(Part 2) Our End-Times Beliefs Affect How We Interpret Today’s News
My favorite undergraduate professor made one point consistently over the three years I took his classes:
We must always, always consider where we are in time.
Even if some students couldn’t master the nuances of Shakespeare or Chaucer, he wanted us all to spend our lives intentionally evaluating the forces that have led up to our cultural context—instead of just blindly moving in their currents.
I’ve never lived through a time in which this guiding principle was more important than it is now.
http://www.thistleandtoad.com/wwwthistleandtoadcom/writings/
En masse, Christians are reacting without thinking clearly, and they are making themselves vulnerable as a result. They forward weird links and memes. They watch faux-documentaries and frantically forward them without doing even minimal research. They try to shame others by calling them fools if healthy skepticism or a call to objective science appears. They defend their frenetic behavior by making blanket dismissals. So much noise is pouring out, and so little information seems able to penetrate the defensive shell.
I fluctuate between fury at this behavior and deep pity for those who are caught up inside it. I can tell that a lot of once-steady people are scared and suspicious. They haven’t been exposed to good, strong ideas beyond their microcosms in a long time— and meanwhile, they’ve been flattered strategically into allegiance.
For these individuals, trust is based on clan-think, not objectivity. Belief for these individuals happens at a primal place in their guts. They aren’t analyzing. They are like wild beasts that bolt and seize based on instinct and tribal fidelity.
But how did we get here? How did we tumble from seminars on the beautiful humility of objective truth in a postmodern world and almost OCD systematic methods of apologetics into this smug, fear-driven barbarism?
Understanding this transition is critical.
In his book, Culture Making, Andy Crouch describes a key theological-political alliance from the mid 1990’s that provides insight about our present culture. According to a 1995 Coalition document, 80% of Americans were concerned about morality tanking in the national culture. So, the Christian Coalition was going to do something about it.
Ralph E. Reed Jr stepped up to help Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition rise to power in the 1990’s. The goal? To direct Congress by the flex of faith-based voters. According to Crouch, Newt Gingrich and a mass of younger Republicans had dominated in midterm elections, and the Christian Coalition was so affiliated with this victory, Time magazine featured Reed on its 1995 cover along with the title, “The Right Hand of God.”
But here’s where it gets interesting.
Crouch writes, “Christian conservatives, by themselves, were not enough of a constituency to form a majority bloc in the Republican Party, so Reed and his partners had reached out to the Party’s pro business, antitax wing, a group that would have placed the ‘problem of declining morality’ far down on their list of concerns” (Crouch 224).
In other words, America’s faith-based movement wasn’t mighty enough to dominate culture on its own. So, political alliances had to be made with non-Christians who cared very little about faith or morality.
Zoom forward to 2020, and the majority of evangelical Christians seem to see absolutely nothing wrong with such compromises. We are so partisan now, we are only worried about THEIR immorality. OUR immorality is a necessary sacrifice for the greater cultural good.
We call those who refuse to make such exchanges “holier-than-thou” and believe we are simply playing street smart in a world in which Presidents don’t have to be Sunday School teachers.
And yet, what is the telos of this sort of compromise?
Let’s go back to Crouch’s example. In just a few short years after attempting to rescue America’s fading moral base, the former president of the Christian Coalition “found himself collaborating with Abramoff [another Republican lobbyist] advocating for, of all things, the interests of Native American gambling.” In 1998, Reed wrote to Abramoff saying, “Hey, now that I’m done with the electoral politics, I need to start humping in corporate accounts. I’m counting on you to help me with some contacts” (Crouch 225).
Folks, this is the same man who had grieved America’s moral decline.
When I first read Crouch’s statements on Ralph Reed back in 2010 or so, I was shocked. How could this have been going on behind the scenes? In 2020, I’m shocked that I was ever surprised.
Today, so few American evangelicals would flinch about slimy, underhanded, or immoral compromises. We seem to care only about aligning ourselves with enough earthly power to protect us. We think the Kingdom of God must come through legislation. Without it, we’re all sunk.
Data backs our willingness to bail on our morality. In 2011, 60% of white evangelicals affirmed this statement: “an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life cannot behave ethically in their public life.”
By 2018, only 20% of that same demographic agreed to the same.
