Baptist News Global: Where Have All the Evangelical Convictions Gone?
MAGA is Morally Bankrupt When Evaluated by Former Evangelical Christian Faith and Practice
"MAGA affirming Evangelicalism may run more people away from the church than it evangelizes."
The author of that quote, Dr. Bill Leonard, has a long resume as a professor of church history and theology, an author and a columnist and commentator on what's going on as Evangelicals, caught up in MAGA politics, have abandoned their Christian convictions in the practice of their faith to embrace the political leadership of a man whose values are as completely and totally the opposite of theirs as it is humanly possible to get. Leonard's evaluation of what has occurred within Evangelical churches and denominations, included in his article "Where Have All the Evangelical Convictions Gone" linked above, is right on target.
While Evangelicals, and I use this term to refer to white Evangelicals specifically, including most of their leadership, have embraced the politics of Trump, Trump himself has embraced none of their faith or its values and practices. He openly rejects their moral principles, when it comes to sexuality and integrity, rejects their claim to the sanctity of human life, rejects their core doctrine of salvation by grace through faith in Christ because it requires repentance and forgiveness of sin he claims he doesn't need, and rejects their theology of the nature of God by replacing it with his own.
There is evidence that what Leonard says about MAGA running people away from the church is true. The Southern Baptist Convention, to which Leonard belonged and where he served as a professor of church history until the early 1990's, has lost 20% of its attendance and membership since its peak in 2006, dropping from 16.2 million to 13.4 million members. But the vast majority of that has occurred since 2016, numbering in excess of 400,000 for each of the last three years, according to what its churches report to the annual convention. And news articles in their own press are alluding to another precipitous drop, perhaps as many as half a million, to be reported in June of 2024.
Among the Pentecostal and Charismatic branch of Evangelicalism's far right, where White Christian Nationalism is becoming enough of an abberant doctrine to start labelling some churches and denominational groups as cults, what was once the fastest growing branch of Christianity in America has now, apparently become its fastest-shrinking. Some of that has happened as the result of scandal, as high profile pastors and "prophets" as some of the leaders are called have, not surprisingly, fallen into sexual immorality. There's not a single denominational entity keeping track of the numbers here, but census data and a few church research organizations are finding that the numbers were dropping, even before COVID, and that as many as 5.5 million people have taken the exit ramp since 2016.
Not surprisingly, Trump considers a "prophetess" of the prosperity gospel movement, the cult in which the core doctrine is centered on money, not on morality or spirituality, as his own "spiritual advisor." Conservative Evangelicals long ago labelled Paula White as a heretic and a cultic leader, but MAGA has forced them to come crawling back, and at least playing nice while underlining their hypocrisy.
The Decline and Fall of a Noted Southern Baptist Republican Activist
The Southern Baptist Convention went through what became known as the "Conservative Resurgence" beginning in 1979. Led by Paige Patterson, then president of a broken-down Bible college in Dallas, connected to its First Baptist Church, and Paul Pressler, a member of Houston's First Baptist Church and an attorney and Texas Appellate Court justice, this group mobilized conservatives who claimed to believe in inerrancy, and who claimed the denomination's seminaries weren't teaching it, to gain control of the trustee boards that governed the six seminaries where pastors were trained, along with its two missionary sending boards, and its publishing house. By 1989, the purge was complete, and professors who did not buy the party line were either shown the door or exited on their own, Bill Leonard being one of them.
Pressler's motive in becoming involved, had to do with his position in the Republican party. He became the chief conduit by which the Southern Baptist Convention was pushed into the GOP to be used as a means of advancing conservative politics and politicians, rather than as a Christian evangelistic and missionary supporting denomination. He led in the creation of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which appointed a former Bush administration sycophant, Richard Land, as its president, to actively gather support from Southern Baptists for Republican politics.
Events have since uncovered the fact that the leadership of the revered and honored "Conservative Resurgence", especially Pressler, was spiritually and morally bankrupt from the start. While Patterson, who used his influence to get the presidency of a seminary he wanted, failed at protecting female students on the campuses he led from sexual assault, Pressler recently settled a long-standing lawsuit brought by a man who claimed that Pressler had sexually abused him from the time he was 14, attending a youth group that Pressler led in a Houston megachurch.
During the course of this particular lawsuit, evidence surfaced indicating Pressler persisted in this habit of sexual encounters with young men, in churches where he encountered them as a Sunday School teacher and deacon, and through the lawfirm in which he was a partner with Jared Woodfill, who is now a Republican candidate for a seat in the Texas House. There are two stories linked above referencing the Pressler lawsuit, what an attorney representing Southern Baptists has to say about Pressler, and how this fits in with Woodfill's candidacy for the state house. Pressler has continued to claim innocence.
Damage Control for Evangelicalism, Political Benefit for Democrats
The implications of the fact that the SBC participated in the financial settlement of the lawsuit against Pressler, an undisclosed but apparently quite large amount, judging from the reaction from within the denomination, will have far reaching effects going to the very heart of the credibility of the "Conservative Resurgence." The leadership of at least two well known, prominent Houston megachurches acknowledged their awareness of allegations against Pressler long before the movement gathered momentum, and, in writing, removed him from his church offices while encouraging him to stop such activity in the event that it became known, and would damage his denominational political cause.
The fact that they were willing to let this continue, rather than calling it to account shows that there wasn't a high level of trust in that inerrant, infallible Bible, nor in the God whom they claim inspired its writing, because they were afraid of what the bad publicity would to to their political effort to replace leaders in the denomination, which was a priority for them. The reaction to this news among Southern Baptists will be slow in coming. Most of their media outlets are choosing to keep their audience in the dark, not publishing anything about the settlement.
But there will be fallout. And that's where some good can come from all of this.
This Isn't as Hard as We Think
It's becoming clear, in the wake of the cataract of news falling about Trump's legal woes and criminal charges, that there will be a political cost to his shenanigans following January 6th and his attack on the Constution and American Democracy. The campaign season getting underway has revealed a significant, and I use that term in the full context of its meaning, group of Republicans who appear to be abandoning Trump, some already determined to support someone else, others saying that if he is convicted on any of the charges for which he's been indicted, they will definitely not vote for him. Whether that means they'll just stay home on election day, vote third party, or actually switch over and vote for Biden, that's good news.
And I say significant, because in both Iowa and New Hampshire, while the media is writhing in incredulity over the fact that two thirds of Republicans are MAGA no matter what, one third of them are not MAGA at all. That's significant, because if he loses that many Republican votes, it would be more than enough to flip Iowa back to a blue state, and give Biden a big win in New Hampshire, where he already has chalked up a nice margin once before. It's significant, too, because two thirds of voters identifying as independent, which are a necessary element in any national election, are also turned off the Trump train.
In battleground states, the margins can be where elections are won and lost. And I think this, for Democrats, is a marginal issue worth exploiting. As a whole, Democrats tend to intellectually and politically separate themselves from white Evangelicals altogether, and settle in behind the pulpits of historically African American denominations. But there's a lot going on here that is actually causing people to reconsider their support. A third is worth going after, whether they just stay home or whether they actually vote for Democrats. There are more shared values than many people realize, and there are authors and experts out there, like Bill Leonard, and Signal Press, whose Democratic party convictions are supported by their Christian doctrine and theology.
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