Recently I was asked to write a response to this question, “Can you point to a turning point in American culture or history where the church started making this dramatic turn away from the teachings of Christ?” This was part of a larger (and ongoing) conversation about how to talk to fellow believers about politics. And before you get the wrong impression of this individual they were thinking about this from the perspective of Russell Moore’s 2023 interview with NPR where he stated that multiple pastors had told him they were called woke for quoting the Sermon on the Mount.1 While I am always a little skeptical of such anecdotal claims I have had similar experiences where I have been called woke simply for quoting the Bible so I do think there is at least some truth to Moore’s claim. And though the initial question was framed broadly, and there are certainly other elements of American Christianity this could apply to, I know this person comes from an Evangelical background and is wondering at the disconnect in their own tradition and so that is where I want to focus. So how did we get here and equally important, what do we do about the state of the Church?
To start with, from its founding there have been attempts to write a myth of America against the backdrop of it being God’s chosen nation. There have always been individuals– whether as contemporaries or in retrospect– who have been ready to cast the events of America’s history in terms of God overcoming evil through US growth and development. From the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, Western Expansionism and global economic and military ascendancy have all been told through the lens of the American myth that God has uniquely ordained the US as a Christian Nation. Scholars have written abundantly on the various elements of this cultural myth including how it distorts history and how it has impacted the development of our country.2 These authors demonstrate that there is a long history of Americans (theologians, pastors, and politicians) giving events a theological shape. Whether this is the need for good to triumph in the Civil War3, or the US Manifest Destiny to conquer the continent, Christianity and God’s Divine purpose were shown as the backdrop of events. This appeal to Divine favor alone does not take us to where we are today, but it does help prime people for the theologies we are now witnessing. If we understand that the US is not simply a piece but a central figure in a Divine plan then we can be convinced that any action the US takes to further its own cause is furthering God’s cause as well. And this has been the case throughout American history where the cause of the United States has been seen as an unequivocal moral good on the grounds that anything that furthers America furthers Christianity. Such thinking is evident in how many Americans (and even Christians) consider historical events like the dropping of the nuclear bomb on Nagasaki Japan. Few Americans stop to consider the fact that Nagasaki was the center of Christianity in Japan and that event had a devastating impact on the faith in that county.4 This is just one example of how complicated moral and historical realities get smoothed out and simplified into the American myth that we are simply doing God’s work.
But as I said this American myth alone would not get us into the place we are today on its own, and another key element of American Christianity is our individualism. American Christianity, largely impacted by the revivalism that has dominated our history, is fiercely individualistic. In 2021 the Southern Baptist Convention affirmed that all sin is between an individual and God, this is one of many such proclamations in US religious history. And though the Bible talks about sins against others (e.g. Matthew 18:15) and of corporate sin (see any of the prophets calling Israel to repentance) we in America think of sin as an individual’s private deeds before God. The reason is such an individual focus on religion melds well with the rugged individualism that became entrenched in the American ethos as the virtue that tamed the West. Our framework is built on the individual living a Godly life as an individual, a private relationship with God.
A third major element in accounting for the issues in Evangelical churches today is a rampant anti-intellectualism. Mark Noll famously wrote about this in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, but evangelicalism has been full of personal devotion and short on deep theology or a commitment to academic pursuits. This reality is directly traceable to evangelicalism’s roots in the Fundamentalist movement.5 Fundamentalism, though more intellectually varied than is often portrayed, eschewed much of the intellectual and academic environment of its time, choosing to insulate in its own small institutions that valued doctrinal purity over academic rigor. Many of these institutions were focused on Christian ministries like Bible colleges or missions agencies. The downfall was that many pastors came out of such institutions distrusting of academics (even Christian academics) who disagreed with the worldview they were steeped in. Further, these institutions and the students they produced were very reliant on charismatic leaders. This insular approach led to a culture dominated by charisma and committed to a distrust of “intellectual elites”.
