The Uneasy Conscience of Christian Nationalism

by | Sep 12, 2024 | Uncategorized

Too many of us assume that Christian nationalism promises a road map to a New Jerusalem or a New Rome or a New Constantinople. That’s understandable, given the triumphal and martial rhetoric of would-be theocrats. But what if the actual road map is to none of those places? 

What if the new Christian nationalism wants to take us not to the rebuilt shining city on a hill of Cotton Mather’s Massachusetts Bay Colony but just to double coupon night at the Bellagio in Las Vegas? 

Journalist Jonathan V. Last noted years ago, when staying at a Vegas resort and casino, how momentarily moved he was by the hotel’s commitment to help their guests save the earth. Last noted the card on his bathroom sink asking guests to conserve water by using each towel multiple times. On the bedside table, he saw another card asking visitors to safeguard natural resources by opting not to have bed linens changed. 

Then he looked out at the front of the hotel, where two massive fountains stood “spewing precious water into the arid, desert air.” That’s when, he wrote, “it struck me that the … concern for the environment might simply be an attempt to save on laundry costs.”

The stakes aren’t very high at one Vegas hotel, but it’s a deal that reveals an impulse in fallen human nature, in a way that’s a win for all the parties involved. The guests get to feel like they’re doing something virtuous, and the house gets to keep more of the chips. It’s a microcosm of what Martin Luther identified as the psychological game behind Johann Tetzel and others selling indulgences to medieval Christians. 

Paying the money helped ease the consciences of those fearful of purgatory while at the same time helping to raise money for building St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. The indulgence hawkers could tell themselves they weren’t in the business of nonprofit fundraising or commercial real estate but in the mission of saving souls. And the indulgence buyers could reassure themselves with penance, which was, and is, much easier than repentance. 

Tossing a coin is easier than carrying a cross. Actual contrition, confession, and surrender are intangible, internal, spiritual realities that require entrusting one’s forgiveness to the promise of an invisible God. Indulgences, on the other hand, come with receipts. 

For Luther, the crisis of it all was not just that the church was corrupt but, more importantly, that the reassurance bought with this type of indulgence actually kept people from seeing what really can overcome sin and wipe away guilt—personal faith in Christ and him crucified. 

“Christians are to be taught that if the pope knew the exactions of the pardon-preachers, he would rather that St. Peter’s church should go to ashes, than that it should be built up with the skin, flesh, and bones of his sheep,” Luther asserted in the 50th of his theses. 

In our time, the indulgences are more akin to a hotel’s green initiative than to the construction of St. Peter’s. The new Christian nationalism—like the withered old state churches of Europe and the secularized old social gospels of mainline Protestantism—defines Christianity in terms of reforming external structures rather than of regenerating internal psyches. Unlike the older theological liberalisms, though, Christian nationalists seek solidarity not in the actual mitigating of human suffering but in the mostly symbolic boundary markers of taking the right amount of theatrical umbrage at culture war outrages, at having the right kind of enemies, at “owning the libs.” 

The uneasy conscience of Christian nationalism pretends that our problem is the opposite of what Jesus told us: that by calling ourselves an orchard we can bring fruit from diseased trees (Matt. 7:15–20), that by controlling what is on the outside of us we can renew what is inside (Matt. 12:33–37). 

This message is popular in all times; prosperity gospels and fertility religions always are. An extrinsic religion enables people to claim Christianity without following Christ and enables powerless, prayerless, porn-addicted culture warriors to convince themselves that they are goose-stepping to heaven. By assuaging our guilt with our political choices, we can convince ourselves that what we find in our new Bethel is Jacob’s ladder to heaven when it is really just Jeroboam’s calf of gold (1 Kings 12:25–31). 

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Philip Yancey, a longtime columnist here at CT, along with other Christ-ians, met with the disillusioned Communists of the regime, including the propogandists at the Kremlin newspaper Pravda. The Bolshevik experiment, of course, had subordinated personal ethics, much less personal faith, to the collective cause—to the supposed “worker’s paradise” of the future, which would justify every lie told, every dissident exiled, every life extinguished along the way. 

What Yancey found most poignant was not just that Soviet communism had failed, but the particular way it failed. As he mused: 

Humans dream of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good, wrote T. S. Eliot, who saw many of his friends embrace the dream of Marxism. “But the man that is will shadow the man that pretends to be.” What we were hearing from Soviet leaders, and the KGB, and now Pravda, was that the Soviet Union ended up with the worst of both: a society far from perfect, and a people who had forgotten how to be good. 

We should not pretend that we could not see the same thing with a lifeless, politicized dystopian Christ-ian nationalism as we saw with a hollowed-out Soviet empire. What a tragic end it would be to wind up with a society as debauched as ever and a people who have forgotten how to be saved. 

The way forward is what it’s always been. As Luther said in his Heidelberg Disputation, “The theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. The theologian of the cross calls a thing what it is.” Sometimes that means nailing a word or two to the castle door. Sometimes that might mean letting goods and kindred go. The whole of the Christian life is about repentance. That repentance must be about the renewing of our minds and the renovation of our hearts, not just the laundering of consciences that are no longer bound to the Word of God. 

