Trumpism Is Devouring the Evangelical Movement
Trumpism Is Devouring the Evangelical Movement
It will take a miracle to avoid a Trump blowout in Iowa.
Tim Alberta’s recent book about the Christian nationalist takeover of American evangelicalism, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” is full of preachers and activists on the religious right expressing sheepish second thoughts about their prostration before Donald Trump. Robert Jeffress, the senior pastor at First Baptist Dallas — whom Texas Monthly once called “Trump’s apostle” for his slavish Trump boosterism — admitted to Alberta in 2021 that turning himself into a politician’s theological hype man may have compromised his spiritual mission. “I had that internal conversation with myself — and I guess with God, too — about, you know, when do you cross the line?” he said, allowing that the line had, “perhaps,” been crossed.
Such qualms grew more vocal after voter revulsion toward MAGA candidates cost Republicans their prophesied red wave in 2022. Mike Evans, a former member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, described, in an essay he sent to The Washington Post, leaving a Trump rally “in tears because I saw Bible believers glorifying Donald Trump like he was an idol.” Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, enthused to Alberta about the way Trump had punched “the bully that had been pushing evangelicals around,” by which he presumably meant American liberals. But, Perkins said, “The challenge is, he went a little too far. He had too much of an edge sometimes.” Perkins was clearly rooting for Ron DeSantis, who represented the shining hope of a post-Trump religious right.
But there’s not going to be a post-Trump religious right — at least, not anytime soon. Evangelical leaders who started their alliance with Trump on a transactional basis, then grew giddy with their proximity to power, have now seen MAGA devour their movement whole.
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People are leaving their churches in droves.
Ironically some preachers are even cheering them on - e.g. Andy Stanley from the NorthPoint Community Church has this whole series on leaving behind false religion, much like believing in Santa Claus and that a stork brings home babies, it just needs to be updated by chucking the whole thing out and starting over from scratch. Religion that gets into the way of Reality... I mean heck, Jesus Himself talked a whole lot about that.
Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.
And ONE preacher - I wish I could say there was more, but in all my research I have only ever found mention of just the one, from a major mega-congregation I mean though I am sure there are some smaller ones - even decried Donald Trump, even back at the height of his popularity, when he was still President even. THAT dude, John Piper, has therefore earned my undying respect. Calling it like it is, when you may lose much popularity (& therefore money), now that's authentic.
And now I'll just leave you all with this little gem:
Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.
How people twist the Bible into saying that ignoring the pleas of the oppressed and instead that grabbing young women by the pussy are somehow good things I will never know, but it says it quite plainly right there.
John Piper is still a misogynistic piece of garbage who defended Mark Driscoll's abusive leadership, calling his downfall a "Satanic victory".
Piper blames egalitarianism for women being abused and molested. In 2009, when asked if a wife should submit to her abusive husband, he responded:
It depended on “what kind of abuse.” Was a woman’s life in danger, or was this merely “verbal unkindness”? If her husband was asking her to engage in “group sex or something really weird, bizarre, harmful,” then she might very gently refuse to submit, but if the abuse was just hurting her and not requiring her to sin, then she should endure “verbal abuse for a season”—and “perhaps being smacked one night.” Only then should she seek help . . . from the church.
He's a garbage person peddling garbage theology and will stand before God wrapped in nothing but his skubalon.
Extra credit for skubalon
I looked into it a tiny bit today - e.g. you can hear about it from his own words:
The last thing that comes to my mind is, that when I look at history—I’m thinking centuries—God must be the kind of general over his army that willingly accepts tactical defeats for strategic victories. That was a defeat. That was a tragedy. The debacle in Seattle is a tragedy from untold angles. Lots of people hurt. It was a defeat for the gospel. It was a defeat for Mark. It was a defeat for evangelicalism. It was a defeat for Reformed theology, for complementarianism. It was a defect. Not trying to whitewash anything. It was a colossal Satanic victory, and the general is not out of control.
Calling Mark a defeat, and his actions a defect, does not sound to me like much of a "defense" of Mark's actions? Whoever told you that Piper was defending him might have been exagerating more than a little - the “Satanic victory” that I read from this quote is over the fact that Mark chose to act in that manner, not the fact that Mark was taken down unfairly by the "lamestream liberal media" or whatever.
