“I Didn’t Move; You Did" (Part 17) : The Shift Away From Defending Truth

Throughout this series, I have been returning to the same claim concerning the conservative evangelicalism in which I was raised: I didn't move; you did.

I don't mean that I haven't changed. Of course I have. My theology has changed in some significant ways over the years. I hope my character has changed too. But when I look at the things that increasingly separate me from American evangelicalism, I keep finding that many of them are values evangelicalism itself taught me.

Tell the truth. Keep your word. Admit when you are wrong. Don't bear false witness against your neighbor. Don't spread gossip. Don't excuse dishonesty simply because the dishonest person is on your side. Character matters. Integrity matters. Truth matters because God is a God of truth.

None of that was controversial when I was growing up evangelical.
And this is where this post connects with the others in this series. 

Whether I am writing about racism, violence, war,  human dignity, care for the vulnerable, or now truthfulness, I keep finding myself in roughly the same place: trying to hold onto things I learned from the conservative evangelical tradition while watching influential parts of that tradition make accommodations I was once taught Christians should never make.

This time, the issue is truth.

Every president in my lifetime has exaggerated, shaded the truth, misrepresented opponents, and sometimes simply lied. This isn't an argument that dishonesty began with Donald Trump, nor is it an argument that Democrats are uniquely truthful.

Something different has happened, though. Donald Trump's (lack of) relationship with truth is extraordinary in its frequency, brazenness, and persistence. Even more troubling to me has been the willingness of so many evangelical Christians—people formed by a faith that commands us not to bear false witness—to minimize, defend, repeat, or simply stop caring about truth.

That change matters to me, because I remember when we said truth mattered.

"I Didn't Move; You Did" (Part 16): The Shift Away From Honoring The Imago Dei In Everyone

One of the things evangelical Christianity taught me was that every human being bears the image of God. Probably everything in this series references this is some fashion: the help of the poor, the care for the immigrant and refugee, the rejection of racism and unjust discrimination, the interest in alleviating global poverty, the concern for the environment so that deadly pollution is curbed, the rejection of war as the preferred way to solve conflict, the importance of honoring the autonomy of people, etc. 

All these things were embedded in the evangelical creeds that formed my life and my evangelical church community for decades.

That conviction helped make me "pro-life" (though these days I prefer the term "whole-life".) I believe human life should be protected and honored from the moment it begins until the moment it ends. But honoring life means more than keeping someone physically alive. It means treating people with dignity, justice, mercy, kindness, and love.

The unborn child bears the image of God. So does the immigrant at the border. So does the prisoner. So does the person with a disability, the elderly person, the poor person, the Muslim, the atheist, the political opponent, the transgender person, the Republican or Democrat politician...the list goes on.

Human dignity cannot depend upon whether someone looks like me, votes like me, worships like me, shares my citizenship, or seeks my approval. If the image of God means anything, it means that human beings possess a dignity we did not give them, and we cannot take away.

That is why the last decade has been so disorienting for me.

Something has changed in significant parts of American evangelicalism. Language and behavior that Christians once would have recognized as cruel, vulgar, degrading, or dehumanizing are increasingly excused—and sometimes celebrated—when they come from the right political leaders.

We seem to have lost something more fundamental than civility. We have lost some of our capacity to walk in another person's shoes—to do and say unto others as we would have them do and say unto us. We have lost not only sympathy, but empathy.

Perhaps it shouldn't surprise us. Charlie Kirk famously said that he couldn't stand the word empathy. Books with titles such as The Sin of Empathy and Toxic Empathy have found receptive audiences in conservative Christian circles.

Of course, empathy can be misguided. Feeling another person's pain does not require agreeing with everything that person believes or does, and it doesn't mean we have to avoid truth and confrontation.

Yet the Christian tradition that has often spoken about orthodoxy (right belief) and orthopraxy (right action) has an underused third "ortho" -  orthopathy (rightly ordered affections). It asks. "What kind of heart am I cultivating? Or, more simply: am I learning to feel about people the way Jesus does?

I am concerned that conservative evangelicals will win political battles while losing something far more important: empathy. We can become the kind of people who no longer recognize dishonor and cruelty when we see it - or, even worse, when we do it.

So, let’s look at how the administration that evangelicals have put into office twice is doing in the areas of orthopraxy and orthopathy when it comes to viewing, treating, and speaking about everyone as image bearers of God.

"I Didn't Move; You Did" (Part 15B): The Shift Toward Christian Nationalism And The Abandonment Of Character

In the first part of this series, I spent a good deal of time looking backward. I revisited the statements, declarations, and public witness of the evangelical movement that shaped me. Again and again, I found leaders insisting that Christians must care for the poor,  pursue justice, tell the truth, defend the vulnerable, practice humility, and maintain enough distance from political power to speak prophetically to it. And we would do all of this not just personally but corporately. We were called to build a society that valued these things as well as reflected in leaders and laws.

Then I turned to the present. I have been asking a simple question: What happened? Why have so many voices that once challenged immoral presidents and unjust policies now defend and even applaud them? To look at this, I have been chronicling various areas in which a profound shift has taken place and explaining how it reveals the conservative evangelicalism I was raised in moving from solid Kingdom foundations of orthopraxy to shaky Empire foundations of power, violence, callousness and idolatry.

