Evangelicals now hate Jesus because he sounds like a liberal wimp

Conservative evangelicals are a core constituency in today’s GOP and a major part of MAGA world. To outsiders, the love affair between evangelicals and Donald Trump was incomprehensible. After all, Trump was a thrice-married, casino-owning trash-talker who probably thought he could do a better job in the role than God could.

But what conservative Christians loved about Trump was his willingness to fight – indeed, brawl – on behalf of shared grievances. It was his very un-Christian behavior that Christians loved. They see themselves engaged in a holy war, and they want a ruthless general to lead them.

So what about the guy who evangelicals are supposed to be following? You know, the one Christianity is named after?

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As it turns out, to some of the true believers – in Trump – Jesus Christ is no better than a Commie liberal.

In an interview with NPR, Russell Moore, who is editor-in-chief of Christianity Today, said that he hears from pastors who tell him about congregants who take umbrage at Jesus telling his followers to turn the other cheek. Moore said that someone invariably comes up to the pastor afterwards and says, “Where did you get those liberal talking points?”

“And what was alarming to me is that in most of these scenarios, when the pastor would say, ‘I’m literally quoting Jesus Christ,’ the response would not be, ‘I apologize,'” Moore recounted. “The response would be, ‘Yes, but that doesn’t work anymore. That’s weak.'” For him, that shows that Christianity is in a state of crisis.

Moore himself has seen first-hand how his fellow believers have put faith in Trump above their own moral standards. In 2016, Moore, then the head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberties Commission, called Trump out for his misogyny and “crazed public and private temperament.” Even though Moore had impeccable conservative credentials, his outspokeness cost him his job after Trump was elected.

There’s ample evidence that the conservative evangelical movement has essentially become a political movement with religion as a kind of garnish, like spiritual parsley. For one thing, politics and faith have become so closely intertwined among conservatives that one is used to justify the other.

Michele Margolis, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania, summarized it in an op-ed for The New York Times: “We don’t just take cues about politics from our pastors and priests; we take cues about religion from our politicians.”

At the same time, people who aren’t especially religious have been embracing the label “evangelical” as an extension of their political identity. Surveys indicating that the number of white evangelicals grew during the Trump administration actually showed that many of them never set foot inside a church.

According to Ryan Burge, an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University and a Baptist pastor, “For many Americans, to be a conservative Republican is to be an evangelical Christian, regardless of whether they ever attend a Sunday service.”

This is bad news for people like Moore who believe religion should be about God. It’s also bad news for religion in general. As politics infects religion more and more, more and more people turn away from it. Of course, that just reinforces evangelicals’ fear of a secular tidal wave about to wash over them, which in turn leads them to wage war on their enemies. It’s a self-reinforcing doom loop, and we’re all caught in it.