When You Fault Evangelicals for Being Unreasonable, Maybe You Make Sure to Use Reason

Jennifer Rubin, a conservative columnist at the Washington Post, claims that evangelicals are proving their harshest critics right. Why? Because they defend Donald Trump. But Rubin’s reasons don’t make sense.

She starts:

For years, Democrats accused Christian conservatives of being closet theocrats, seeking to impose Christianity on the country and refusing to accept, let alone embrace, American diversity. That was a generalization, but it turned out to be more true than not.

The evangelical defense of President Trump has taken on a religious fervor immune to reason.

Notice, the vice of evangelicals shifts from imposing their religion on the country to defending Trump with fervor. Since Donald Trump, widely regarded as one step removed from Harvey Weinstein, is never going to impose Christian morality on the country, Rubin’s point unravels.

If she meant, evangelicals are inconsistent, or even hypocritical, I understand. But if hypocrisy were the slippery slope to theocracy, then the United States has been theocratic except for those virtuous administrations of Washington and Lincoln.

Next, Rubin quotes a Post story as evidence of evangelicals’ fervent defense of Trump:

Although some say the Trump-evangelical alliance harms Christianity, it’s common to hear other conservative Christians say that Trump’s unexpected win — down to the electoral college — shows that God had a more-deliberate-than-usual hand, and has put Trump there for some reason.

Brian Kaylor, a Baptist pastor with a PhD in political communications who has written several books about religion and politics, thinks [White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee] Sanders holds this view of a divine plan and it gives her confidence at the podium.

“When you have to stand up there and defend whatever he’s done, it’s more than you are defending a politician, or even a president; you are defending God’s chosen leader for this time,” he said of Trump’s defenders.

Did you notice that Sarah Huckabee Sanders didn’t even surface explicitly in the quotation. It is a quotation from someone who is interpreting Sanders’ view and who uses the phrase “God’s chosen leader.” And because an academic said what he did, Rubin can then deduce without ever quoting an evangelical that:

That’s stunning to the many Americans who think the divine right of kings was what we fought against in the American Revolution. A God-chosen president can do no wrong, tell no lie, make no error. And that, it seems, has been the default setting for many of Trump’s most loyal supporters among the religious right.

Doesn’t Rubin know that divine-right monarchs were actually supposed to uphold Christian standards? And did she consider that the American founding, which practically every founder believed was ordained by God, was designed to keep people from using religious standards for determining who could legitimately hold office?

But that doesn’t stop her from insisting that defending an immoral POTUS is a violation of the First Amendment:

The notion that lies don’t matter, that politics is akin to a religious mission, strikes many Americans as a scary repudiation of the Constitution’s establishment clause.

That makes me wonder what Rubin does with evangelicals who chastise the President for his egotism, lack of decorum, and many vices and sins. Aren’t they guilty of demanding that Trump conform to Christian morality? And isn’t that a form of imposing Christianity on the country?

Rubin concludes in a bi-partisan manner by calling on all opponents of Trump:

Under a president who now actively courts theocratic leaders and seeks to widen racial and religious division, the United States is being seriously tested. It will take people of faith and of no faith committed to democratic norms and American diversity to repel this assault on the country’s animating principles.

Here is where Rubin loses me but not anti-Trump editors at the Post. She expects Christians as people devoted to Christian convictions to defend democratic norms and American diversity. In fact, evangelicals as Christians by supporting a person who lacks moral convictions are supporting American diversity. Or is it that Rubin thinks the American founding was Christian, that democracy and diversity go hand in hand with Christian faith? If so, then she favors a Christian America where the government forces religion on citizens.

Image