In the previous post, I argued that Christian nationalism changes the church in predictable ways. First, it encourages the nation to borrow God's authority for the empire's actions. We saw that in the way war can become wrapped in the language of divine mission, turning national victories into God's victories and military power into an instrument of God's kingdom.

But there is a second consequence, one that may be even more damaging to the church itself.

Once the church becomes closely intertwined with a political movement, it gradually abandons the call to speak prophetically to those in power. Instead of holding leaders accountable, it begins protecting them. Instead of confronting sin wherever it appears, it starts making exceptions for "our side." The result is not simply political compromise. It is moral compromise that deals a devastating blow to the public witness of the church.

I think nowhere is that shift more visible than in the evangelical movement's dramatic reversal on the question of character.

" I Didn't Move; You Did" (Part 15A) Christian Nationalism And The "Sacrament" of War

In the first part of this series, I spent a good deal of time looking backward. I revisited the statements, declarations, and public witness of the evangelical movement that shaped me. Again and again, I found leaders insisting that Christians must care for the poor, pursue justice, tell the truth, defend the vulnerable, practice humility, and maintain enough distance from political power to speak prophetically to it. (My previous post looked at the kind of global responsibility the evangelical movement once took seriously.)

Then I turned to the present. I have been asking a simple question: What happened?

Why have so many voices that once challenged presidents now defend them? Why have leaders who once insisted that character matters decided it suddenly doesn't? Why has the movement become so comfortable with nationalism, partisan identity, and political power?

I don't think there is only one answer. But I do think one answer explains much of the shift. It is the growing embrace of Christian nationalism, a danger we were constantly warned about for the past 50 years. Here are some excerpts from the declarations I posted.

We must resist the temptation to make the nation and its institutions objects of near-religious loyalty.

God has ordained the two co-existing institutions of church and state as distinct and independent of each other with each having its own areas of responsibility (Rom. 13:1-7; Mark 12:13-17; Eph. 4:15-16, 5:23-32).

All too often we have abandoned our Lord’s concern for those in the shadows, the twilight, and the deep darkness of the world, and become cheerleaders for those in power and the naïve sycophants of the powerful and the rich…

…The other error, made by both the religious left and the religious right in recent decades, is to politicize faith, using faith to express essentially political points that have lost touch with biblical truth. That way faith loses its independence, the church becomes “the regime at prayer,” Christians become “useful idiots” for one political party or another, and the Christian faith becomes an ideology in its purest form. Christian beliefs are used as weapons for political interests...

Christians from both sides of the political spectrum, left as well as right, have made the mistake of politicizing faith…Whichever side it comes from, a politicized faith is faithless, foolish, and disastrous for the church – and disastrous first and foremost for Christian reasons rather than constitutional reasons...

Called to an allegiance higher than party, ideology, and nationality, we Evangelicals see it our duty to engage with politics, but our equal duty never to be completely equated with any party, partisan ideology, economic system, or nationality. In our scales, spiritual, moral, and social power are as important as political power, what is right outweighs what is popular, just as principle outweighs party, truth matters more than team-playing, and conscience more than power and survival...

The politicization of faith is never a sign of strength but of weakness. The saying is wise: “The first thing to say about politics is that politics is not the first thing.” The Evangelical soul is not for sale. It has already been bought at an infinite price...

We repent of our failures to condemn and restrain violence by remaining silent, by promoting nationalism, or by unjustly supporting conflicts through deficient theological justification.

We lament that some Christians have looked to the state rather than the gospel as the key means for bringing about God’s intentions for the world. This takes an especially regrettable form when wed to nationalism—here defined as the belief that every state should have a single, national culture and no other—or ethnonationalism—which is the belief that every ethnic group should have its own state. This is a great evil in our world.

We lament that many Christians have been sadly complicit in it, as well as in the claims of ethnic and racial supremacy it fosters. Against this, we assert that no modern state is able to claim or will ever be able to claim to be the special agent of God’s saving rule.

I read Francis Schaeffer back in the 80s and 90s. I taught the How Should We Then Live video class to high schoolers. Though Schaeffer had some unfortunate influences (#rushdoony), he had some good insights that were spreading throughout the evangelical world.

“There is no New Testament basis for a linking of church and state until Christ, the King returns. The whole "Constantine mentality" from the fourth century up to our day was a mistake. Constantine, as the Roman Emperor, in 313 ended the persecution of Christians. Unfortunately, the support he gave to the church led by 381 to the enforcing of Christianity, by Theodosius I, as the official state religion. 

Making Christianity the official state religion opened the way for confusion up till our own day. There have been times of very good government when this interrelationship of church and state has been present. But through the centuries it has caused great confusion between loyalty to the state and loyalty to Christ, between patriotism and being a Christian.

We must not confuse the Kingdom of God with our country. To say it another way: "We should not wrap our Christianity in our national flag.” ― Francis A. Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto

The late Billy Graham, Christianity Today’s founder, gave us a loud warning in an article he wrote for Parade Magazine in 1981, when he said: 

“I don’t want to see religious bigotry in any form. It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it.”[1]

Historically, evangelicals advocated for a prophetic distance from power, especially wealth and political authority, from which they could freely speak truth and righteousness to those in power. They had a stated suspicion of nationalism and “near-religious loyalty” to the state.[2]

Today, in practice and teaching, it endorses proximity to power[3] and defense of leaders regardless of character, often openly embraces Christian nationalism, and seeks to merge faith with political identity.