Now, as always, every day is Reformation Day. 

Russell Moore is CT’s editor in chief.

The post The Uneasy Conscience of Christian Nationalism appeared first on Christianity Today.

Humility in the Age of Cancel Culture

by | Sep 12, 2024 | Uncategorized

In a special episode of The Bulletin, Christianity Today’s senior director of CT Media, Mike Cosper, interviewed New York Times columnist Frank Bruni about his book The Age of Grievance. Where polarization has split churches, families, and friendships, Bruni suggests that the root of this polarization is grievance, an animating impulse in our culture that focuses on scarcity instead of abundance. This conversation offers a way forward for Americans or anyone who looks at the culture and wants something better.

Frank Bruni and Mike Cosper

Mike Cosper: There was one element in the book that I was a little surprised by, and I’m curious for your thoughts on this.

A notion that’s missing from the book is the idea of forgiveness. And I don’t mean that in a religious sense but in the interpersonal sense, in the cultural sense. I remember years ago reading Hannah Arendt in The Human Condition. She makes the claim at one point where she says we can’t have a culture without forgiveness.

She says vengeance encloses both the doer and the sufferer in this relentless automatism of action, which will never come to an end. In contrast, forgiving is the only reaction which doesn’t merely react but acts anew and unexpectedly. And the idea is that forgiveness is this moment where we can start fresh.

I’m curious: Is there a role for forgiveness in our culture to do the constructive kind of things you talk about in the book to move things forward? 

Frank Bruni: I do think there’s a role for forgiveness.

It’s one of the things we must work our way back toward. It’s the opposite of cancel culture. In various passages, I do talk about how we must get away from this tendency to judge people too quickly. In the last chapter of the book, the concept I explored at great length is humility. I think forgiveness and humility are more than kissing cousins. I think they’re conjoined twins. 

MC: I love the idea of how we carry ourselves into forgiveness. In public conversations—whether it’s online or face to face—when we think about our politics, can we carry ourselves, our positions, our convictions in a way that we’re humble enough about them that we don’t have to react so viciously when we encounter an idea that’s different than our own?

That comes back to the fundamental issue—maybe it’s a shrinking appetite. Certainly, it’s a shrinking space for a kind of vision of pluralism. It seems you’re saying we must try to carve out this space that says we have to live in a world where people are fundamentally opposed to many things that you might think and believe. We still must find a way to live at peace with them. We don’t talk or think like that; the tendency is to think in terms of winning and losing. 

FB: There are even aspects, I think, of modern child rearing. Certain economic groups send the message that you deserve a world precisely to your liking. You deserve a world purged of offense and insult.

It’s not an accident that Jonathan Haidt and his coauthor titled their book about this The Coddling of the American Mind. They were talking about a generation of students being led to believe that they should never encounter anything that unsettles them or complicates their lives. 

When I talk about humility, what I mean, in part, is recognizing that we do not get circumstances that are always exactly to our liking. Other people’s dissenting views have as much right to exposure and discussion and oxygen as yours do. 

We have somehow come to a political culture right now where people believe the minute we say, “Maybe you have a point,” we’ve lost the argument. We have too many actors in our politics and outside of our politics who think that impassioned equals virtuous, everything is overwrought, everything is all or nothing; and in fact, they end up doing damage to their own cause as they also do damage to the fabric of public life and the fabric of our culture.

MC: In the church, we often talk about first-order and second-order issues. First-order convictions are things like the Nicene Creed, the Apostles’ Creed—our fundamental sets of convictions. And then second-order issues are the things that divide Christians from one another, like the way we think about baptism or church polity or women in leadership versus men in leadership.

One of the things that is frightening in our moment is the way infighting in the church over second-order issues is rising to a first-order level. We are becoming a people who are saying, “This is the hill I must die on.”

FB: Whether it’s in churches or other segments of society, we really don’t seem to value and recognize the importance of coming to some sort of truce and having the collective peace that we used to. In some ways, it’s individualism run amok.

We’ve not only evolved into being a surprisingly and depressingly pessimistic people, but we’ve also turned into a surprisingly and depressingly narcissistic society. As I said, we don’t get circumstances that conform exactly to our liking. At no point in our lives should we be told to expect that.

We should be told to absolutely work toward justice. While we’re doing that, we also have to recognize dissenting opinions and not automatically see those people as evil. 

Often, if you  met them and talked to them, you would understand there’s a life story. There are reasons why they believe what they believe, but we’ve become extremely and toxically individualistic. In most cases, the price of waging this fight within the church or the public square is not worth it.

MC: You give a lot of space toward the end of the book to some visions for how we solve this. A lot of it comes to education, and the two things that struck me were the way you talked about civic education and the way you talk about media literacy, which I think is a huge issue in our moment.

The underlying question that I found myself asking after reading it is, Are you optimistic that solutions like that could be adopted and work? Could those kinds of things really be transformative? And what does a road map for that kind of transformation look like? 

