Where Did Evangelicals Go Wrong?

America is a riven society. Political divisions have been on the rise for years. The gap between the Republican and Democratic Parties has grown in Congress, and the share of Americans who interact with people from the opposing party has plummeted. Studies tell us, “Democrats and Republicans both say that the other party’s members are hypocritical, selfish, and closed-minded, and they are unwilling to socialize across party lines.”

Many Americans read news or get information only from sources that align with their political beliefs, which exacerbates fundamental disagreements not just about policies but about basic facts.

So-called affective polarization—in which citizens are more motivated by who they oppose than who they support—has increased more dramatically in America than in any other democracy. “Hatred—specifically, hatred of the other party—increasingly defines our politics,” Geoffrey Skelley and Holly Fuong have written at FiveThirtyEight. My colleague Ron Brownstein has argued that the nation is “confronting the greatest strain to its fundamental cohesion since the Civil War.”

[Russell Moore: The American Evangelical Church is in crisis. There’s only one way out.]

One might reasonably expect that Christians, including white evangelicals, would be a unifying, healing force in American society. After all, the apostle Paul wrote that Jesus came to tear down “the dividing wall of hostility” between groups that held profoundly different beliefs. “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the children of God,” Jesus said. In that same sermon, Jesus also said, “I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.” Even if those goals have always been unattainable, they were seen as aspirational.

Yet in the main, the white evangelical movement has for decades exacerbated our divisions, fueled hatreds and grievances, and turned fellow citizens into enemies rather than friends. This isn’t true of all evangelicals, of course. The movement comprises tens of millions of Americans, many of them good and gracious people who seek to be peacemakers, including in the political realm. They are horrified by the political idolatry we’re witnessing and the antipathy and rage that emanate from it. But it is fair to say that this movement that was at one time defined by its theological commitments is now largely defined by its partisan ones.

FOR MUCH OF the 20th century, evangelicals were disengaged from American politics, in part because of the humiliation of the 1925 Scopes “monkey trial,” in which one of the nation’s most prominent evangelicals and politicians, William Jennings Bryan—a populist Democrat who ran for president three times—prosecuted the case against a high-school teacher, John T. Scopes, who was charged with violating Tennessee state law for teaching evolution in schools. Bryan, who also testified, won the case but hurt his cause. (Scopes was found guilty, but the verdict was overturned on a technicality.) Outside of fundamentalist circles, Bryan and the movement he represented, which attacked the empirical findings of science, became the object of ridicule.

Theology gave fundamentalists and evangelicals another reason to keep their distance from politics. Many churches and denominations stressed personal piety over social engagement. The world was irredeemably corrupt, they believed; the role of Christians was to save souls, not remake the world.

In 1965 a young Independent Baptist pastor, Jerry Falwell, argued that the Church should be separate from the world. “We have few ties to this earth,” he said. The civic responsibilities of Christians were therefore limited: obey the law, pay taxes, vote. But that was about it. “I would find it impossible to stop preaching the pure saving Gospel of Jesus Christ and begin doing anything else,” Falwell said, “including fighting communism, or participating in civil-rights reforms.”

At the same time, some significant evangelical figures, such as the theologian Carl F. H. Henry, were calling for cultural reengagement. “While it is not the Christian’s task to correct social, moral, and political conditions as his primary effort,” Henry wrote, “he ought to lend his endorsement to remedial efforts in any context not specifically anti-redemptive.”

In 1973, about 50 politically moderate-to-progressive evangelical leaders, including Henry, signed the “Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern.” It was meant to address what they perceived as the gap between Christian faith and a commitment to social justice. Marjorie Hyer of The Washington Post wrote at the time that the gathering “could well change the face of both religion and politics in America.”

What happened instead is that the 1970s saw the rise of the religious right. It was a response to what conservative Christians considered to be a whole series of rapid, disorienting changes in social and moral norms. The 1960s ushered in the feminist movement and the sexual revolution. There was Woodstock and the Stonewall Riots, the birth of the National Organization of Women, and a wave of campus uprisings.

In the 1970s a whole series of issues—the Equal Rights Amendment, gay-rights ordinances, regulations on Christian schools, the IRS threatening to strip Bob Jones University of its tax-exempt status because of its policy against interracial dating, the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion—convinced many evangelicals and fundamentalists that their values were being subverted, their way of life assaulted. Political activism became a form of cultural resistance—and eventually, they hoped, a means to cultural victory.

[John Fea: What I wish more people knew about American evangelicalism]

“The critical development in the mid-1970s was mobilization, and on a national scale,” the historian Mark A. Noll wrote in The New Republic. “As that mobilization took place, it transformed well-established traditions of evangelical and fundamentalist religion into a political instrument.”

