1982: Observing the Evangelical Church’s Embrace of Right-Wing Politics

Rise of the Moral Majority

I was youthful and apolitical in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and I listened to almost every gospel program on the radio.  As a member of a heterodox Christian sect, I critiqued the doctrines of the radio preachers. When it came to politics, however, the learning curve was so steep that I struggled to grasp some of the fundamental aspects of the conversation.  One of the broadcasts I listened to but didn’t particularly enjoy was Jerry Falwell’s “The Old Time Gospel Hour.”  I sensed that Falwell’s audience was primarily composed of fundamentalist-leaning Christians who angrily rejected the administration of “Born-again” President Jimmy Carter.  They favored the candidacy of Ronald Reagan— a man who didn’t confess to being an evangelical and rarely attended church.  Like many other Americans, I had also been roundly disappointed with the state of the union under the Carter administration.  I believed that Carter’s policies affected me personally, as I kept an extremely tight budget during his tenure, and the high cost of gas meant I had been forced to cut spending in other critical areas to survive. 

The escalating tension with Iran was another area where I lacked cognitive processing tools, but I was troubled by what I read in the newspapers. Fifty-two American hostages were being held at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran for well over a year, and Carter had seemed incapable of resolving the conflict.  Although Falwell’s theology and oratorical style did not resonate with me, I believed there must have been some merit in his criticisms of the Carter administration, since most of the people in my tribe also seemed to be struggling financially.

Charismatics Embrace Efrain Ríos Montt

“Guatemala has a new president at the helm, and guess what?  He’s one of ours!”  The megachurch teacher from my city was giddy with excitement about the unfolding events in Latin America. She had no background in politics or world affairs, nor had she enrolled in any formal theological education in her rise to establishing a widespread presence on radio and TV.  Her lack of preparedness didn’t seem to trouble her audience, though, because she possessed the reputation of knowing how to “walk in the Spirit,” ministering to the church with “sign gifts” and excessive good cheer.

Her endorsement of this new Guatemalan regime was accelerating. “Efrain Ríos Montt was raised in a church that worships God in Spirit and Truth, and he is fully committed to Jesus today,” the teacher continued.  “And not only that, but according to my sources… he speaks in tongues and participates in the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit.  I believe he has been placed in that volatile nation for such a time as this.  God’s going to use him in a powerful way.  Before long, I believe revival will be breaking out all throughout Central America!”  That particular segment of the worship service ended with the congregation praying for Guatemala and for the man whom God had appointed to bring stability and revival there. This was all such encouraging news!

Imagine my confusion when I returned home and read in the papers that General Ríos Montt had staged a coup to seize power.  My charismatic Christian friends, as usual, had an answer for that: “You see, the government that was in power was so corrupt and diabolical that it needed a fast turnaround.  The previous president would not have permitted the democratic process to move forward.  So, God is using Ríos Montt to deliver his people!”  Well, I guess anything is possible, I surmised.  I couldn’t help but wonder, though, where my friends and the local megachurch had suddenly acquired such expertise on the politics of Central America.

The evangelical world, especially Charismatic Christians, seemed eager to embrace a uniform narrative.  On TV, Pat Robertson expounded on how God had orchestrated contemporary events to enable this godly man, this Holy Spirit-led man, to lead his struggling nation back to prosperity.  On the pages of various Christian periodicals, the same information was frequently featured, most prominently in Charisma magazine, which I occasionally read during that era.

I had not yet enrolled in a single college class, and my critical thinking skills were not particularly acute.  In any event, why would my Christian leaders and friends be reporting these things if they weren’t true? Having heard no contradictory data, I didn’t question the narrative.

Genocide in Guatemala

It was therefore more than a little disturbing in the coming months when the wire services reported that Ríos Montt had begun to wage a campaign of genocide against fellow Guatemalan citizens.  Specifically, about eighteen hundred native Mayans of the Ixil tribes had been exterminated.  Reports of citizens having been tortured and raped, and forced to relocate to Southern Mexico, began to appear in the headlines.  From the lips of Pat Robertson, from our local megachurch, and from Charisma magazine, I heard absolutely nothing.  No sense of horror, no apparent shame, no apologies, no explanations.  They simply stopped talking about the wonderful manner in which God was going to use the anointed general to revive his people. They had all moved on to other topics.