FB: I don’t think those two things can save us on their own in and of themselves, but I think that they can be part of a much longer recipe of getting to a healthier place as a country.

What’s so difficult about this is we have the tools to improve in all the ways we need. But one of the daunting things about it is it’s not just one thing. It is political reforms coupled with educational reforms coupled with spiritual investigation coupled with a whole lot more.

But I do think that it should not be that difficult to do something. One thing I do with my students at the university level is talk about where they get their information. We talk about what they’ve bookmarked, who they followed, what they like. And then we discuss where that has led them.

Some questions I ask them include:

Did you set that up intentionally, or did you make a couple of decisions and then the algorithms kicked in?

Does your media diet represent what you really intended? 

Is it aligned with your values? And if the answer is “not exactly,” how about taking a moment right now and rearranging the pieces a little bit?

I’ve had this conversation with every class of students I’ve taught. It needs to begin when they’re much younger, and I think it needs to happen at the kitchen table as well as in the classroom. If we’re going to solve this, we all must look at how we behave in our private lives. We must ask if we are living as we would like other people to live, if we’re modeling the behavior to which we want young people to aspire. 

Frank Bruni has been a journalist for more than three decades, including more than 25 years at The New York Times as op-ed columnist, White House correspondent, Rome bureau chief, and chief restaurant critic.

Mike Cosper is the senior director of CT Media, host of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, and cohost of The Bulletin.

The post Humility in the Age of Cancel Culture appeared first on Christianity Today.

The Soul of MAGA

by | Sep 12, 2024 | Uncategorized

Donald Trump stands wrapped in the arms of Secret Service agents—their dark sunglasses and suits blending like a many-armed, many-eyed modern seraphim. Blood streams from his right ear, and his face is contorted with rage, determination, and pain. He thrusts his fist skyward. Behind him, the Star-Spangled Banner yet waves. You couldn’t pose a more iconic image if you tried.

In the months before the assassination attempt, I watched dozens of old Trump speeches and read a stack of his biographies, trying to understand the unique charisma that enabled him to transform right-wing politics in the US and that coalesced in a movement to Make America Great Again—or what we simply call “MAGA.” 

Enough ink has been spilled on this subject to turn the ocean black, and most of it has been decidedly negative, attributing the movement’s success to “white rural rage,” “racism,” “white supremacy,” or various forms of Christian or ethnic nationalism. Some have pointed to the economic turmoil of the past two decades as the force that galvanizes MAGA—the dot-com boom and bust, the gig economy, the economic crises of 2007 and 2008, and the looming specter of AI and automation, which threaten the middle class and the manufacturing economies. But here again, the conclusions tend to be negative: grievance, discontent, and economic anxiety. 

While I see truth in these diagnoses, I’m not convinced they get at the root of what compels MAGA. As Augustine put it, a people is “united by a common agreement on the objects of their love.” Which is to say that people’s affections—their loves, desires, and longings—tell us far more about them than their grievances, their discontent, or for that matter their policy positions. 

Any political movement would be expected to rally to their candidate after an assassination attempt. But Trump’s bond with his voters is unique in American culture, and that bond was formed via the larger-than-life images, stories, and portrayals of him in pop culture. The post-assassination-attempt photo—in the context of stories cultivated for decades—propped him as not just a politician but a symbol of the good life. 

And that’s why MAGA loves him. 

Since riding down his gilded escalator in 2015, Trump has held the attention of Americans in a kind of vise grip, making our politics reactive to him, what he said at a rally, on The Sean Hannity Show, or on social media. 

The power Trump wields comes from the status he secured long before he ran for office—not as a politician or a real estate tycoon but as a celebrity. 

Ever since his foray into public life in the 1970s and ’80s, Trump was eager to make headlines. According to his niece Mary Trump, Donald not only craved that attention personally; it was part of what his father, Fred, expected of him—the primary benchmark of his success for the family business. 

By the end of the 1990s, despite multiple bankruptcies and a variety of personal scandals, he firmly established his place as an avatar of the rich and powerful. In 1999, Rage Against the Machine recorded a music video for the song “Sleep Now in the Fire” featuring day traders with signs that read, “Trump for President.” A year later, the same idea was a punch line in an episode of The Simpsons. 

On its own, that kind of fame eclipses what most presidential contenders could achieve in long and illustrious careers of public service. It would pale in comparison to the fame that was to follow the advent of reality television.  

The Apprentice featured Donald Trump on 14 seasons between 2004 and 2015 and was a ratings smash. With Trump starring as a real estate mogul in search of his next protégé, each season featured a dozen contestants competing in games and stunts meant to prove their entrepreneurial savvy, loyalty, and leadership ability. 

The show came at a moment when Trump desperately needed an infusion of good publicity and—for the first time in his life outside of the Trump organization—a steady paycheck. As Maggie Haberman describes in Confidence Man, “The disparity between the world created on the show—a commanding businessman flying from one site of luxury to another—and Trump’s reality was jarring for those who worked on the show.” 

