Bill McKibben, The Guardian; They’re doing to America what they did to Christianity
"Trumpism’s most revealing and defining moments – not its most important, nor cruelest, nor most dangerous, nor stupidest, but perhaps its most illuminating – came earlier this autumn. In the course of a few weeks, the US president started showing everyone his plans for a gilded ballroom twice the size of the White House and then began unilaterally ripping down the East Wing to build it. Then, after nationwide protests against his rule, he posted on social media an AI video of himself wearing a crown and piloting a fighter jet labeled “King Trump”, which proceeded to bomb American cities and Americans with a graphically vivid load of human poop.
He has done things 10,000 times as bad – the current estimate of deaths from his cuts to USAID is 600,000 and rising, and this week a study predicted his fossil fuel policies would kill another 1.3 million. But nothing as definitional. No other president would have dared – really, no other president would have imagined – unilaterally destroying large sections of the White House in order to erect a Versailles-style party room, with the active collaboration of some of the richest Americans, almost all of whom have business with the government. And no one – not Richard Nixon, not Andrew Jackson, not Warren Harding, not anyone – would have imagined boasting about defecating on the American citizenry. Even the worst American leaders were willing to maintain the notion that they represented all the people; Trump has managed to turn America’s idea of itself entirely upside down. And he has done it with the active consent of an entire political party. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, when asked about the poop video, for once did not bother lying that he had not seen it. Instead he said: “The president uses social media to make the point. You can argue he’s probably the most effective person who’s ever used social media.”
As disorienting as it is to watch the president try to upend the old idea of democracy and replace it with its polar opposite, there is one large group of Americans who should not find it completely novel. That is those of us – in older age cohorts a near majority – who were raised as mainline Protestant Christians.
We have watched over the years as rightwing evangelical churches turned the Jesus we grew up with into exactly the opposite of who we understood him to be. At its most basic, they turned a figure of love into a figure of hate who blesses precisely the cruelties that he condemned in the Gospel; we went from “the meek shall inherit the Earth” to “the meek shall die of cholera.” This has happened more slowly, over decades instead of months, but it is nonetheless unsettling in the same ways, a disorienting gut punch for many of us.
What particularly hurts is the fact that at no point did we manage to fight back, not effectively anyway. Without intending to, we surrendered control of the idea of Jesus. It is a story that may provide some insights into how to fight the attack on democracy.
Many readers, younger ones especially, will require some backstory. In 1958, President Dwight Eisenhower laid the cornerstone for the building that would house the National Council of Churches on the Upper West Side of Manhattan – on that day, according to a history of Protestantism by Mark Silk, a cool 52% of Americans were part of the so-called mainline denominations: Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Episcopalians and the like. That meant most of the nation subscribed at least nominally to a religious life marked by a kind of polite civic normality and a somewhat progressive reading of the Bible – every one of these denominations eventually backed the civil rights movement, and Dr Martin Luther King’s March on Washington was literally planned from the Methodist national headquarters, the closest private building to the Capitol. (Catholicism accounted for another third of Americans, an important piece of the story I will get to eventually.)
In the 60 years since, all that has changed; the mainline denominations are now barely a sixth of the population, our churches largely aged and declining. Now the most public and powerful forms of Christianity, the vast and often denominationally independent megachurches and TV ministries, are as wildly different from that version of Protestantism as Donald Trump is from Eisenhower.
Paula White-Cain, for instance, who leads the newly created “White House Faith Office”, held a livestreamed prayer service the day after the 2020 election to call on “angelic reinforcement” from Africa and South America to swing the election away from Joe Biden. Doug Wilson, the self-taught pastor who co-founded Pete Hegseth’s denomination has insisted that it was a mistake to let women vote. (He also teaches that sex “cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party”, because “a man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts.”)
Christianity, it must be said, has always trafficked in angels and had some serious trouble with the role of women. The actually distinctive thing about this newly ascendant version of Christianity is that it meshes easily with the savage cruelty of the new political order, one whose tenets and tempers are directly contradictory to that older version I grew up in. They share the same forms, in that all pay homage to Jesus and quote from the Bible, just as the president still inhabits the same White House (or what is left of it). But the Jesus of this imagination – muscular, aggressive and American – is a different man than the one I grew up worshipping. The idea that he can be invoked to justify cutting off aid to foreign countries and bundling immigrants into the back of unmarked vans is repulsive to me, but also mystifying – as if gravity suddenly pulled objects upward.