Interestingly, when considering a famous Republican politician, only 6% of white evangelicals agreed that private immorality makes a politician incapable of ethical leadership. When a past Democratic president was mentioned? That number goes up to 27%
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/04/25/how-trump-has-changed-white-evangelicals-views-about-morality/
So, we’ve not only lost our ability to care about morality—we’ve lost our ability to realize that we’ve lost this ability.
How does all of this align with evangelical eschatology and our vulnerability to misinformation in all forms of media?
On May 11, D.L. Mayfield wrote a heartbreaking essay in Sojourners titled “In Push to Reopen, American Evangelicals Fall Prey to Political Strategy.”
Mayfield addresses several vulnerabilities exposed by the politicization of the evangelical right—including the heartbreak a younger American feels in the wake of evangelicalism’s moral compromise. She also addresses the potential impact of our eschatological views, which she affiliates with fierce individualism. She writes,
”I was raised to believe that Jesus would be returning soon, and that the world would continue to get worse until he did. Evangelical Christians like myself were convinced that only a small contingent of faithful Christians would be spared the wrath of God at the end of the world. This theology, coupled with a narrative insisting Christians in the US are a persecuted minority, led to a distrust of institutions and power, including the government. The world will continue to get worse, you should do what you can to protect yourself and your people, and you shouldn’t trust the government. In fact, the more of an outsider a politician is, and the more they promise to protect you in the short term, the more likely that person would be to get your vote.”
I don’t know that Mayfield and I would agree on every theological point, but I think there’s a lot here to consider.
How does our belief in the immediacy of Christ’s return impact our goals for our time on earth?
How does our suspicion of government and our fear of difficulty impact our fascination with political outliers?
How does our sense of being among the few who actually understand spiritual reality feed our need for being experts who are “in” on what’s happening behind the scenes in the present?
Or maybe consider these statements many of us would find true at some level.
1. Jesus is coming back soon. We know exactly how this is going to work. Knowing future truth gives us insider tips that help us analyze present events better than everybody else. Therefore, we’re constantly alert and suspicious.
2. The antichrist is coming, so we don’t trust governments or institutions (unless they are our people) because anybody in power (besides our people) could be part of issuing in the one world order.
3. Christians are being persecuted, and it’s likely to get a lot worse, so we are willing to dance with the devil for the sake of our own safety.
Producing:
A sense of superiority
Blind tribalism
Fear leading to compromise
Staring at those reductions, do you find yourself asking the same questions I ask? What does it look like to be a good steward of the special information we’ve been given? How do we walk with shrewdness and wisdom, without getting trapped by humanistic, faux-religious, anti-gospel strategies waiting to trick us? What does it look like to manage writings about the future responsibly?
Perhaps a realignment of our earthly allegiances would help some?
C.S. Lewis knew that corruption was the inevitable result of partisan affiliation with the Christian faith. If you’re not familiar with his essay, “Meditation on the Third Commandment,” is worth your time. https://web.mit.edu/bcf/www/BSJ97/cslewis.html
Reading Lewis’s predictions will probably feel a little spooky as you reflect on what has happened since the mid 1990’s in American evangelicalism. A more pointed warning could hardly have come more true.
Yet, most of us who grew up inside the Culture Wars mindset are unable to see the vulnerabilities of our approach. In large part, we are too proud to be learners. We were first trained to be cultural saviors with ultimate information, and now we are trained to believe that we have insights and suspicions nobody else has.
Ironically, there’s nothing of the gospel in this posture. There’s nothing about the sufficiency of Christ, His wisdom, His resources. Like Uzzah catching the Ark, we are stepping in to do Christian America on our own, by our own strength, our own leaders, and our own rules.
By default, we believe that God needs American politics and the flex of legislative power to make America Christian. By default, we believe the Kingdom of God must be implemented top-down, which not only means its flourishing depends upon laws—but also that the church can be destroyed by the absence of a strong Christian government. By default, we excuse every compromise we take to get there, believing our sins are committed for the greater good.
Meanwhile, our egos have swollen up like carcasses in the sun.
“I know the end of things. I’m one of the ones who gets it. Really gets it. I found this video. You should watch it. Don’t tell me it’s been negated by sources. THEY always have a way of undermining truth. It’s how THEY work. I have nothing to learn. YOU have something to learn.“
(To be continued…)
