guiding biblical interpretation.

Even if evangelical Christians’ interpretations of the Bible mirror their cultural and political views, and not vice versa, this is not something that is done consciously by every evangelical Christian. Many evangelical Christians simply grow up in a family and church community where they are taught a set of religious, cultural, and political views that they are told fit together naturally, despite this relationship being a product of specific past forces and not something that is unchanging or in any way universal.

Understanding the relationship between evangelical Christians’ cultural and political views and their biblical interpretation helps explain how evangelicals could adopt positions on immigration and asylum seekers that seem so at odds with anything actually said in the Bible. Namely, their positions are being guided by their culture and politics, and their religion follows their culture politics. Evangelical Christian leaders around the country are working double time to create a scriptural justification for their xenophobia—although I should note that this is still contested in some circles.

What would it mean to stop grading evangelicals on a curve? For the media, part of the problem is a widespread norm of viewing religious beliefs as fixed and finite: If someone says this is what their religion teaches, that is what their religion teaches. I understand why this is the norm, but I do think this approach has substantial limitations. People how their views because they choose to—and that includes their religious beliefs. An evangelical Christian who is uncomfortable hearing xenophobia from the pulpit will go church hunting and join a congregation that is less xenophobic.

People shouldn’t be absolved of the harm their actions cause simply because they claim their views and positions are grounded in their religious views. This is too simplistic. People can and should be held responsible for their religious beliefs. Religion is not isolated from culture and politics.

This is something I should know, if anyone does. True, I left evangelical Christianity because my faith stopped making sense to me, and not over evangelical opposition to same-sex marriage or any related issue. But my story serves as a reminder that people can change their religious beliefs. They’re not locked in. I know others who left as well, and plenty who left particularly conservative evangelical congregations for churches that preach gender equality, racial justice, and environmental responsibility.

Evangelical Christian positions on politics today should be understood as part of a long history of evangelical support for policies that demonize the other and aggrandize the white race. This may feel new, and probably there are things that are new, but on a fundamental level, it is simply more of what came before. The media—and your humble blogger—need to do a better job remembering that.

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