Revengelicalism Trumps Christianity

Earl Fowler

Never thought it would come to this, but Lord, I miss the Christianity of my childhood.

Not because I lament a loss of faith or a belief in Jesus as my divine ticket to everlasting life.

And certainly not because I miss the social aspects of church functions or listening to my grandparents’ generation crash and burn through tinny, sanctimonious hymns about gathering at the river or marching to Zion or the fast-falling eventide.

God forbid.

The last time my mom made my brother and me go to church, I fainted and took out a couple of rows of chairs behind me; turns out we’d neglected to remove the cardboard from the collar of my new starched white shirt. She was so embarrassed by my near strangulation by clip-on tie that we never went back. My dad never went anyway, dismissing all religion — including the fervent beliefs of his own father — as “a bunch of hooey.”

Sic transit gloria mundi.

No, I miss the Christianity of my childhood — not any particular sect but pretty much the dominant strain of white social Christianity that prevailed in North America half a century ago — because of its liberal ideals and relatively innocuous fecklessness compared with the militant turn the religion has taken since the Reagan era.

We’ll get back to that. In the meantime, Adrienne Rich’s description of the God-fearing world of old in her wonderful essay “Split at the Root: An Essay on Jewish Identity” lays out the ethos in which most of the few who read this (you lucky fellow travellers!) were brought up:

The very word “christian” was used as a synonym for virtuous, just, peace loving, generous, etc. etc. The norm was christian: “religion: none” was not acceptable. Anti-Semitism was so intrinsic as not to have a name. I don’t recall exactly being taught that the Jews killed Jesus; “Christ-killer” seems too strong a term for the bland Episcopal vocabulary; but certainly we got the impression that the Jews had been caught in a terrible mistake, failing to recognize the true Messiah, and were thereby less advanced in moral and spiritual sensibility. The Jews had allowed moneylenders in the Temple (again, the unexplained obsession with Jews and money). They were of the past, archaic, primitive as older (and darker) cultures are supposed to be primitive: Christianity was lightness, fairness, peace on earth, and combined the feminine appeal of “the meek shall inherit the earth” with the masculine stride of “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

For the first half of the last century, of course, this was a self-serving and blatantly hypocritical outlook. It tacitly condoned Jim Crow racism and misogyny. It let pass racial segregation and Christians-only admission regulations at colleges and country clubs. It sanctioned whites-only rules at hotels and restaurants, rigid patriarchy within families, police brutality against non-whites and, stretched to the limits, lynchings, yellow stars and, arguably, the Shoah. It required, or rather, enabled our Christian forebears to live in what Rich describes as a “network of lies and arrogance and moral collusion.”

Ah, those days! But with the ecumenical spirit and reforms of Vatican II and the advent of Liberation Theology and the Civil Rights movement of the sixties, there was surely some reason for optimism and rejoicing.

Rich was my mom’s age, grew up as the child of a secular Jewish father and a Southern Protestant mother, and eventually came out as a Jewish lesbian. Still, I can identify with what she’s saying here and I’ll bet you can, too:

The social world in which I grew up was Christian virtually without needing to say so; Christian imagery, music, language, symbols, assumptions everywhere. It was also a genteel, white middle-class world in which “common” was a term of deep opprobrium. “Common” white people might speak of “niggers”; we were taught never to use that word; we said “Negroes” (even as we accepted segregation, the eating taboo, the assumption that Black people were simply of a different species). Our language was more polite, distinguishing us from the “rednecks,” or the lynch mob mentality. So charged with negative meaning was even the word “Negro” that as children we were taught never to use it in front of Black people. We were taught any mention of skin colour in the presence of coloured people was treacherous forbidden ground. In a parallel way, the word “Jew” was not to be used by polite gentiles. I sometimes heard my best friend’s father, a Presbyterian minister, allude to “the Hebrew people,” or “people of the Jewish faith.” The world of acceptable folk was white, gentile (christian, really) and had “ideals” (which coloured people, white “common” people, were not supposed to have). “Ideals” and “manners” included not hurting someone’s feelings by calling her or him a Negro or a Jew — naming the hated identity. This is the mental framework of the 1930s and 1940s in which I was raised.

That mental framework had expanded into Canada, even among respectable blue-collar families such as my own, by the 1960s. And the beauty was that you could be baptized, confirmed and attend church as often as it suited you without thereby committing yourself to some whacko, vengeful ideology centred around converting the Jews, or Muslims roasting in hell for eternity, or envisioning a glorious role for yourself in triggering Armageddon, Christ’s return and the Rapture. Love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal.

What was especially grand about the restrained (with gusts to tepid) version of Christianity that prevailed in mainstream North American churches — when you stripped away the incense razzamatazz and the bloodthirsty crucifixion fixation and the querulous hairsplitting over the Trinity and other theological conjuring tricks (how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?) — was the prominence accorded to a simple principle often attributed to Jesus but which predates him by many centuries in the traditions of India, Egypt, Greece and other ancient cultures: Treat other people better. You know. The way you’d like to be treated yourself.