So let me first describe the Jesus that I grew up with, because theoretically Jesus is the center of any Christian faith, and because the fastest-growing cadre of Americans might have little sense of him since they are atheists or agnostics or nones. I have no problem with any of these traditions, or with any other faith (of my three particular political heroes, only one – Dr King – is a Christian. Gandhi was Hindu, and his colleague, the too-little-known Abdul Ghaffar Khan – was a Muslim). But I do think that there are pearls of great price in the Christian story (though it should be said that I am no theologian, only a layperson and occasional Sunday school teacher).
It is emphatically not the story of a mighty king arising; instead, a baby is born to homeless parents in a garage, who must quickly flee to a different country to evade secret police. The baby grows up in humble circumstances, a working carpenter; his message is about love for others, especially for the poor – and not a sentimental love, but a concrete one, expressed by feeding and sheltering. Christ’s response to violence is to turn the other cheek – not as an act of passive acceptance, but as a way to educate the attacker; his crime policy is that if someone steals your coat you should give him your sweater too. This person’s message is sufficiently subversive that he is eventually put to death by the reigning imperial power, but that execution is powerless to quell his spirit or his message, which then spreads across a growing community of followers who try to behave as he had...
The obvious and straightforward fact that the Jesus of the gospels calls for a kind of radical love centered on the poor is what has always made Christianity something of a scandalous religion: appealing to the masses, but because of its inherent radicalness needing to be contained. In the 1950s it was contained by dilution – Protestantism was so dominant that it basically baptized the status quo.
The 1960s broke that – the leadership of these churches, who were among the most committed followers of Jesus, found that they had little choice but to march in Selma, literally or figuratively. But many of their followers did not want to; they had been on board because Protestantism was part of the fabric of American life, not a challenge to it. Membership in mainline churches began dropping off. And for many of those who still felt a cultural or personal need for Christianity, evangelicalism was on the rise: it meshed wonderfully with the emerging Reagan-era emphasis on individualism and spoke directly to Americans who rejected the movements of the civil rights era.
The idea that personal salvation – as opposed to concern for others – was at the heart of Christianity always bordered on the heretical, but over the decades it has morphed into the absurd farce we see now, where Jesus is held to bless every show of dominance and aggression we can imagine. There is, by now, a well-established genre of Republican officials posing for Christmas cards with submachine guns; Nashville Republican congressman Andy Ogles passed them out to his entire family for a picture. He was one of the congresspeople who led the charge not only to freeze USAID funding for the poorest people in the world, but to use that money instead for increased deportations from this country. It is as if he had decided to see exactly how un-Christlike it was possible for one human being to be – indeed, he demanded that the local private Christian college Belmont University lose federal funding because it had a hope, unity and belonging department that he thought was too much like “DEI”.
Evangelicals are not unanimous in their support for Trump. For years I have written a column for the progressive evangelical magazine Sojourners, for example, but even its publishers would confess that they are very much a minority. Realistically, white evangelicalism is the base of Trump’s support, and this flock has not broken with him the way many of his other followers have in the past nine months.
For most readers, rightly, none of this inside baseball will matter much. For me, personally, it certainly does: it is as weird to me as a Christian as it is to me as an American to see King Trump fantasizing about offloading his bowel movements from a plane on our heads. But the reason I bother to write about it is not personal but strategic. That is because mainline Protestantism made a serious mistake: surrendering its vision of Jesus without much of a fight. It is not entirely gone – there remain thousands of wonderful and vibrant congregations, and leaders like the Rev William Barber who occasionally manage to break through in public. Episcopal bishop Mariann Edgar Budde raised a ruckus this winter when, with Trump in attendance, she prayed for him to show compassion to immigrants; there have been more than a scattering of pastors in the protests outside immigration offices, just as there are in almost every social movement in this country. But these exceptions prove, I fear, the rule of general passivity: in general, the old mainline Christianity never was able to offer a very potent defense against the aggressive and toxic new forms of Christianity."