By the late 1970s, Falwell, who a decade earlier had advocated separatism, was embracing political activism. In addition to serving as pastor of Thomas Road Baptist Church and chancellor of Liberty University, which he founded in 1971, Falwell was organizing “I Love America” rallies at state capitols. In 1979 he founded the Moral Majority, whose purpose was to mobilize conservative Christians against “secular humanism” and what he later called “the flood tide of moral permissiveness.”

“We are fighting a holy war,” he said, “and this time we are going to win.” He was hardly alone. Falwell counted as allies pastors, televangelists, and theologians; leaders of para-church organizations and “pro-family” ministries; Christian television programs (like The 700 Club) and radio shows with a massive reach (like Focus on the Family); and Christian political activists.

“The eruption of the Christian Right was sudden,” according to Frances Fitzgerald, author of The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America. “In 1980 they seemed to be everywhere, putting on huge conferences and mass rallies, and giving interviews on secular TV shows.”

“Low voter participation was an expression of a religious position,” A. James Reichley, a scholar of politics and religion, told The Christian Science Monitor in 1984. “But that changed dramatically in the early 1970s, to the point that the evangelicals now are among the highest participants in elections. Not all the first-time registrants are for Reagan and not all are being brought in by the churches. But the churches are having a substantial effect.”

Leading up to the 1980 election, evangelicals tended to be more Democratic than non-evangelicals were. (Fifty-seven percent of evangelicals describe themselves as Democrats compared with 47 percent of non-evangelicals.) In 1976, Jimmy Carter split the evangelical vote with Gerald Ford. During the 1980 presidential election, however, Falwell pledged to mobilize voters for Ronald Reagan, “even if he has the devil running with him.”

Reagan defeated the incumbent Democratic president, Carter, in a landslide, winning about two-thirds of the evangelical vote. Four years later, Reagan carried almost three-quarters of the evangelical vote. The mass migration of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians to the Republican Party was well under way. American politics was changing in profound ways; so, too, was the evangelical movement.

IN THE 1980s, the Presidential Biblical Scoreboard published by two church-related groups pushed evangelicals to assess candidates under the “biblical-family-moral” framework. But what was at least as significant as the issues that galvanized evangelicals and fundamentalists was the temperament, the cast of mind, that increasingly defined much of the evangelical, as well as the fundamentalist and Pentecostal, world.

The rhetoric had turned apocalyptic. In 1980, Falwell said that America was “floundering to the brink of death.” A year later, D. James Kennedy, the pastor of Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and a leading religious conservative, told 2,000 delegates at a joint meeting of the National Religious Broadcasters and the National Association of Evangelicals that evangelicals should increase their level of political involvement because “secular humanists have declared war on Christianity in this country and they are progressing very rapidly.”

In 1982, the theologian Francis Schaeffer, one of evangelicalism’s most important public intellectuals in the latter half of the 20th century, gave a speech in which he warned that America “is close to being lost.” He warned about “the Humanist conspiracy” and said that if public schools didn’t teach creation as well as evolution, that amounted to “tyranny.” In A Christian Manifesto, the book that emerged from his speech, Schaeffer warned about an “elite authoritarianism” that would systematically destroy the Christian worldview. “It is not too strong to say that we are at war, and there are no neutral parties in this struggle,” Schaeffer wrote.

Year after year, decade after decade, the same themes were repeated. America was always on the brink of moral collapse. The secular, progressive barbarians were always at the gates. The threat was existential and unending. It was a zeitgeist of catastrophism.

This attitude catalyzed among evangelicals and fundamentalists an ambience of fear, the belief that catastrophe was just around the corner, a sense that those who didn’t share their views were out to destroy their country, their values, their children. For many evangelicals, politics became a contest between the Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. They raged against their opponents, whom they saw less as fellow citizens than as their enemies. Politics became drenched in grievances and demonization, almost always aimed at liberals and Democrats, especially Democratic presidents. Evangelical leaders set the tone.

One example: In 1994 Falwell sold a videotape that alleged that President Bill Clinton had ordered the murder of “countless people.” (The Washington Post reported that Falwell acknowledged on CNN that he had no independent evidence to corroborate the allegations. And none was ever found.)

The next Democratic president, Barack Obama, was accused of “paving the way for the future reign of the Antichrist,” in the words of Robert Jeffress, a significant figure in the evangelical world and pastor of one of the largest Southern Baptist churches in the country. The then-president of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Paige Patterson, affirmed Jeffress’s claim: “I understand what Jeffress is saying.” This rhetoric was the coin of the realm.