The series concocted a jet-setting lifestyle of luxury and success that starkly contrasted Trump’s reality, a “crumbling empire” of “well-worn carpets” and “chipped furniture.” Producers masked the worn and beaten state of the executive offices they leased from him at Trump Tower and the seedy vibes of his rundown New Jersey casino. And while a string of bankruptcies, bad deals, and financial disputes were a matter of public record, Trump wasn’t running for public office in 2004. What harm could there be in NBC propping him up as a mastermind and mogul? 

It wasn’t the first time a benefactor subsidized Trump’s mythos for self-interested reasons. In 1990, he was drowning in bad investments and debt. Newspapers in June of that year reported that creditors would be providing him with a personal spending allowance of $450,000 a month—a move that both constrained his spending and enabled his lavish personal brand, which they saw as critical to the marketing strategy for their investments in his properties.

Fred Trump himself was a successful and cutthroat developer, with the sense of thrift, scarcity, and urgency typical of first-generation immigrants. His financial success bankrolled many of Donald Trump’s business ventures and floated him when he teetered on the brink of failure. 

But as Mary Trump recalls, “Fred didn’t groom Donald to succeed him. … Instead, he used Donald, despite his failures and poor judgment, as the public face of his own thwarted ambition.” In Donald, Fred Trump saw someone who could make the Trump name great among Manhattan developers, extending his success into social and political circles he’d never been able to break into.

Many trace Trump’s turn to politics back to 2011, when he became a loud and harsh booster of the “birther” conspiracy theory suggesting Barack Obama is not a natural-born citizen. But his foray into presidential politics was more than two decades earlier, in 1987, when he took out a full-page ad in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe. “The world is laughing at America’s politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help,” it read. 

The talking points were co-crafted by Roger Stone, a Nixon-loving political consultant who was part of Trump’s 2016 team and was later convicted of obstruction of justice, false statements, and witness tampering during the probe into Russian interference in that election. (Trump pardoned him in December 2020.) 

In 1987, Stone, as Haberman describes him, was already known as a bit of “a schemer,” someone willing to play dirty in politics in order to win. In Trump, Stone saw a charismatic figure with the bravado to say and do anything to generate attention and headlines. 

Stone gave Trump a taste of political life, helping him meet with donors and politicians and give speeches in New Hampshire. Trump ultimately decided not to run in ’88, but he attended the Republican National Convention. Haberman describes the scene: “Trump was mesmerized, enraptured by the display around him. It was like a giant sporting event, except in honor of one man. ‘This is what I want,’ Trump said.” 

The presidential debate of 1960 has long been seen as a turning point in American democracy. It was the first televised debate, and John F. Kennedy appeared young and energetic on screen, with a breezy, calm, and in-command demeanor. Richard Nixon looked tired, unkempt, and uneasy in the studio lights. We know what happened next.  

Half a century later, Trump’s media savvy connected with an electorate who spent a lifetime watching, on average, six hours a day of television. Such consumption isn’t without effect. As David Foster Wallace once said,, “Television, from the surface on down, is about desire.” 

The goal of network (and social media) executives isn’t to challenge or confront or even entertain us; it is much more simply to keep us watching. They achieve this by entertaining and even challenging us, but they mostly achieve it, Wallace says, by presenting us with a world of people who are more beautiful than us doing things that are more interesting than we do. Wallace writes:

We gaze at these rare, highly-trained, unwatched-seeming people for six hours daily. And we love these people. In terms of attributing to them true supernatural assets and desiring to emulate them, it’s fair to say we sort of worship them.

This liturgical quality in media is like that of religious iconography in the Orthodox Christian tradition. It’s not so much that the icon is worshiped or prayed to; rather, it is prayed through. The image provides a glimpse of the good life—and the worshipers engage in acts of prayerful imagination, envisioning their lives caught up in this vision of the good. 

Your favorite television shows offer something similar: a vision of life with deep friendships, meaning, and purpose. Reality television invites viewers to imagine themselves finding true love, home sweet home, or an unimaginable windfall of wealth. Trump was part of the iconography of The Apprentice: a successful power broker, beloved by his kids, married to a supermodel, wealthy beyond most people’s imaginations.  

Those who entertain us aren’t merely journalists, personalities, or actors, Wallace says. They’re “imagos, demigods.” For a populace whose spiritual and moral imagination was formed by decades of immersion in television, Trump didn’t descend an escalator when he announced his run for the presidency in 2015; he descended Mount Olympus. To be hit by a bullet and rise again, undeterred, fist in the air, shouting, “Fight, fight, fight” was proof, once again, that he was larger than life. 

Augustine’s great political work, The City of God, was written after the sacking of Rome by a horde of barbarians. The defeat was devastating to the Romans, including many of its great Christian thinkers. Jerome, writing from Bethlehem, wondered, “If Rome can perish, what can be safe?” Some began to wonder if the empire’s turn to Christianity a century earlier had been a mistake. Why hadn’t the Christian God protected them in their war? Would they have fared better by staying loyal to Jupiter? 

