“How did Christianity become so mean? How did we get from Jesus’s message of love to relentless condemnations against gays, transgender persons, women preachers, immigrants, scientists, educators, journalists, and public school librarians? When I look at American Christianity in 2024, I feel like I’m watching the 2004 film ‘Mean Girls’”.
That quotation was in retired United Methodist Church pastor John Sumwalt’s column in the weekly Agri-View newspaper (May 23, 2024). It came from retired preacher colleague Martin Thielen of Cookeville, Tennessee in response to a question on Thielen’s blog.
Just to be absolutely CLEAR, the quotation is not intended as a condemnation of Christianity. It addresses the abomination of authentic Christianity being exhibited and masking as a political brand – a brand that violates the “message of love” on which Christianity is based.
That branding is centered in Southern Baptist Convention congregations but it applies to many others around the country. That this is beyond doubt is extensively documented in two recent books: “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory” by Tim Alberta and “The Exvangelicals” by Sarah McCammon.
Alberta cites Texas native Amy Snidow, who grew up in a evangelical family and was married to a pastor. Already disturbed by a fusing of faith and anti-gay bigotry, partisan Republican politics, and Christian nationalism, Snidow’s breaking point came when “people started praising Donald Trump from the pulpit.”
Thielen finds that there are many people who feel “alarmed over today’s mean-spirited Christianity.” Pastor Brian Zahnd (of St. Joseph, Missouri) laments that “large numbers of evangelical Christian leaders are fomenting hostility among their followers.”
To quote Zahnd, “You are forming your people in anger and hate. You are helping to intensify their capacity to hate other people. You are giving them permission to carry around this permanent rage.”
Before becoming upset or even enraged at those words, please read the Alberta and McCammon books. They are available through local libraries.
To quote another member of the clergy – the renowned Catholic archbishop Fulton Sheen: “A civilization is in danger when those who never learned to obey are given the right to command” (is that a premonition of someone seeking power today?)
In the July/August issue (page 87) of The Atlantic, writer George Packer describes a “moral and psychological cesspool: a liar, a bigot, a sexual assaulter, a cheat; crude, cruel, disloyal, vengeful, dictatorial, and so selfish that he tried to shatter American democracy rather than accept defeat” (who fits that description?).
Packer continues: “His supporters have to ignore all of this, explain it away, or revel in displays of character that few of them would tolerate for a minute in their own children…Beyond the reach of reason and even empathy, nearly half of my fellow citizens are unfathomable.”
Why are so many people comfortable with how a major segment of evangelical Christianity is marrying itself to politics – in effect a theocracy that didn’t fare too well over many centuries in Europe (a reason that many of our ancestors fled their homelands) and that continues today under Islamic regimes?
To that question, Packer quotes a middle-aged Arizona businessman who doesn’t “look to the president for moral guidance in raising children or running a business.”
Similarly, on page 100, Alberta quoted a 2016 statement by Jerry Falwell Jr: “You have to choose the leader that would make the best king or president…It might not be the person we call when we need someone to give us spiritual counsel.”
That’s the phenomenon – like it or not.