Worldviews have consequences, both good and bad. Just two days after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Falwell and Pat Robertson—a Baptist minister, religious broadcaster, founder of the Christian Coalition and the Christian Broadcasting Network, and Republican presidential candidate in 1988—had a conversation on Robertson’s television show The 700 Club in which Falwell said, “What we saw on Tuesday, as terrible as it is, could be minuscule, if in fact God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of God to give up probably what we deserve.” He added that the American Civil Liberties Union has “got to take a lot of blame for this,” and Robertson agreed. Falwell went on to say:

I know that I’ll hear from them for this. But throwing God out successfully with the help of the federal court system, throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools—the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this, because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way—all of them who have tried to secularize America—I point the finger in their face and say, “You helped this happen.”

To which Robertson responded, “Well, I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government.”

For three and a half decades, apocalyptic thinking, frustration, and fury helped define the politics of evangelicalism and fundamentalism. The intensity of the fear fluctuated, but it never fully waned.

My Atlantic colleague Tim Alberta, the author of The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicalism in an Age of Extremism, pointed out in an interview that after the Cold War ended, during the 1990s, a decade of peace and prosperity, “some of that panic starts to fall away a little bit.” But what started to “trip the alarms inside of evangelicalism,” according to Alberta, was the end of the George W. Bush presidency and the election of Obama. Alberta points out that portions of the white evangelical movement were deeply uncomfortable with a Black president, with the leftward shift of the culture, and with advances for gay rights and same-sex marriage.

[Read: How Trump has transformed the evangelicals]

All of this was happening prior to Donald Trump’s appearance on the political stage. But it went to a whole new level after he won the Republican nomination and the presidency in 2016. The religious right didn’t change so much as the person the religious right supported for president changed. He ushered in a whole new era.

THE ALLIANCE BETWEEN the religious right and Trump—a nonreligious, thrice-married man who celebrated his infidelities in the tabloids, paid hush money to a porn star, cheated on his taxes, spread conspiracy theories, mocked POWs and people with disabilities, and was found was found liable for what the judge in the case referred to as rape—seems incongruous, and in some ways it is. After all, for years evangelicals insisted that good character was essential in political leaders, and especially in presidents. That was certainly the case when evangelicals lacerated Clinton for his moral failures.

In 1998, for example, Gary Bauer, then the president of the Family Research Council, a star of the religious right and a family-values crusader, wrote that “children cannot be set adrift into a culture that tells them that lying is okay, that fidelity is old-fashioned and that character doesn’t count.” And he pointed to Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky: “The seamy facts under public discussion are shameful enough. But fascination with this story should not be allowed to obscure the deeper lesson these incidents impart. That lesson is this: Character counts—in a people, in the institutions of our society, and in our national leadership. In character is destiny. Our founders believed and set down in their own words that only a virtuous people could remain free.”

But once Trump won the Republican nomination in 2016, Bauer, like many influential evangelical figures—including Franklin Graham, son of the famed preacher Billy Graham; Jerry Falwell Jr., who was the president of Liberty University before he was ousted amid scandal; Robert Jeffress; Al Mohler, the president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family; Tony Perkins, Family Research Council’s longest-serving president; and Wayne Grudem, a theologian and an author—fell into line behind Trump. In doing so, they embraced a man whose personal, political, and business ethics are not only far more compromised and corrupt than Bill Clinton’s; they are unsurpassed in the history of the American presidency. For evangelical leaders and for those representing the movement, character no longer counted.

“We kind of gave him—‘All right, you get a mulligan. You get a do-over here,’” Tony Perkins, the president of the FRC and an ardent Trump supporter, told Politico.

In October 2016—several weeks after the release of the notorious Access Hollywood tape in which Trump bragged about his affairs and declared that when you’re a star, “You can do anything. You can grab them by the pussy. You can do anything”—more than seven in 10 white evangelical Protestants said an elected official can behave ethically even if they have committed transgressions in their personal life. Five years earlier, when Obama was president, only 30 percent of white evangelical Protestants said the same. No group shifted their position more dramatically.

The argument is commonly made that this was pragmatic. Evangelicals might not admire Trump, but he would deliver on their policy agenda, and that mattered most. That might have been true for some, but a good deal more was going on as well.

The Calvin University historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez, the author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, challenges the commonly held assumption that the religious right backed Trump for only pragmatic reasons. She argues that Trump represented the fulfillment, rather than the betrayal, of white evangelicals’ most deeply held values. Kobes Du Mez’s book offers an account of 75 years of evangelical history, showing how the evangelical subculture worked for decades to replace the Jesus of the Gospels with an idol of rugged masculinity and Christian nationalism.

