(Shutterstock)
Last week, even a Martian could have heard the buzz of anticipation in WashU’s Graham Chapel. Its pews were smooshed with an overflow audience eager to hear Tim Alberta, staff writer for The Atlantic, make sense of something we have struggled with for a decade: how to reconcile Christian support for a president oblivious to Christian values.
Alberta has been covering this paradox for years. He wrote the bestselling American Carnage: On the Front Lines of the Republican Civil War and the Rise of President Trump, and just last year, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. In his introduction, the director of the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics called The Kingdom “one of the most astute and persuasive accounts of religion in contemporary politics that I’ve read.”
We settled in, ready for insight. Alberta began by recalling his previous visit to WashU’s campus: in fall 2016, to cover the third and final presidential debate. It was the weekend the Access Hollywood tape went public. Senators were pulling their support for Trump, and people were wondering if he would even show up for the debate, let alone continue his campaign. Then one of Trump’s aides rushed Alberta into a conference room where four women had been summoned—the women who had accused Bill Clinton of sexual harassment. “In that debate, not only did Trump refuse to tuck his tail between his legs,” Alberta recalled, “[but] he came out swinging.”
A few years later, Alberta sat in the Oval Office taking notes as Trump insisted that the third debate was what won him the election. So, in preparation for this talk, Alberta found himself pondering the sort of campaign rhetoric it takes to get elected.
“Pretend this is a campaign speech,” he said, then launched into the Beatitudes, telling us how blessed it is to be poor and meek. “Let’s be honest, folks, how many votes am I getting?” The ideas Jesus introduced contradicted all the usual ambitions, incentives, ways of relating, and structures of power. His was, as one scholar named it, “an upside-down kingdom.”
Alberta began talking about St. Peter, the unlikeliest of disciples. “Peter and his friends were awaiting a messiah, one that would make things right by slaughtering the Romans,” reclaiming holy sites, and reclaiming power, he said, adding slyly, “Make Israel great again.” Instead, they were confronted with a vagrant preacher from the backwater town of Nazareth, a woodworking apprentice of low birth with no formal education. Why follow him?
“Peter only gets fired up to follow Jesus when he sees that Jesus is his path to power,” Alberta reminded us. Still, it was quite a leap. The Jews were miserable, exiled from their homeland and reduced to secondhand citizens without the right to own land and build wealth. “And Jesus comes along and says, ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the land.’ And he’s saying this to people who have no land.” Their identity is “blood and soil, militant nationalism,” and they are ready to pick up the sword. “You will not trample on our beliefs, attack our values, push us to the margin of society.”
I saw what Alberta was doing. But instead of clinching the parallel, he continued the story of Peter. I slumped in the pew, back in church again and suffering through a sermon. Brilliantly rendered, but not what I was here to hear. Christianity was stealing our civil liberties and social protections, and he was repeating ancient truths instead of confronting that?
At that point, Alberta cheerfully admitted that he had come in a Trojan horse, secretly bent on preaching rather than discussing U.S. politics. “I don’t want to talk about America,” he said. “What we are dealing with now is not unique to us at all.” He even tossed Ecclesiastes at us: nothing new under the sun. But the dissolution of democracy is new, I muttered to myself, and we need to know how to deal with it.
Instead, he told us more about St. Peter, how he swiped off a soldier’s ear with his sword, and Christ admonished him and picked up his cross. From there, Christianity began its shift from a ragtag movement at the margins to a mainstream, established belief system. “The church begins to organize itself around the very thing it once renounced: power.”
Tim Alberta
An hour in, Alberta finally returned to present tense, describing the growing sense that the U.S. is the new Israel, a covenanted nation meant to be governed by European Christian men. Also the corollary: “that our institutions, our civic life, was meant to revolve entirely around Christianity.” In this popular narrative, which he had heard firsthand in churches across the country, separation from the state was never really intended. The establishment clause of the Constitution? Meh. People were convinced that “theocratic governance is not the bogeyman it was said to be.”
Christian Nationalists (such an innocuous term, of course Christians love their country, how dare the media turn that against them?) perceive a systematic assault on Christianity in America. “We hear a lot about persecution,” Alberta said. “What exactly does that mean? Being asked to stay home a couple days because of COVID?” Yet people have listened, rapt, as “pseudo-historians with slick presentations and cherry-picked quotes” offered them “an unholy alliance of bad history and bad theology.” Some of the founders were Deists, some Christians, but they were all adamant about the separation of church and state. “Christian Nationalism is the oxymoron to end all oxymorons,” Alberta said. “It is fundamentally a contradiction in terms.”
With that, all his references to putting down the sword and picking up the cross came clear. Christianity was never meant to be coercive. Alberta had grown up a preacher’s kid, and he was preaching because he was worried about Christianity’s lost credibility. All this power and influence, yet the faith was dying, at least in the U.S., with church membership dropping fast. In a recent survey, “evangelical Christians were viewed favorably by one group and one group only: evangelical Christians.” Feeling somehow under siege, they were determined to fight their way into political power. As a result, “the term ‘evangelical’ is increasingly synonymous not with the crucifixion and resurrection or the fundamental precepts of the Christian faith but rather with White conservative Republican Trump voters.”
Alberta looked out at his audience, now sitting up straight. “If the goal is to grow this upside-down kingdom of God, how can you do it when everyone outside your walls is an enemy combatant?” Jesus told Peter—and the rest of us—to drop the sword. No violence, no coercion. Now “the same people who warn, in some cases justifiably so, about the indoctrination in the schools, are attempting to conduct a reverse indoctrination.” The same paradoxes crop up in every other policy issue—because the Christian Nationalist agenda “has nothing to do with Christ at all.” And “once you are willing to rewrite history and manipulate and distort it, pretty quickly you are going to start doing the same to scripture,” he added. You will “process your faith through the prism of your politics.”
As he preached, Alberta had worked a fancy math trick, a demonstration proof that what we have been struggling with such frustration to reconcile never needed to be reconciled. The real Trojan horse was Christian Nationalism, and what rolled along inside it was not Christianity at all.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