Also, I happen to agree with John Piper given solely the context of the quote that you cited: anyone at all who is married should probably sleep on something, especially a more minor event, and then seek more qualified help - what is wrong with that advice? I did not read from your quote where he said that she should not seek help from the police, or that she should put up with long-term abuse, but I did read from it that she should seek help, from someone qualified to offer that (it reads as if he does not know her personally, so was directing her to go to someone that she would trust).
Also from your very own words, it seems that you are not at peace yourself with your opinion of him. People will let you down for sure, but I hope you find a way to get past it. Forget Piper, if that helps you, and find something real - that much I agree with you on:-). (although this "Piper" that you speak of does not match up with what I can glean about the dude irl, so there's that too)
I do not need to be at peace with anyone who would marginalize half the human race. My job is to speak out on behalf of the poor, the immigrant and the oppressed.
I do not agree with you or him, I think that is a dangerous perspective on marriage and relationships that leads to countless women remaining in abusive situations.
It is hard enough to get help or leave as it is, creating submission narratives that reinforce dangerous behavior can cause untold harm.
It is hard enough to get help or leave as it is, creating submission narratives that reinforce dangerous behavior can cause untold harm.
On that point I 100% agree. Fwiw, I do not know about Piper in particular but much of Christianity bespeaks of a mutual form of submission of both to one another. I am not making up these words as it says it quite plainly in Ephesians 5:21:
Submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.
Ofc, people - very often including women - often choose to forget about this verse, and focus on the one singular verse that immediately follows it about wives submiting to their husbands, as if telling half the story is somehow anywhere close to telling the entire thing. Yes wives should, within reason, and also husbands should - BOTH should, up to a point.
What I said about a wife should pause for a moment before taking action is what I believe, but it does NOT follow that she should never tell the police, or that she should never seek help, or that she should allow him to abuse her (or that he should allow similar in return).
The Bible has a ton of verses literally commanding followers to consider the oppressed - e.g. Matthew 25:
Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, 36 I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
37 “Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? 38 When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? 39 When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
40 “The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
Ofc, the main problem with Christianity is all the darn Christians, who don't practice what they preach nor even read the book that they claim is holy even as they beat you over the head with it:-P. But if Piper is among those and preaching that women should be abused, then yeah it would be okay in that case to be angry at him. God Himself would be furious. The thing is... I have yet to see any evidence that he is one of those who is spreading such a message of hate and pain and fear.
So it's a good cause you are fighting for - I'm totally with you there - I know don't see so far what that has to do with him?
Easy. They say Jesus is weak. I'm not even joking.
But before you go singing the praises of John Piper for getting it right about Trump, remember that recognizing authoritarians is the bare minimum a person should be doing. He's not some hero just because he stands in opposition to his peers on this one thing.
His other beliefs include things like: homosexuality is "broken and disordered sexuality" and by extension, thinks it's something you can overcome by believing in his god. He believes and teaches creationism, despite the overwhelming body of evidence that supports evolution. He believes and teaches about a literal global flood, despite multiple branches of science not finding any support for that fable.
He got one thing right, but that just makes him akin to a broken clock. Trumpism and Fundigelicalism are merging, because they're authoritarian at their core, and John Piper believes in that very same kind of Christianity.
One thing I have to keep reminding myself about stupid people: they don't know that they are stupid. Many of them honestly believed that they were "patriots" when they showed up at January 6 to "defend the Constitution", even though they were participating in something that was meant as a soft-core coup. So yeah, if Jesus Himself says something that goes against what the TV man says to do, it is no surprise that they will throw out their religion as easily as they have done everything else. Brainwashing is strong.
About John Piper: my main point was that at least one person was courageous enough to call out Drump for being a massive POS. That said, I do not know everything about Piper - just that I agree with him on that one point.