After seventeen months, Ríos Montt was deposed in yet another coup.  I never heard if the new general replacing him was another “godly” man who “Walked in the Spirit” or not. From the evangelical world, I heard not even a murmur.

Evangelical Political Conditioning

I had been active in church since my conversion to Christ, and I continue to practice those habits today.  My wife and I had to switch churches several times when we moved to new cities, but we were never without a church home for longer than a month.  In subsequent years, I served as a pastor or an associate in some of them.  We attended churches from six denominations in the Northeast, West, South, and Midwest. Regardless of the organizations in which we were involved or the regions where we lived, we consistently observed the same patterns:  We were conservative Christians, and so we supported the Republican Party.  For nearly three decades, voter guides were distributed at the churches we attended to help us understand the most important electoral issues and which candidates running for office were likely to resolve them favorably.  The voting guides always reflected a familiar narrative. In every church, in every state, and in every instance, it was strongly implied that Republicans were best-suited to hold all vacant offices. 

I shouldn’t have been so unprepared; therefore, when in 2016 it was reported that 83% of evangelicals were backing a transparently immoral candidate for the highest office who was well-known for his infidelities, for refusing to pay employees who had completed work for him, for owning and mismanaging gambling enterprises, and for his prolific lying and boasting.  At the end of this man’s campaign, the entire country watched a video in which he boasted that he sexually assaulted women, regardless of their consent.  This was not at all out of character with what I had already known about the candidate for three decades. What I was completely unprepared for was that so many long-time friends would line up behind his angry, hateful rhetoric.  Naively, perhaps, it was still accurate to say that I was shocked.  I expected better of my friends.  We had all sat in the same gymnasiums together, learning about the fruit of the Spirit and how the most remarkable thing on earth we could do was to love other people.  We had all complained together about the immorality of Bill Clinton, hoping he would be removed from office due to his adulterous behavior in the White House.  Collectively, we had rallied behind George W. Bush, even when we weren’t quite sure why his continuing warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan had endured long after justice had been addressed.  George W., at least, had been another “one of ours,” even if his ability to govern had seemed tepid at best. Now that 2016 was upon us, though, they were insisting that I pull the lever for an arrogant playboy who had been married three times, had been in the tabloids for decades regarding his infidelities and lecherous behavior, and who was now organizing his campaign upon naked contempt for the “other” — badmouthing the ones whom Jesus had specifically commanded us to love.  It was all too much for me. There was not a nanosecond in which I considered supporting the man or the movement. I was now politically savvy, and my heart had been conditioned for love, not partisanship. 

Redemptive Behavior Supersedes Politics

In retrospect, I am forced to consider whether I had been deluding my family and myself.  Were my fellow parishioners not hearing the “Love your neighbor” message I had been hearing from numerous pulpits and proclaiming from my own?  Had only a tiny remnant of them taken ownership of the notion that believers should be people of exemplary character, driven to support like-minded people?  I admit I had listened to Rush Limbaugh and some of his fellow travelers in the late eighties and early nineties, and I sometimes had chuckled at the way he would troll “the libs.”  As a Pro-Life believer, it seemed absurd that so many of my fellow citizens who claimed to care about civil rights could so casually disregard the rights of the preborn. Early in my journey, though, I had also clearly heard the condescension in the voices of the right-wing pundits, recognizing how their priorities inevitably favored party over principle.  I had realized that this was not pleasing to God, and eventually, I had stopped allowing the demagogues to live rent-free in my head. For a few years, though, I had ostensibly mocked civil rights issues and opposed at least some policies that favored those below the poverty line, although I myself was not financially prosperous.  Even so, when I heard the angry rhetoric with which our favored pundits addressed immigration issues, clamoring for legislation declaring English to be the official language, I had to start pulling away. My wife and I were training to be missionaries, for crying out loud.  If my tribe was determined to oppose multiculturalism and were actively working to make immigrants feel unwelcome, how was I going to flourish as a guest in a majority-Muslim nation?  In time, it occurred to me that if I had missed how exhaustively we were being groomed for lifelong fealty to the GOP, maybe there were other nefarious elements of our collective church culture I had also been blinded to.