This brings us to the 1950’2-1970’s and we have a Christian culture developing, largely influenced by Southern revivalist preachers who have taken over radio and TV. This culture is patriotic bordering on Nationalistic6, committed to an unhealthy individualism, anti-intellectual, committed to following charismatic leaders, and easily swayed by a small group of insulated institutions. However,at this time this group was politically divided and not a solidified unit, that all changed in the 1980 Presidential election.
In the 1960’s there was a fundamental shift in American politics as the Democratic Party began to be led by Northern Democrats who were pushing for northern urban areas. This push naturally led Democrats pushing for Civil Rights reforms. With this Southern Democrats, still committed to segregation began to leave the Democratic Party. Many of these were Christians who began to found Christian schools and colleges seeking to preserve segregation. As these Southerners began to shift party allegiances to the Republican Party other GOP lobbyists were looking to solidify a voting block of Christians. The issue they landed on was abortion, and the Religious Right was born.7 Prior to the 1980 election Christians outside of Catholics and a few evangelicals did not have a unified stance against abortion, however since the segregated schools in the South needed to remove Carter (a Southern and devout Christian) from the White House they rallied around the abortion issue, pushing Reagan to victory. From 1980-2024 the Republican party maintained an anti-abortion stance to solidify this voting block in their camp and it worked,today to be Evangelical (at least for White Evangelicals) is to be Republican, to the point that some Republicans identify as Evangelical Christians even though they have no connections to a church.8
So now we have in some ways the perfect storm, a Christian movement that is built on charismatic personalities, has a severe distrust of intellectuals and experts, committed to a myth that the US was founded as God’s beacon to the world, and being targeted by one political party. From 1980-2024 the political capitol of Evangelicals grew within the Republican party, and as this happened Evangelical Christians began to listen to specifically right wing media which echoed their language of a “traditional America”.9 What these commentators warned of was a liberal rejection of traditional America and so these liberals became the enemy.10 As this political alliance has grown stronger over the years American Churches have grown more Conservative, as sociologist Ryan Burge has noted.11 And since 2016 this rhetoric has been played up to the point that many Christians now see little difference between Conservative American values and Christian values.12 And this is where we stand, many American Christians have truncated view of the Bible (it is about personal salvation), believe wholeheartedly in the myth that America is God’s chosen nation, are likely to believe their charismatic pastor no matter how uneducated, and over the last generation have been conditioned to vote for one party. Now when someone like me posts a Bible verse like Leviticus 19:3413, I have Christians in the comments telling me Christians are not under an obligation to love foreigners. Or as Moore attested calling the Sermon on the Mount “woke”. It is because these parts of Scripture do not align with their political ends and so they have difficulty believing they are part of Scripture.14
Further, most of those aligned with this way of thinking use two distinct arguments to keep control of the narrative.
- Democrats are evil and so anything they do is evil
- Slippery slope rationale that we cannot give up ground on anything because that will lead to a takeover by those with evil intentions.
The first of these narratives leads Christians to distance themselves from anything that smells of liberal because they do not want to be associated with evil. An example of this line of thinking is Joe Rigney’s The Sin of Empathy endorsed by John Piper Albert Mohler and others in conservative Reformed circles as well as conservative political pundits. The premise of the book revolves around the idea that liberals care about empathy and so Rigney wants to distance himself from the concept and call it “sin”. The truth is he creates imprecise definitions (then uses them inconsistently) to classify what he sees as liberal talking points as sinful.15 Here we have someone creating a sin reflecting an American political expression that does not correspond to anything in the Bible (and is in fact opposed by the Bible). But because it fits the conservative narrative of hatred toward American Liberals, it will be backed by leaders in that community.16 Further, Democrats are seen as evil. Thus, anyone who does not do everything in their power to stop them is participating in evil. This of course means there is no potential to compromise because if we compromise with evil we are on the slippery slope to destruction. And so if we read the Bible in such a way that it gives any credence to positions shared by American Liberals we know that reading of the Bible must be mistaken and we must reject it.17 This means any themes in the Bible that represent issues which sound like social justice (a Liberal ideal) will be ignored. [there are of course different representations of this position and not all are this extreme but I’m dealing with a more extreme version clearly represented in conservative circles.] Overall, even more conservative Christians are not as far to the right as average Republicans, but are being pushed to the right by media.18 But as Christian denominations grow further right we are going to see a greater de-emphasizing of certain Christian themes in churches which means that there will be a greater chance of lay Christians who fall into the critique Moore highlighted.