The support for Trump was “the culmination of evangelicals’ embrace of militant masculinity,” she argues, and they condoned his “callous display of power.”

[From the January/February 2024 issue: My father, my faith, and Donald Trump]

In a 2018 interview with The Guardian, Jerry Falwell Jr.—who referred to Trump as a “good moral person”—described Democrats as fascists and “Brownshirts.” Tony Perkins told Politico that evangelical Christians “were tired of being kicked around by Barack Obama and his leftists. And I think they are finally glad that there’s somebody on the playground that is willing to punch the bully.” And in 2016 Pastor Jeffress told NPR, “I’ve said I want the meanest, toughest SOB I can find to protect this nation. And so that’s why Trump’s tone doesn’t bother me.”

White evangelical Protestants are now among the Republican Party’s most loyal constituencies. In 2020, Trump actually expanded his support among white evangelical Protestants, winning 84 percent of their vote after having received 77 percent four years earlier.

White evangelical Christians are the most consistently reliable supporters of the most polarizing and morally depraved president in American history. It has hurt America, and it has done tremendous damage to the witness of the Christian faith.

THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT BEGAN, at least in part, at least for some, as a defensive reaction to the aggressions of the modern world. It has ended up in a very different and troubling place. So how might those of us who are Christians, regardless of where we fall on the political spectrum, help redeem this moment? Most fundamentally, it will require a reshaping of sensibilities, a fundamental rethinking of the “how” of politics.

First, Christians need to reacquaint themselves with the Jesus of the New Testament, not the Jesus of the American right (or left). The real Jesus demonstrated a profound mistrust of political power and did not encourage his disciples to become involved in political movements of any kind.

The most meaningful emblem of Christianity is not the sword but the cross, which is the antithesis of world power. Jesus made clear time and again that his kingdom is not of this world. And the New Testament does not provide anything like a governing blueprint.

The early Church did not hand out voter guides. What it did do, according to the sociologist Rodney Stark, was create “communal compassion” and social networks; care for the sick, widows, and orphans; welcome strangers and outsiders; respect women; and connect to non-Christians. That is how a tiny and obscure messianic movement in the second and third centuries became the dominant faith of Western civilization. That is how it transformed the ancient world and the course of human history.

This does not mean that Christians, Christian institutions, and churches should never under any circumstances be involved in politics, because politics has profound human consequences. It is one arena in which to pursue justice, which matters. What this does mean is that Christians need to assume a much different posture, to move away from hyper-partisanship toward a more detached and prophetic role, and to take more seriously than many do the idea of dual citizenship—the belief that we may be citizens of the City of Man but that our deepest loyalties are to the City of God.

A proper political theology would prevent Christians, Christian institutions, and churches from becoming pawns in political power games. “The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state,” Martin Luther King Jr. said. “It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool.” Today, far too many evangelical Christians—however admirable they may otherwise be and despite the many good works they may do—are tools of a dangerous movement and of a dangerous former president.

Second, Evangelicals also need to develop a theory of political and social engagement that is far more comprehensive and careful, mature and informed, textured and sophisticated. In this respect, evangelicals and Protestants have much to learn from Catholicism, which has laid out and built on principles of social teaching over many centuries. The cornerstones of Catholic social thought are human dignity; subsidiarity, which holds that nothing should be done by larger and more complex institutions that can be done as well by smaller and simpler ones; and solidarity, meaning the social obligations we have to one another, with a special concern for the poor and most vulnerable members of the human community.

As Michael Gerson put it when describing Catholic social thought, “The doctrinal whole requires a broad, consistent view of justice, which—when it is faithfully applied—cuts across the categories and clichés of American politics. Of course, American Catholics routinely ignore Catholic social thought. But at least they have it. Evangelicals lack a similar tradition of their own to disregard.”

[From the April 2018 issue: The last temptation]

Until some similar approach begins to take hold—and is transmitted from theologians and church leaders to the wider community of believers—the random, ad hoc nature of evangelical political involvement will continue and probably worsen. There is no authoritative theological construct in place to check, channel, and refine raw partisanship cloaked in Christian garb.

A third thing that needs to happen is for many politically active Christians to move away from a spirit of anger toward understanding, from revenge toward reconciliation, from grievance toward gratitude, and from fear toward trust.