Journeying to Christocentric Thinking

Today, I refuse to serve in any church that reflexively drives people towards a GOP worldview; The same can be said for churches promoting an automatic coziness with Democrat party issues.  Christ transcends partisan thinking.  Biblical concerns cannot be neatly divided into two camps.  Dozens of social and political issues confront believers each year, each requiring thoughtful responses and redemptive action.  Your favorite political party is wholly inadequate to address ecclesiastical activities, as it is not organized around Christocentric thinking. To trust the judgment of political parties in deciding matters close to God’s heart is like sending a surrogate to take care of our marital and parenting concerns. Partisan activities cannot accomplish the things God desires for our nation and for the world.  Creating additional parties may be beneficial to the country, and I believe this would benefit the American people; however, these efforts will also likely fail to bring about Kingdom outcomes.  Allowing Christ to transcend our thinking is the first step in navigating the complex realities of politics.

Loving Partisans While Maintaining Fidelity to Truth

I have not stopped loving my friends who have become MAGA disciples.  I don’t socialize with them as much as I used to, though.  Some have insulted me, others have publicly chastised me, and many have stopped talking to me altogether upon recognizing that they were unable to assimilate me into their movement.  I have also insulted some of them, whether shrewdly or transgressively. If people can be duped into embracing the MAGA doctrine, they cannot simultaneously occupy the upper tiers of my esteem.  Their counsel is much less helpful to me today; I can no longer rely upon them to make judgment calls based upon charity or even decency.  If one claims to love Christ and then embraces a movement based on contempt for the marginalized and for all Americans who vote differently than they do, how might these people cultivate the ability to interpret the Gospel in a manner considered to be “conservative” or even helpful?  They have missed the plot.  They didn’t make it to first base. The Holy Spirit will have no dominion in hearts that have not been transformed by agapic love.

Many citizens appear eager to abandon the faith of our Fathers based upon the toxicity they now observe in the evangelical church.  A broad survey of church history enables us to recognize that the betrayal of American evangelicals is not a new phenomenon. The church has always been populated with problematic people, and always will be.  The haters have lived among us since the first century.  I find it to be a great advantage that many of those who are unaligned with the Greatest Commandment have been identified in the past nine years. We can now clearly identify which ones will be unreliable in matters of hospitality, evangelism, and discipleship. Their failures don’t make me less inclined to serve Jesus, though; He has a more prominent role in my life than ever.  He welcomed me into the church, after all, and he welcomed some of you.  Each of us has wheeled our share of baggage through the door, whether it was in our days of youthful foolishness or in the past few weeks.  The church will somehow survive.

Anticipating Judgment and Reconciliation

 Admittedly, I continue to wonder when he’s going to go after the MAGA movement with a whip, turning over the tables in their temples. Maybe he never will; It’s apparent that not all evil done on earth is punished on earth.  But on second thought, maybe turning over the tables is exactly what he is doing.  I have recently observed people fleeing evangelical churches, while polling informs us that younger people are calling themselves “Nones” more frequently than they are calling themselves followers of Christ. I say this with no sense of joy. It hurts me personally, and it hurts the Body of Christ.  Those who say they wish to Make America Great Again (as in… the era perhaps when some Americans could own other Americans, and women were subservient) will be forced to see that they are not special. Indicators will include a failing economy, rising autocratic rule, and increasing scorn from our allies.

The Western European nations have shown no indication of returning to societies where the Gospel is preeminent. Neither has the great Christian empire of Russia returned to its Gospel roots, despite now having more religious freedom than it did fifty years ago. 

God doesn’t need America to demonstrate His greatness. 

In the Global South, among people whom MAGA adherents have labelled “vermin” and “scum”, residents of “s-hole” countries are responding to Christ’s mandate with enthusiasm.  Americans who are thoroughly convinced of their exceptionalism will one day be confronted with God’s alternative view, which will be demonstrated as he makes His name great among the nations.  When St. John the Divine was given a glimpse into the end of the age in Revelation 7:9, he didn’t observe any “special” people, but rather “… a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.”  If nothing else provides us much solace, we can at least anticipate our vindication and a great family reunion in which all our differences will be eternally resolved.  Until that day, we can commit ourselves to doing all the good we can muster.

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