In response to these concerns, Augustine urged his fellow Christians to reject the paganism that imagines God (or the gods) as orchestrating world events according to their own hierarchy of power or, worse, according to a hierarchy of human righteousness:

For as the same fire causes gold to glow brightly, and chaff to smoke … so the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked. And thus it is that in the same affliction the wicked detest God and blaspheme, while the good pray and praise. So material a difference does it make, not what ills are suffered, but what kind of man suffers them.

What distinguishes the gold from the chaff, Augustine says, is not primarily what people believe but what they love. If their affections were rooted in the greatness of Rome, the city’s fall was cause for despair. But if their affections were elsewhere, if what they loved and longed for was the heavenly city, then suffering ought to refine and concentrate their faith and make their testimony more beautiful. 

“Two loves have made the two cities,” he wrote. “Love of self, even to the point of contempt for God, made the earthly city; and love of God, even to the point of contempt for self, made the heavenly city.” 

As James K. A. Smith puts it, “There’s no ‘city limit’ sign to the earthly city precisely because the earthly city is less a place and more a way of life, a constellation of loves and longing and beliefs bundled up in communal rhythms, routines, and rituals.” 

In ancient Rome, a robust civic tradition of storytelling, mythology, and philosophy carried these rhythms, routines, and rituals from generation to generation, shaping the affections of the Roman people for Rome itself. Our experience is no different. Smith says you can be assured that when someone asks you to “pledge allegiance” to anything, they’re asking for your heart. 

But the quest for our affection spreads far beyond the overtly political. Throughout our lives, we’re confronted by stories and habits meant to seduce in one form or another—whether they’re seeking our votes, our attention, or our credit card numbers. 

Evan Vucci captured the iconic photograph just moments after President Donald Trump’s ear was injured during the attempt on his life on July 13.

For many, this accounts for the unique affection and bond followers feel for Donald Trump. Their common love isn’t just Trump the televisual demigod who descended from Trump Tower to make America great again; it’s also the world that gave us Trump and shaped his own imagination: the world of television. It’s a world that offers the grandiose and immediate, a world where complexity is flattened, suffering has a clear purpose, and conflicts are resolved by the top of the hour. It’s a dreamworld, a utopia—and utopia is the perfect word to employ, since it actually means “no place.” 

When our moral imaginations have been shaped by what is both idyllic and unreal, it leaves us vulnerable to all manner of demagoguery. We long for a good life and sense that it’s just out of reach; the demagogue gives us someone to blame.

Along with Augustine’s way of understanding the role of affections in politics, The City of God offers another interesting reference point for our moment. Many Christians—myself included—shared a sense that in 2016 the barbarians were at the gates. Christianity was being pressured in the public square in new and alarming ways. Same-sex marriage became the law of the land in a blink, and bakers and florists who conscientiously objected to participating in those weddings went to court to guarantee that. So did nuns who didn’t want to buy birth control. The first bathroom laws and accompanying culture wars were just beginning. 

Donald Trump’s promise to “make America great again” seemed to dangle the possibility of a return to an era with a different moral and spiritual ethos, and an anxious political coalition greeted him as a modern Horatius, the legendary soldier who stood alone on a bridge to defend Rome from the Etruscans in the sixth century BC. 

As Trump amassed delegates in the primaries, and as other candidates dropped from the race, conservatives—and conservative evangelicals in particular—found themselves at a crossroads: They could either join this coalition that had declared war on a common enemy or find themselves politically homeless. Some declared “never” and stuck to this conviction. Others, fearing the progressive barbarians at the gate and further social alienation, allied themselves with Trump. 

When November came and Trump delivered a stunning Electoral College victory, his disruption of the Republican Party became a wholesale realignment. There would be no return to the Republican Party of the past, no 2016 postmortem to consider how the party could have nominated someone like him. Instead, there were judges to nominate, a legislative agenda to pursue, and a new leader in the White House shaping the national discourse in ways that were, at various turns, shocking, funny, confusing, and terrifying. 

From the Trump supporter’s perspective, it was the opposite story of Augustine’s Rome. The faithful had rallied and defended the nation from the pagan hordes. And yet, eight years later, it’s worth questioning if that was the right take. 

Yes, Trump delivered three US Supreme Court justices who delivered a judgment that ended Roe v. Wade and returned abortion rights to the states. But since then, abortion rights at the state level have expanded radically, the actual number of abortions in the country has gone up, and the pro-life cause disappeared from the Republican Party platform.

In the case of progressive sexual and gender ideology, there has been a reactionary turn in recent years, particularly evidenced by the rollback of “gender-affirming care” for minors and new rules against biological men competing against women in nearly all levels of sports. But before one credits that rollback to Trump, it’s worth noting that most of it began after he left office, during the Biden presidency, and that it was more the result of slow, scientific review and of liberals who were “mugged by reality” (to use Irving Kristol’s phrase) when they saw transgender male athletes showering in women’s locker rooms.

