With God on Their Side: How Evangelicals Entered American Politics - New York Times
One major question dominates FitzGerald’s treatment, and it is suggested by her subtitle. Why should the faithful try to shape America at all? To a strong believer, God’s kingdom is the one that matters, and it is not of this world; America, from such a perspective, is just a tiny speck in a vast world unknowable to us. Get right with the Lord, not the Republican Party.
As if to demonstrate such a sentiment, separation from, not engagement with, the world around us was the major tendency in conservative American Protestantism during the first half of the 20th century. Baptists were strict adherents to the separation of church and state. Religious entrepreneurs like William B. Riley in the North and J. Frank Norris in the South concentrated on building fundamentalist fiefs rather than political movements. Another important separationist, according to FitzGerald, was J. Gresham Machen, expelled from the Presbyterian general assembly for his strict and sectarian screeds against both theological liberalism and spreading fundamentalism. Separationism, FitzGerald writes, “inspired conspiracy theories of the vilest sort, but it also fostered group solidarity and attracted Bible-believing Protestants alienated in the strange new world of global depression and global war.” Whatever you think of the separationists and their ideas, shaping America was not high on their list of priorities.
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The same cannot be said of Billy Graham. “His lasting achievement,” FitzGerald says, “was to bring the great variety of conservative white Protestants, North and South, into his capacious revival tent under the name ‘evangelicals.’ ” Graham gave evangelicalism a more subdued tone, one not reflected in the harsher rhetoric of Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson. Yet the difference between them was not over whether to shape America but how. The more explicitly right-wing fundamentalists thundered. Graham and his like-minded evangelicals taught. Robertson entered politics by running for president. Graham was more effective by gaining the attention of elected presidents, including Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But both Robertson and Graham shared a desire to reject separationism in favor of engagement.
The merger between the Republican Party and the evangelical movement did not result in separationism’s total abolition. FitzGerald includes a fascinating chapter on conservative Christian intellectuals. One of them, R.J. Rushdoony, developed a complicated theological system he called Christian Reconstructionism; he taught that “with God on their side, Christians had no need for majoritarian politics, or for compromise and accommodation to reach their goal,” as FitzGerald puts it. The other prominent thinker within the movement was Francis Schaeffer, a prolific author and filmmaker who, again as FitzGerald characterizes his ideas, argued that “Christians had a duty to resist a government that acted against God’s law.” (One of Schaeffer’s funders was the father-in-law of our secretary of education, Betsy DeVos.) Schaeffer’s legacy lives on among those, like the former congresswoman Michele Bachmann, who believe that this country was founded by religious Christians.
Amazingly enough, “The Evangelicals,” for all its length, is not comprehensive. There is no discussion of church music here, even as the evangelicals led a move away from the organ to Christian rock and white gospel. Missing as well are Christian bookstores and the self-help therapies and guides to sexuality they can barely keep in stock. African-Americans are not included in FitzGerald’s story either, and while she justifies her choice on the grounds that their religious histories and traditions are different from those of whites in matters of worship style and, to a lesser degree, theology, they stem from very similar roots. (Pentecostalism, for example, began with blacks and whites worshiping together before splitting along racial lines.)
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Although FitzGerald ends with Donald Trump’s presidential victory, her book helps us understand why separationism has become an all-but-forgotten aspect of the conservative Protestant religious experience. Despite Trump’s quite secular lifestyle and attitudes, evangelicals, more concerned with the Supreme Court than a Supreme Being, voted overwhelmingly for him, and he returned the favor by offering to “destroy” the Johnson amendment, which seeks to prevent the clergy from endorsing candidates by revoking their tax exemptions if they do. With Trump in power, an alliance between conservative Christians and conservative politicians seems as strong as it will ever be.
One should not, however, ignore the irony. Because they work so ceaselessly to shape America, it is fair to say that conservative Christian political activists, at least from the standpoint of the separationists, are doing the Devil’s work far more than the American Civil Liberties Union. The overweening pride, lust for power and idolatry of worshiping the state that characterizes so many of today’s conservative evangelicals will at some point probably doom them, but only when the criticism comes from within their own ranks. FitzGerald touches on this at the end of her book when she discusses the work of people like Russell Moore, who in 2013 replaced the culture warrior Richard Land as the president of the Ethics and Religious Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention and worked to bring the S.B.C. back to its original religious roots. At the time of this writing, Moore seemed in danger of losing his job for aggressively opposing Trump. Watch to see if he does, and you get a glimpse of the future direction the evangelicals will take.
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