Then again, whenever I dig deeper I do tend to only increase my respect for him, even as I also scratch my head about why this or that. e.g., based on my literally <5 minute search of his stance on Creationism - i.e., please take with a grain of salt there:-P - his POV seems to be that God created the world, and most importantly Man on it, but he also acknowledges not knowing much about "how" he did it, and in particular how long that took. He does seem to personally believe - and also wants to spread that belief to others - that man is only 10-15k years rather than hundreds of thousands (which isn't quite "creationism", this thought that is exemplified in Arthur C. Clarke's 1968 book 2001: A Space Odyssey, later adapted to film by Stanley Kubrick, where some "event" caused the rise of Man to sentience; and which was also present in Star Trek TOS and many other scifi works - though I do not know the proper term for that). So THAT is the part that is on quite shaky grounds, though also the issue seems fairly complex e.g. we kept pushing back the date of the earliest "humans" but eventually had to acknowlege that the earliest stone tools predate humanity itself by several millions of years (even half a million or so prior to the entire genus Homo). We also keep tinkering with what we call "humans" e.g. the out of Africa theory keeps getting refined to multiple waves of migrants, the earliest ones of which iirc were not fully "human" themselves.
Anyway, John Piper is old, but most important is not his personal belief structure (although he does want to preach it from the pulpit and that I think is something he should be called out on), but how he handles those beliefs, imho. For one thing, in that interview he mentioned that he would not let that stop him from bringing along even an Elder into his church who happened to believe the opposite, so it is an extremely minor matter in his eyes. And for another, he fully acknowledges that he simply accepted it without bothering to dig deeper into that issue at any time in his life.
I hear you that it reflects a weakness on the part of his thinking but... he's old, and much of this evidence has been contradictory and confusing during his lifetime. Most important though is his character: I very much like when someone acknowledges the boundaries b/t what they know vs. what they do not!!! Except, even so, he says that he wants to preach what he believes so... (but then again, HAS he preached that? was that an off-the-cuff thought that he verbalized or did he actually go through with that? I don't know)
Believing that the Old Testament is against homosexuality is just par for the course with Christianity though - the New Testament fulfilled the Old but people sure do like to return to it.
About the flood... wait, what? He really says that it is "global"? There are quite a lot of stories - e.g. Gilgamesh - that also talk about a flood about that time, so I really do believe that there was a massive flood in that region, but the only sense in which we know it to be "global" was in the sense that Alexander the Great conquered the "entirety of the world as it was known to those peoples, at that time" (but even then, it's not like they believed that there was a sharp cliff that you would fall off of:-P). Anyway this would be pretty damning if true but... I searched and could find nothing about him saying this - are you certain?
Anyway yeah, we are all fallible, but if someone with some actual authority in the evangelical christian world says that Donald Trump is a pile of steaming garbage, I wanted to say "yeah - right on!":-P
About authoritarianism: I would argue that there is a very narrow, very particular type of authoritarianism that we all should believe in - and that is that 1+1=2. Facts are facts, and truth is true, and whenever we find something that contricts what we previously THOUGHT was true, we should lay it aside in favor of the new evidence. e.g., if I met "Neo" and saw him fly, then I would believe in Him and that this is The Matrix (if he said it), but otherwise I will not believe in that. Christianity says similarly not that we should all bow down to worship an individual human man such as Drumpf, but that we should acede to the actual, real Truth, which differs from Atheism in saying that that Truth=God, and differs from Agnosticism in saying that it actually matters. Anyway, Piper seems one of the more vocal of people against putting our faith in individual humans, especially over Truth, so without hearing him say words to the contrary I don't think that HE is very much like those Trumpists, or fundies (fundamentalists who say that we should all turn off their brains and allow the pastors to do 100% of our thinking for them), although I cannot speak to his position about Fundigelicalism.
Edit: the people who showed up on Jan. 6 say that they are "patriots", and they say that they are "Christians", and they say that they wanted to "defend the Constitution", and they say that they do what they do b/c of their "belief in God". However, they are stupid, and do not really know what they believe. Just b/c they say something, DOES NOT MAKE IT TRUE. I feel like the words of Jesus may, might, maybe, perhaps have more to do with what Christianity is all about than those people who didn't even read the Constitution before they took a dump all over it (then tried to feed it to the rest of us, citing it as a "peaceful protest").