Trump’s supporters may counter that he’s better than the alternative, that he’s a check on progressive overreach, or that we ultimately needed someone willing to fight, even if he is rough around the edges. His evangelical supporters simply haven’t yet noticed the devastation around them. 

Seeing through this lens, that iconic image of a bleeding Trump is far more disturbing. In it, I see something other than the courage and resilience of a man who avoided an assassin’s bullet—though I do see that aspect of the photo. I’m grateful he survived, grateful a murderer couldn’t rob Americans of their choices at the ballot box, and grateful the Trump family still has their husband, father, and grandfather. 

But as a milestone in American politics, it breaks my heart. It is not the first act of political violence since Trump descended the golden escalator in 2015—a period when violence has come to our nation’s Capitol, members of Congress, and the Supreme Court. I fear it won’t be the last. 

I lament that rather than offering words of peace or patriotism, Trump expressed the most visceral sentiment of his movement: “Fight, fight, fight.” 

And I lament that such a moment was captured so artfully, so perfectly, so iconically. It’s fuel for the flames of disordered love. I pray for the day when Christian affections will see the picture as tragic rather than triumphant, a cause to weep rather than a catalyst to rage, a call to repentance rather than a vision of the good life. 

Mike Cosper is the senior director of CT Media, host of The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill, cohost of The Bulletin, and author of Land of My Sojourn and the forthcoming The Church in Dark Times.

The post The Soul of MAGA appeared first on Christianity Today.

The Christians Trying to Restore Our Faith in Elections

by | Sep 12, 2024 | Uncategorized

Christine Johnson is the type of American who kisses her ballot and thanks God whenever she votes.

Johnson has volunteered as a poll worker in Minnesota for over 20 years; she currently serves as an election judge in a blue district.

“I love being a part of the process,” Johnson said. “I love helping my neighbors vote.”

One of her favorite sights is when parents bring their children to learn about the voting process. It’s touching to see the reverse as well, she said—adult children helping their elderly parents who are determined to vote in person navigate the polling site.

To Johnson, Election Day feels like a holiday. She knows what this November 5 will look like for her: She’ll start the day before the sun rises, getting dressed and packing a change of shoes, “because you know you’re going to be in a church basement or a bad chair or a bad cement floor all day long.”

She will brew a thermos of coffee to get her from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m., when she and her Democratic counterpart will drive the completed paper ballots from their polling site—sometimes a school gymnasium or house of worship—to city hall. 

There may be 15 or so election workers, mostly volunteers, working at her site. They set up the machines, post signs directing voters where to go, and go through a checklist of their duties. Then comes another special moment. The group will get in a circle, raise their right hands, and recite an oath “to be impartial and to follow the law and to get it right,” Johnson said. “I get kind of choked up when I do that oath every election.”

Her civic involvement stems from her faith. Shortly after becoming a Christian as a teen, Johnson started taking more interest in the world around her. In college, she was the lone freshman subscribing to periodicals to learn about political theory and systems of governance.

“This is such a rare and precious thing that we get to choose our leaders, and I don’t take that for granted at all,” she said. “I feel for people who … don’t have a constitutional republic or any form of say [in their government]. That just hurts my heart.”

The US election system relies on hundreds of thousands of volunteers like Johnson. But the role she has long seen as an opportunity to serve is now the target of a maelstrom of suspicion from a vocal segment of Americans, including some of her fellow conservatives and fellow Christians.

Partisan attacks on election administration methods, election results, and election officials are not new, but they have become a defining feature of today’s political landscape, with the “stop the steal” rhetoric and claims of election fraud that emerged after Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in 2020. It seems harder than ever for election workers trying to keep the process fair and trustworthy.

In a recent poll of election officials, more than one-third said they experienced threats, harassment, or abuse due to their work. Half voiced safety concerns for their staff, and nearly all have been forced to improve their safety measures.

“It has become more normal, if you are a public servant, to endure threats of intimidation and harassment at pretty significant levels,” Elizabeth Neumann, former assistant secretary for counterterrorism and threat prevention at the Department of Homeland Security, told CT.

Even formerly innocuous roles—city council, county clerk, election workers, or volunteers in civic service “as retirement jobs”—have “these horror stories of [getting] voicemails of somebody threatening to kill their grandchildren,” she added.

Christians called to serve in these roles have found some comfort in their convictions—but they’ve also felt the sting of neighbors and churchgoers demonizing their work.

Kentucky secretary of state Michael Adams recalls his wife and daughter peeling his campaign sticker off their cars after dealing with public confrontations in the parking lots of grocery stores, pharmacies, and even their church.

Secretary of state was supposed to be a relatively boring office. Wonky. Administrative. At least that’s what Adams told his wife, Christina, when he was eyeing the position after years as an attorney working in election law.

He was elected in 2019. He took office weeks before a global pandemic turned routine questions of election administration into fraught public health and safety concerns. Misinformation and deepening institutional distrust inflamed the country’s partisan tensions.

“What used to be a very boring office, and what he assured me was going to be just a very boring term, turned out not to be,” Christina Adams told CT. “It was definitely not what he pictured going in.”

