After Trump’s recent victory, there were many stories we are telling ourselves about the election. For some, it was the story of a revolt against the establishment. For others, Trump’s victory is the ultimate referendum on immigration, or the final death-blow to the woke-industrial complex. For those on the opposite end of the political spectrum, this is the beginning stages in the story of how fascism will eventually engulf our nation.
But there is another story, quiet and beneath the surface that is going virtually unnoticed. It is the story of thousands of people, many of them millennials, who are leaving the faith in droves because of their perception that being a Christian is associated with being a Trump supporter. This is, of course, an accentuation of a trend that has been in place since the Bush years. In a substack article earlier today, Kyle King observed how he “noticed that many of my millennial friends were leaving the faith, because they found American-Evangelical-Cultural-Christianity to be a bit nauseating or at least, spiritually unhealthy. I nearly did the same thing late in high school as I considered embracing atheism.” The flood of social media announcements in the last 24 hours along the lines of “God gave us Trump,” will only add to this ongoing exodus from the church. Ask yourself what political outcome is worth such a price!
During the Nazification of the German church, Germany pastors capitulated to Hitler by creating their own version of Christianity consistent with the norms of Fascism. Today, thousands of Christians are creating their own version of Christianity consistent with the norms of Trumpism. From pastors like Mark Burns to Youtubers like Steve Turley, a weird type of pseudo-Christianity is emerging. A myriad of thinkers, preachers, pundits, and social media users are mixing Christianity with a cocktail of false doctrines, including baptized political relativism and Christianized identity politics and right-wing progressivism and the ideology of an aggressive (and often violent) personality cult. At a time when the church could be a powerful witness to an alternative way of being human than the familiar tropes of worldly ideology, and at a time when we could be proclaiming a political theory of love rooted in the doctrine of God’s kingdom, scores of American Christians are succumbing to this heretical synthesis of Christianity and Trumpism. Is it any wonder this is driving away tens of thousands of millennials away from the church? Are the benefits of a second Trump Presidency worth such a high cost?
I’ll close with St. Paul’s words in Romans 2:24: “For the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.”
Further Reading