And if this sounds harsh, I am sorry but it is the truth, it is attested by scholars who study these realities and my own personal experience over my lifetime. And this is something that hurts me because it is my culture and as I have written before (here) I have found this deeply disturbing because I have seen so many people I respected hold to party politics rather than the Christian convictions they taught me. Also,let me be crystal clear I am not trying to say conservative ideas are bad, I am trying to say that when a political party gets in the way of Christian faith that is bad and to some extent that is happening. The question that we are left with is how do we cross this divide? I have burned bridges trying to negotiate the complexities of this subject which is why I am so hesitant to write about it noq. I do not think anyone has all the answers but I do think that Pamela Cooper-White The Psychology of Christian Nationalism: Why People Are Drawn In and How to Talk Across the Divide does a good job in helping to bridge the gap in having discussions with people who are falling into this trap.
- https://www.npr.org/2023/08/08/1192663920/southern-baptist-convention-donald-trump-christianity ↩︎
- For those interested in following this up there are a number of good books
Mark Noll The Civil War as a Theological Crisis
———- America’s Book
———- America’s God
John Fea Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?
David Holmes The Faiths of the Founding Fathers
John Wilsey American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion
↩︎ - Good being whichever side that pastor supported, until the the Union claimed ultimate victory then the North claimed the ultimate support by God while the South rewrote the myth into the Lost Cause ideology which tempered their concern with slavery and saw the whole war as Northern aggression against Southern ideals of decency and autonomy. ↩︎
- https://japan-forward.com/nagasaki-when-truman-atom-bombed-the-home-of-japanese-catholicism/ ↩︎
- Molly Worthen does a fantastic job tracing this history in Apostles of Reason. ↩︎
- “Nationalism as a political ideology that emphasizes the interests and culture of a particular nation, often prioritizing national identity and unity over other affiliations.” Samuel Perry ↩︎
- https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/religious-right-real-origins-107133/ ↩︎
- For more the history of how Evangelical Christians became interlocked with conservative politics see, Kristin Kobes Du Mez Jesus and John Wayne ↩︎
- This was until 2024 when Donald Trump walked back stances on key issues for more conservative Christians like abortion and gay marriage. ↩︎
- It is probably also the case that the fall of the USSR as an external threat to the US forced many Reagan Republicans to look for a new threat to rally around and that became the degradation of society. ↩︎
- https://x.com/ryanburge/status/1922621781170430197
https://x.com/ryanburge/status/1921972626299212149
https://x.com/ryanburge/status/1921892243826221327 ↩︎ - Anecdotally, I remember posts from a pastor at the January 6 rally in DC where he was confused by the unChristian atmosphere he encountered. He seemed to expect that all Republican Trump supporters would be devout Christians like himself. (Whether these posts were deleted I don’t know I couldn’t find them I suspect they were live streams that were not saved). ↩︎
- The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the LORD your God. ↩︎
- Or as some pastors I know have done try to downplay their relevance saying the current political situation does not allow us to think this way. ↩︎
- Ironically Biblical scholars like John Elliot, in his commentary on 1 Peter, point out that the Greek συμπαθής (often translated sympathy) in 1 Peter 3:8 is better represented by the English empathy. This means the Bible commands us to show empathy. ↩︎
- To say nothing of the fact that Rigney is connected to outspoken Confederate sympathizers and people with ties to white supremacist groups. ↩︎
- This is an example of transference, during the Cold War any reading of Scripture that sounded like Communism was rejected on the basis that Communism was evil therefore the Bible could not endorse it in any way. The fall of the Soviet Union did not end this kind of thinking rather the enemy transitioned to an internal enemy American Liberalism. ↩︎
- https://x.com/ryanburge/status/1922831792681185421 ↩︎
Squinting in the Light 
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