Michael Adams worked across the aisle with Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear during the early months of the pandemic to give voters more time and options to vote. With bipartisan support in the state legislature, Kentucky expanded absentee and early voting access and opened countywide polling centers. Turnout was up, with three-quarters of voters in the June 2020 primary voting absentee. 

Some Republicans criticized the changes. Social media trolls did their worst. Hate mail arrived in Michael Adams’s inbox and at his house. Even a false alarm by his new home security system had the family initially terrified that one of his online attackers had decided to follow through on the barrage of death threats. 

“We were on edge, a bit more than I’ve ever been in my entire life,” Christina Adams said. “That was the first time I was actually nervous for our safety.”

It was hard for Michael Adams to watch all the politics around his job—a job that was supposed to be boring, a job that was supposed to combine his legal expertise with his Christian calling to public service—disrupt his family’s life. 

The controversies around the tight presidential vote in battleground states like Arizona, Michigan, and Georgia in 2020 are well-known. But even in deep red states, and even in the years since, the work of state and local officials continues to be shaped by election-related conspiracy theories brought by concerned voters.

Adams said it used to be that only a handful of secretaries of state faced intense pressure and controversy, often because they were in purple states with close races. “The rest of us kind of thought, Well, there but for the grace of God go I,” Adams said. But by the 2022 midterms, “We all felt that way.”

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, has found 1,546 proven cases of election fraud. These include anything from mailing an absentee ballot for someone who has died to voting despite being ineligible to tampering with or damaging ballot drop boxes.

More than 1,313 of the cases tracked by Heritage resulted in criminal prosecution, while the rest led to civil penalties, judicial findings, or other actions. That tally spans over a decade of elections—meaning in any given state, in any given year, there could be up to a handful of illegitimate ballots in a particular race, nowhere near the level needed to swing an election.

The think tank notes that the database is nonexhaustive. But even based on Heritage’s numbers, “the amount of proven election fraud is miniscule,”  the Brookings Institution wrote.

Yet it seems like there’s more distrust than ever around the election system. Americans hear more about suspected or alleged fraud. In Colorado, former county clerk Tina Peters claimed she was “called” to expose election fraud in 2020 by revealing voting machine data; she lost her job and faced 10 charges of official misconduct and tampering with the election.

Former president Donald Trump’s allies filed 62 lawsuits following the 2020 election, mostly in battleground states that Biden won. All but one of the lawsuits, including those that reached the Supreme Court, failed, according to one USA Today analysis.

The outlier was a case in Pennsylvania where a judge ruled that voters could not return and “cure” their ballots in the days following an election if they had failed to provide proper identification at the time of voting. The ruling did not affect the outcome in the state, where Biden won by over 80,000 votes. But that hasn’t always slowed the suspicion and vitriol.

Claims of a rigged election have continued to feature prominently in Trump’s reelection bid. And the lawsuits, allegations of wrongdoing, and misinformation have convinced a sizable share of the GOP that Trump’s loss was illegitimate: In a poll from last year, only 57 percent of Republicans believed Biden legitimately won.

Threats to poll workers and election officials have gotten so bad that the Justice Department launched a task force to deal with them. Workers have reported more than 2,000 threats in the past three years. Around 100 are being investigated.

One prominent case from 2020 involved two officials in Georgia, Ruby Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss. They were accused by Trump ally Rudy Giuliani of committing election fraud. Freeman received over 400 threats and had to move from her home. Last year, they won a $148 million defamation case against Giuliani. But as for all the threats, only one person ended up facing charges.  

Freeman, who is a Christian, said upon winning the lawsuit that “my friends say that God knew who to give this assignment to because ain’t no way we could do this. God chose me to go through this because he knows that I would tell everyone whose path I cross about Jesus.”

In Kentucky, Michael Adams also found faith to be a lifeline.

“I can’t imagine doing this job, or any job, without having faith,” Adams said. He described one incident where people marched outside the state capitol with AR-15 rifles during a protest over COVID-19 restrictions. “I do think a lot of people have prayed really, really hard for me the last several years.”

While he was in the thick of the online hate, several people from his family’s church reached out, even a few who were on the opposite side of the political spectrum.

“I felt like that was probably the Spirit encouraging us,” Christina Adams said. “It was actually encouraging to know how many homes were open to us, should we need to leave ours. That’s what really touched me. I mean, maybe five or six said, ‘You need a place to stay, come on over.’ … That meant the world.”

When Adams ran for reelection, Republicans recruited two challengers for the primary, both of whom campaigned on claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent. Adams won 118 out of 120 counties in 2023. In the months since, things have settled down—somewhat. As a keepsake of more turbulent times, in one corner of his office he keeps a red posterboard sign: FIRE MICHAEL ADAMS.

Adams said he’s worried less about threats than about whether his office will have enough poll workers or polling locations. It takes 15,000 people to run a statewide election. Adams’s staff is around 35.

