I have been wondering for a while, but especially in the past couple of days, about what to call those who tend to be labeled as “conservative Christians” and yet are neither conservative nor Christian in any meaningful sense.
As a scholar of religion I am aware that labels are always problematic. In that capacity I am also convinced that labels and terminology matter even though they are always imperfect and imprecise. Categories always have blurry edges.
As a Christian who used to be conservative, I am aware that there is a straight line from my past self to where I am at present. I can also see the straight line from conservative Evangelicalism to those who have kept the label but lack the substance.
In the 1980s, I did not think of myself as Evangelical or conservative. I was those things with hindsight, but no one was using that terminology. What we emphasized (and thus the label that was placed on us as a nickname) was being born again. As a newcomer to the Pentecostal church where I had had a profound spiritual experience, I was unaware that not long before a significant number of Pentecostals, Baptists, and others had sold their soul for a mess of political pottage through the “Christian Coalition.” I thus had no sense that forces were at work that were shifting the focus from proclaiming the good news to seeking to seize control of government. That story is told in many other places, if anyone reading this isn’t aware of it.
That’s at the heart of the shift that makes it possible for the father of the foul mouthed murderer Jonathan Ross to call him a “conservative Christian.” It is a label that has remained in place as the focus has shifted from proclaiming a life-changing encounter with God to demanding that the United States impose certain views and norms they espouse on everyone.
That’s why I say that at this point there are some who still wear the label yet who are neither conservative nor Christian.
To be sure, for centuries there have been Christians for whom it was a club, a national identity, or something else. In arguing that these conservative Christians are not genuine Christians, I’m not just pointing to the teaching of Jesus that they flout and disregard. I’m more focused on the thing that used to be the focus of Evangelicalism, the proclamation of a life-changing encounter with God. By the standard of earlier conservative Evangelicalism as I knew it and participated in it, these folks would be considered nominal Christians at best, in need of hearing the good news and being born again.
They are also not conservative, either in relation to historic Christianity or in relation to American values outside of the southern states. While it took a while, the United States eventually came to realize that all means all in statements such as “all men are created equal.” Eventually we got to all people. That progress in a liberal direction was a further outworking of our founding principles.
Slaveholder religion on the other hand was conservative in the sense that it aimed at keeping privilege for some at the cost of enslavement of others. But that religious tradition that eventually evolved into fundamentalism was not preserving unchanging truth. It was deeply reactionary. Uncomfortable about change of a sort that has not historically unsettled Christians, they made a religion that aimed to preserve an imagined golden age of the past.
In both cases theology and society go hand in hand. I have moved on my journey in more than one way, but I am convinced that the way I have moved has brought me closer to the liberality, the inclusivity, the emphasis on social and economic justice, of Jesus and his earlist followers. So if I’m trying to stay true to that while applying those core emphases in our time, am I “liberal” or “conservative”? Both, in different senses. To be true to a liberal vision with which one’s religion or nation was founded is a deeply conservative thing to do in relation to that heritage.
So what is a good label for those who are who are neither conservative nor Christian in the senses explored here, since as we have seen the application of the term “conservative Christian” is at best inaccurate and misleading? Of late a couple that have seemed particularly appropriate are “Beast-worshipers” and “Antichristians.” On the one hand, as Alex Cole put it, “Christians spend generations warning us about the coming of the Antichrist, and when he does show up, they line up to vote for him.” The whole Left Behind/End Times scenario is a fabrication of that tradition with little basis in the Bible, but that doesn’t lessen the irony.
On the other hand, those who bowed to the power of Rome and worshiped its gods that represent its imperial authority, rather than remaining faithful to Christ at cost to themselves, were the actual focus of the Book of Revelation in its historical context.
Either way, it seems apt to refer to the Trumpists, Magagelicals, or whatever else one might call them as devotees of the Beast, of Antichrist.
If we go with something more mundane, the label Religious Right is not bad, as long as there is awareness that the right end of the political spectrum has historically represented authoritarianism and fascism.
What term would you recommend, for those who want to keep the label Christian for themselves, sharing it among genuine liberals and conservatives, while emphasizing that the political club that waves a religious banner is a fundamental betrayal of the core of what it means to be Christian, as well as of what it means to be American?
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