The Golden Rule. Compared with that tidy maxim, everything else is dross and so much tissue paper. Take it seriously and gay marriage becomes possible, regardless of what a tribal rabble wandering the desert thought about homosexuality three millennia ago. Equality among men and women becomes possible, on or away from the pulpit. Even — and this one is a particularly onerous task for adherents of any religion — forgiveness of those who trespass against us. Turn the other cheek.

But in the late 1970s and all through the eighties, the image of Jesus as a social reformer who sought to improve the lives of the poor, while angrily expelling corporate interests from the Temple, foundered and sank in the Red Sea with the ascension of the so-called Moral Majority and the New Christian Right, a movement led by the televangelist Jerry Falwell Sr. — a smarmy, smirking, baleful stegosaurus of a man who successfully reversed the long-standing Baptist insistence on separating religion and politics. Gone were the days of rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.

The canker was in the rose.

As attendance dwindled in traditional churches, the extremist evangelical Protestantism that prevails today in the corridors of power, via the unholy alliance of religious leaders and political action groups with the mendacious megalomaniac in the White House, became a steamrolling perversion of Christianity throughout America.

The bleeding sacred heart of the religion in both Canada and the U.S. was gradually altered, a bit like an old car that has part after part replaced under the hood until it was no longer the same vehicle. Some of my Christian friends remind me of Stendhal’s hero in The Charterhouse of Parma, who took part in confusing and seemingly insignificant skirmishes only to later learn that they were involved in the Battle of Waterloo. And guess what? This time, the autocrats won.

In the U.S., we now have a subservient Republican Congress of men and women calling themselves Christians — and there are plenty of likeminded counterparts within Canadian legislatures — so blinded by their insane thirst for power, their fanaticism and the slow drip of cant that they compete to debase themselves by truckling before a satanic emetic like Trump. To kiss the ring of the Dark Lord Sauron, as it were.

And not just the ring.

An adulterer, a champion bearer of false witness, a blasphemer, a thief, a coveter of his neighbours’ wives and property, a vengeful sinner who never repents but only seeks to blame, Trump is as unlike any holy man in any faith tradition as one can conceive.

Yet he himself is a willing idiot (likened by some to the flawed King David of the Bible) in the game played by the self-described “Christian nationalists” behind such initiatives as Project 2025, and he and his minions are lustfully carrying out their plan to supplant American democracy with a Christian nationalist autocracy.

For Trump isn’t acting as whimsically or irrationally as many think. This Wikipedia summary of the Project 2025 plan might ring a few bells in the old church tower:

The project’s policy document Mandate for Leadership calls for the replacement of merit-based federal civil service workers by people loyal to Trump and for taking partisan control of key government agencies, including the Department of Justice (DOJ), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Department of Commerce (DOC), and Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Other agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Education (ED), would be dismantled. It calls for reducing environmental regulations to favour fossil fuels and proposes making the National Institutes of Health (NIH) less independent while defunding its stem cell research. The blueprint seeks to reduce taxes on corporations, institute a flat income tax on individuals, cut Medicare and Medicaid, and reverse as many of President Joe Biden's policies as possible. It proposes banning pornography, removing legal protections against anti-LGBT discrimination, and ending diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs while having the DOJ prosecute anti-white racism instead. The project recommends the arrest, detention, and mass deportation of undocumented immigrants, and deploying the U.S. Armed Forces for domestic law enforcement. The plan also proposes enacting laws supported by the Christian right, such as criminalizing those who send and receive abortion and birth control medications and eliminating coverage of emergency contraception.

Some of these steps have been taken, other measures are well under way, and we can be certain of more fire and brimstone in the forecast as well-financed evangelical zealots succeed in reducing the United States into an ignorant Elmer Gantryland ruled by a small cadre of amoral billionaires who pretend to pay tribute to a mad Lear, a king who revels in snapping the 10 Commandments like Mara-a-Lago swizzle sticks.

This is what fascism, American style, looks like. This is evil, powered by a passionate Revengelicalism determined to undo the sixties. Both the 1960s and the 1860s, that is, when the slaves were freed.

As Malcolm Bradbury noted in his 1959 debut novel, Eating People Is Wrong, “Intelligentsia are by no means always liberal in outlook.” George Orwell made the same point in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Heck, Plato codified it in The Republic, though of course he was all for elite rule of the mob.

Confronted with the simple assertion I am about to make, many people’s minds tend to sheer off from it like Jell-O on a plastic spoon. But my thesis is a simple one, to wit: Anyone who claims to be a Christian while giving mindless allegiance to a strongman, an overlord, a führer, a caesar — is suffering from a wicked case of bad faith. He or she is no more a follower of Jesus than were the “German Christian” followers of Adolf Hitler.

First they took Berlin. Now they take Manhattan.

Tip of the day: Bona fide religious faith is never nationalistic. As Pope Francis made clear in a final encyclical to U.S. bishops before his death in February, J.D. Vance’s incoherent theological defence of an “America first” approach to immigration matters represented a fundamental distortion of Christ’s message:

Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups … The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.