“You do the math. I have to rely on volunteers, thousands and thousands of volunteers,” he said. “I think it’s healthy for our system that it’s, number one, primarily citizen operated, volunteer operated. And, number two, that it’s citizens from both sides of the aisle.”

But that means relying on people’s willingness and civic-mindedness to step up to the plate and volunteer. This becomes harder in a fraught atmosphere. After Kentucky voted to allow abortion protections in the state constitution in 2022, some Kentucky churches serving as voting locations faced enough scrutiny that they decided not to do it again.

Church doors are still open to voters in Glendale, Kentucky, population 2,227.

Mike Bell—called Brother Mike Bell by congregants and townspeople alike—dreamed of being the mayor growing up. He’s as close as you can get in his tiny unincorporated town. He’s on steering committees, chairs the Hardin County Water Board, is chaplain to the chamber of commerce, and is also probably one of the most famous voices in town.

Bell calls basketball and football games, trading his preacher cadence for drawn-out vowels—“Te-e-rrrrry Buckle!” he demonstrated at his office—and rhythmic cheers. Kids love it so much they use clips of his voice as their ringtones.

Bell’s office at Glendale Christian Church is dotted with references to It’s a Wonderful Life: Behind a coffee cup with a picture of George Bailey on it is a certificate of Bell’s baptism, very faded, along with a few dollars—the first $15 he ever made from preaching.

“Glendale is kind of like Bedford Falls,” he said. “And I’ve lived a wonderful life. You know, sometimes I wonder if God’s already given me heaven.” (He added with a chuckle, “But then the next day he gives me a little hell, so I know it’s not.”)

Bell’s life demonstrates one of his core beliefs: that Christians are called to serve their neighbors and communities, not exist apart from them. “To be a real preacher, you got to be down there with them,” he said. “Jesus walked among them. You got to walk among them.”

So he’s opened the church’s doors to the Lions Club, the town’s business association, a local quilting group—and, again this November, to voters.

The church has served as a polling site on and off for over three decades, a commitment that costs them about a week with all the setup and teardown of equipment. Bell would bring doughnuts and coffee for poll workers.

“It’s a great opportunity, because you’re being a part of the community,” he said. He wants to see more Christians be active in politics—not necessarily talking politics from the pulpit but serving at the ballot box and taking the time to vote.

Hardin County clerk Brian Smith agrees. Being a Christian in public life is his way of trying to make his community better. When concerns around election processes or results come up, he says his faith motivates him to respond to people’s concerns with respect, try to get things right, and be transparent about mistakes and human error when they are made.

But when he’s not buried in records or working on election-related duties, he can often be found chatting with people lined up to renew their license plates or update their driver’s licenses.

In his office, he keeps packs of water bottles to hand out when the line gets long.

Smith believes addressing election-related tension and regaining trust will require more civic involvement. And he’s starting early, wheeling the county’s voting machines into elementary schools for mock elections.

Second graders voting for superhero candidates—say, Hulk for sheriff—vote on the machines, print their ballots, and scan them in. Officials go through the process with them as if it’s Election Day.

When kids filled out the wrong spot, Smith’s staff showed them how to document a spoiled ballot. When characters like Wonder Woman and Captain America tied for county clerk, they double-checked the results and went on to a coin flip (in Kentucky, tied races are decided by the casting of lots).

“It was a great lesson that every vote counts. If a vote can end in a tie, you better believe that your vote counts,” Smith said. “We used that same equipment and then we hand-counted the results, and it matched our machine results. The kids got to see from a very early age what election integrity is all about.”

The civics lesson was such a hit that a nearby middle school invited the clerk’s office to operate their student council election.

“I gotta tell you, those kids took their jobs seriously,” Smith said. “They made sure everybody got just one ballot.” After ballots were counted, Michael Adams made an appearance to certify the results.

In Minnesota, Christine Johnson also wants to repair the rifts in trust, for the sake of poll workers’ safety and for the sake of democracy.

When people accuse the process of being rigged, Johnson recalls the checklists volunteers follow, how they make sure people from different parties tag-team on all the key tasks, the layers of audits, and the way the paper trail is double- and sometimes triple-checked. 

“I can’t speak for every state,” Johnson said, “but when it comes to the care for the ballots and the process where the voter is having their input, it’s like, oh my gosh, our city clerk, she just runs such a tight ship.

“I just tell people, well, my experience is that you have nothing to worry about.”

Johnson has found that her firsthand experience is rarely convincing. 

“They’ll say, ‘Well, maybe that’s okay there, but how do you know it’s good everywhere else?’ Or they’ll bring up other states. Or they’ll go, ‘Well, you know, they would be able to trick you too. They’re going to do it secretly behind the scenes and you wouldn’t even be aware of it.’”

She’s not sure what election officials can do to combat the distrust. “Sometimes I’ll even say to some of the more skeptical friends, ‘You know what, you should sign up. You should have your own experience.’

“And you know,” she added, “no one’s ever taken me up on that.”

Harvest Prude is Christianity Today’s political correspondent.

The post The Christians Trying to Restore Our Faith in Elections appeared first on Christianity Today.