Ken Stern is a fair-minded liberal who spent a year with people on the right to better understand their worldview. (His book Republican Like Me documents his journey.) Stern visited evangelicals in a variety of settings, and was impressed by the generosity he encountered. A few years ago, I met with him, along with the pastor of the church I was attending. He asked us why, if many evangelicals devote their lives to helping others, does that not translate into a political agenda? How is it that anger and aggression have become the public face of Christianity, while the many acts of kindness and charity, and the spirit informing those things, are kept under a bushel, largely out of public view? Why do evangelicals consistently show their worst side rather than their most winsome one?

We wondered the same things.

In his 1997 book, What’s So Amazing About Grace?, Philip Yancey writes of asking strangers, “When I say the words ‘evangelical Christian’ what comes to mind?” He mostly heard political descriptions, and not once did he hear a description redolent of grace.

Yancey wrote:

Grace comes free of charge to people who do not deserve it and I am one of those people. I think back to who I was—resentful, wound tight with anger, a single hardened link in a long chain of ungrace learned from family and church. Now I am trying in my own small way to pipe the tune of grace. I do so because I know, more surely than I know anything, that any pang of healing or forgiveness or goodness I have ever felt comes solely from the grace of God. I yearn for the church to become a nourishing culture of that grace.

It is that “culture of grace” that can transform people’s hearts, and in the process renew not just the Church but also American society and American politics. But a “culture of grace” does not mean Christians should fail to criticize what deserves criticism or stay silent in the face of wrongdoing. Christians are not called to be passive in the face of injustice and maliciousness.

The fourth thing Christians can do to strengthen their public witness and the state of our politics is internalize and act on the lessons from the parable of the Good Samaritan, which speaks to this moment in a powerful way.

In the story, a Samaritan comes across a Jew who has been beaten, robbed, and left dying on the side of a dangerous road from Jerusalem to Jericho. After a priest and a Levite both ignore the wounded man, the Samaritan rescues him and, at his own expense, nurses him back to health. “Go and do likewise,” Jesus says.

At the time, Samaritans and Jews despised each other, and had few dealings—a first-century version of the political, ethnic, and religious tribalism we know too well.

The point Jesus, a Jew, was driving home is that we need to break down the walls between us. We are called to love our neighbors—a category which, according to the parable, includes those who are racially, religiously, ethnically, and culturally different than we are—and to help them in their need in the most practical way, materially and physically.

Instead, too many Americans view the “other”—for some, that refers to refugees, Muslims, or Mexicans; for others, it’s rural southerners, gun owners, or religious fundamentalists—with a combination of suspicion and contempt that is eating away at our sense of national unity.

Christians can model what it means to reach across the divides that exist in their work settings, in their churches, in their social circles, and on social media. They can demonstrate tolerance and understanding toward those with different life experiences. They can be intentional about finding volunteer settings that put them in contact with people who have different political views, skin color, national origins, and class status.

There’s no magic wand we can wave to repair the breach. A nation’s civic and political culture is changed by what we do in our daily lives—in our homes, schools, communities, and houses of worship. And by loving our neighbors we take the most important first step. That is what Jesus calls his followers to do, and what citizenship in 21st-century America demands.

A LITTLE MORE THAN A DECADE AGO, my friend Steve Hayner was going through the Gospel of Luke, and was struck again and again by the grace and embrace Jesus extended to those whom the religious elite had every reason (they thought) to kick to the curb. People on the low rungs of life, including those with frailties and flaws, flocked to Jesus—not because he preached moral rectitude but because he was willing to love them, to listen to them, and to welcome them.

“I doubt whether God will have much to say about our political convictions in the end,” Steve wrote to me at the time. “But I’m quite sure that he will have something to say about how we loved the least, the marginalized, the outcasts, the lonely, the abused—even when some think that they have it all.”

“Political convictions that lead toward redemption and reconciliation are most likely headed in the right direction,” he added.

[Robert P. Jones: White Christian America needs a moral awakening]

This isn’t a prescription for a particular kind of political involvement. It’s certainly not a road map for dealing with complicated public issues. It is, however, a reflection of how Christians should engage the world, including the political world.

A successful Christian political-social movement will require making the case for social order and moral excellence with generosity of spirit, while offering a healing touch to those who are suffering and living in the shadows of society.  

Politics can be a more noble enterprise when it is twinned with faith, but only faith properly understood and properly executed. Such a faith would be guided by the wisdom expressed by the Roman Catholic monk Thomas Merton: “A theology that ends in lovelessness cannot be Christian.”

This essay is adapted from a paper in a forthcoming volume on religion, civil discourse, and democratic renewal sponsored by Penn's Perry-Collegium Initiative.