An Evangelical Voice

Fresh water project, Gambia

     "I am telling you how it really is. Whatever it was you did for others, however miserable and unimportant they seemed, you were doing for me."

     Matthew 25

White Evangelical voters overwhelmingly support Donald Trump. But not all of them.

The editorial in Christianity Today revealed a crack in the Trump constituency. The editorial said that in supporting Trump Christians are making their faith about loyalty to a team, not about virtue and faith. We should choose to follow Christ, not Trump, it said.

An editorial in the conservative National Review said Trump was objectively guilty of improper actions that endanger our Republic. Remove him.

Removal won't happen. Trump's behavior is understood by partisans to be irrelevant. He doesn't represent virtue. He is a tool of God, fighting Christ's battles.

Not everyone agrees. John Coster had a conservative Christian upbringing, and he attended an Evangelical College in the 1970's. Coster had a big career in construction projects relating to technology. His work ranged from start-ups to Fortune 100 corporations, where he regularly led international teams. Amid his career, between projects, he would take time off to volunteer for Christian ministries in Africa and the former USSR.

Over the years he experienced what he describes as "profound encounters with God, but he was dissatisfied with the lack of rigorous intellectual interaction of faith with his work. He has been especially troubled the today's politicization of the sacred and transcendent.

A Guest Post, by John Coster

Coster

Human history is replete with religion being used as a cudgel to gain political and economic power. There are few exceptions. It seems to be our nature as humans to leverage every structure we create like religions, political parties, governments, corporations, and trade unions to build empires. Power is unsurprisingly seductive.

By some accounts, the origins of modern Evangelicalism began when Western Enlightenment was taking root; when rational thought replaced land, religion and clan as our lens for identity and meaning. Evangelicalism’s original purpose was seeking Truth (upper case intentional) and providing a unified and coherent theology across different Protestant denominations.

Early Evangelicals were also focused on propagating the Gospel of Jesus Christ which Christians throughout history have believed gives the ultimate hope for mankind’s problem. To those who find this offensive, consider that if you are convinced something is absolutely true and right, and being ignorant of it has catastrophic consequences for your fellow human, wouldn’t it seem morally wrong to not share it? But I digress.

As with many movements (NRA anyone?), the institution’s leadership and mission change dramatically over time. One difference with Evangelicals (National Association of Evangelicals notwithstanding) is that it lacks any official head or governing body. Essentially anyone who self-identifies can count as an Evangelical which means that popular pastors, teachers and influentials like Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell, Robert Jeffress and Ralph Reed end up being the dominant public faces and de facto spokesmen. It also makes polling difficult and highly suspect. These leaders tend to speak with unambiguous certainty and make the audacious claim that disagreement with them is tantamount to denying the Gospel of Jesus.

Happily, there is growing dissent and not everyone buys this - see https://nyti.ms/2A1Cv2P

The creation of the Moral Majority in the 1980s accelerated the re-branding and redefinition of the Evangelical label from spreading good news and saving souls through a transformed inner life, to creating a political powerhouse that tries to legislate morality. In doing so, they have diluted and undermined the spiritual foundation of the very belief system they sought to protect. But this is not new.

Throughout history we see religious leaders aligning themselves with powerful political structures that are antithetical to the very premise of their religion. According to historians, in first century CE Palestine, the Sadducees schmoozed with the occupying Romans and used their illusory role as Jewish religious leaders for their own self-serving purposes. The Lutheran Church in Germany during WWII, and the Rwandan Church in the mid-1990s, had such cozy relationships with political leaders that they are often seen as complicit in the atrocities perpetrated by each regime, only to be guilt-ridden for decades or more afterward. There are good arguments for keeping Church and State separate.

What is particularly troubling to me about the current Evangelical "leaders is not just that they acquiesce to the demands of such a morally lost leader; they actually promote him as good, and vilify his (and their) opponents. My personal hope is that true followers of Jesus will see the disconnect from his teachings and have the courage and humility to stop their allegiance to this destructive so-called Christian movement.