It was just a remarkable coincidence, of course, that Francis should have given up the ghost the morning after meeting Vance in the flesh. Miserando atque eligendo USA! USA! USA!

But it’s no accident that when you take a step back and look at the evangelical movement today, it’s like staring into a cracked mirror, seeing a reflection of a religion that had the potential to be something beautiful and profound, but now is nothing but a garish, self-serving parody. We’ve all seen the signs, the billboards, the TV preachers with their slick smiles and thousand-dollar suits, peddling salvation like it’s some kind of get-rich-quick scheme.

To them, it is.

And don’t get me started on the megachurches — coliseums of conformity where the name of Jesus is dragged through the mud and turned into a marketing strategy. But when it comes down to it, the real issue isn’t the money, the politics or the moral gymnastics — they’re just symptoms of a deeper problem. Evangelicals aren’t really Christians, not in any meaningful sense.

It’s easy to throw around labels, to get bogged down in theology and doctrine, to point fingers and claim superiority. But what I’m talking about here goes beyond all that — the very essence of what it means to be Christian, the thing that once was supposed to set people apart from the rest of the world: a radical love and compassion for others, especially the most downtrodden.

There was a time when Christians were seen as outsiders, as revolutionaries in a brutal, unjust world. They were the ones who took up the cross, who cared about the poor, who defied the worldly systems of power and wealth. Jesus wasn’t some rich CEO of an AI spiritual franchise. He was a wandering teacher, a man who sat with the outcasts, who healed the sick and called the comfortable out of their privilege.

What do we have now? A movement that insists on putting the state of your soul into a box of doctrinal certainty, a movement that has turned Christ into a political figure, a booster of empire. But let’s get real. If Jesus were here today, he wouldn’t be on the stage of some Christian concert in Nashville or preaching to a packed stadium in Dallas or enjoying private evening tours of the Alberta legislature. He’d be in the streets, in the prisons, with the homeless, and yes, probably in the face of all those hypocrites, challenging them to take a good hard look at the way they’ve twisted his message into something that serves their own selfish ends.

And it’s not just the politics, either. It’s the commodification of faith. Religion, when it’s done right, is messy, it’s uncomfortable. It forces you to confront the darkest corners of your soul. It demands sacrifice, real sacrifice, not just the kind where you drop a few bucks in the offering plate and think you’re good for the week. Evangelicals, though, have turned Christianity into a clean, well-lit business. They sell salvation like it’s a product you can consume.

Do you want to feel good about yourself? Buy a Trump (God Bless the U.S.A.) Bible, sign up for a seminar, get yourself saved, and boom — you’re in. No questions asked, no need to actually live the message, just follow the program. Price point, $60 US. According to the website that sells it, it’s “the only Bible endorsed by” the president. Moreover, His (Trump’s, not Christ’s) “name, likeness and image” are being used under a paid licence from one of Trump’s organizations, CIC Ventures LLC.

Amen and hallelujah, brother. And now even the White House itself is being showily, tastelessly remodelled into a gaudy Mar-a-Lago-style golden idol.

In the past, the church might have been a place of refuge, of deep reflection and spiritual renewal. Now it’s more like a country club for people who want to feel morally superior while doing nothing that remotely resembles the love Christ talked about. Evangelicals, with their superficial rhetoric of “personal relationships with Jesus” and “inviting him into your heart,” have forgotten what it really means to follow someone who turned the world upside down, who didn’t just walk with the poor but died for them.

They have made Christianity into a self-help philosophy, an existential comfort blanket, rather than a call to live radically, to give up everything for the sake of others. They’ve made it into a cudgel with which to persecute members of other religions, women who have made the agonizing choice to have an abortion, and especially the LGBTQIA+ community. They’ve made it clear to immigrant communities — the ones not yet cruelly deported to El Salvador or Uganda or warehoused in Alligator Alcatraz courtesy of a fount of Christian love and charity (not to mention a pressing need for cheap farm labour) — that the price of assimilation is to engage in persecution themselves.

I’m not saying there aren’t sincere individuals within evangelical circles who genuinely seek God and strive to live better lives. Of course there are. But they’re swimming upstream in a river that’s been polluted by greed, political ambition and the hollow promise of eternal life without ever having to live out the lessons of the here and now. Christianity, the real stuff, isn’t about the afterlife — it’s about the present, it’s about being here in the trenches with the wounded, the poor, the marginalized, and yes, even the “illegal alien.” It’s about transforming the world, not retreating into your own bubble of comfort and self-righteousness.

Evangelicals? They’re not Christians, not any more, not in any way that reflects the spirit of Christ. They’ve traded the cross for a flag, the bread and wine for political power, and the Gospel for something that can be sold at the nearest megastore. They’ve turned Jesus into a mascot, a convenient figurehead for their own desires and fears. And until they wake up to that, until they stop using his name to justify their own snakeoil, they’ll remain the great pretenders, living a faith that’s as shallow, insincere and uncomprehending as the eyes of Tammy Faye.

Either that, or the Apostle Paul was just pretending when he said: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”

Your God, your God.

Why have you forsaken Him?