Post Alley: Maga and the Souls of Evangelical Christians
One of our main themes at The Signal Press has involved communicating the message that being MAGA and loyal to Trump is antithetical to having faith in, and practicing the Christian gospel. So when we see something like this piece, where Christian leaders who are well educated, experienced in leading churches, which is frequently a very difficult job involving ministry to members of the congregation, maintaining spiritual unity amid doctrinal diversity and theological autonomy, also speak and write about the incompatibility of genuine, Biblical Christianity with Trump's MAGA cult, we take notice. We link their commentary, hoping that those who read it will take the time to share it with their conservative, Evangelical Christian friends, and perhaps will show some of them that their acceptance of the MAGA movement's platform has corrupted their church and rendered it ineffective in meeting its mission and purpose.
Randall Balmer, an Episcopal priest and professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, and Jemar Tisby, professor at Simmons College in Kentucky, recently teamed up for a webinar pointing out the corruption of Christianity which has occurred as conservative, fundamentalist and Charismatic/Pentecostal Christians, churches and denominations have merged their claimed belief in Biblical authority and inerrancy with far right wing political extremists who make up the MAGA cult. They're not the only kind of American Christian that has allowed politics to infiltrate their ranks, but because of their doctrinal flaws, it has infiltrated and corrupted their churches the most.
Tisby says that gaining control through politics is more or less an admission by conservative Christians of the failure of their faith. Unable to bring about the kind of social change and control that they think is their mission and purpose by spiritual means, they are now resorting to political power to get their way. According to Tisby, this takes away the Christian identity of the church, making it more political.
"It's not Christian in the sense that it doesn't resemble Jesus," he says, "but it is Christian in the sense that it does use Christian symbols like crosses, and the Bible, and it does use prayer," he added.
"White Christian Nationalism strips away any semblance of gospel witness because its purpose is to seize absolute control of government and society by ending democracy and pluralism," said Balmer. "Once you begin to lust after political power, and political influence, you lose your prophetic voice," he said.
Along with the moderator of the webinar, Nathan Empsall, who is also an Episcopalian priest and director of "Faithful America," an online Christian social action community, Tisby and Balmer described White Christian Nationalism as having white supremacy at its core. It's neo-Christian, according to them, because it uses a Christian justification, claiming that God is on their side and that they have some kind of spiritual commission to be the ones in control of American government and society.
While there is absolutely nothing in the text of the New Testament, and more specifically, absolutely nothing at all in the words of Jesus Christ himself, that remotely indicates this is how Christianity is intended to "reach the world," that's simply evidence that this is a pseudo-Christian movement, using the veneer of Christianity to justify their actions and to gather support from people who either don't know enough about their faith to know the difference, or who have been primed by this error having crept into churches for a long time. And in denominations and groups which often shun education in favor of current spiritual revelation, the racist, theocratic tendencies are already there.
Most of the apostles who became authors of the New Testament warn against this kind of heretical, apostate belief finding its way into the church. When they wrote their prophetic warnings, the church was surrounded by a pagan society under Roman rule, and the idea of having the kind of political power necessary to rise up and throw off the Roman dictatorship with some miraculous, spiritual power behind them, was very appealing. Most of the opposition from the religious leaders of Judaism that Jesus experienced resulted from the fact that his ministry didn't look to them like they had envisioned the Messiah after several hundred years of being under foreign rule. Conquests such as that of Alexander, the Romans and that of Antiochus IV Epiphanes, had convinced them that the Messiah would come as a military conqueror like David, re-establishing a political kingdom, not the spiritual domain which Jesus brought about.
Even as soon as 20 years after the resurrection, the apostle Jude writes, "For certain intruders have stolen in among you, people who long ago were designated for this condemnation as ungodly, who pervert the grace of our God into licentiousness and deny our only master and Lord, Jesus Christ." Jude, v. 4
The MAGA group and its leader certainly fit Jude's description of the denial of Jesus Christ, which they have publicly done on multiple occasions, passed over or excused by their pseudo-Christian apologists. They fit the prophetic, biblical descriptions found in Jude. Trump's lifestyle should be an open embarrassment to any Evangelical Christian, the adultery, the pathological lying, the glorification of worldliness, refusing to pay debts, and now, the open revenge he is promising that is antithetical to Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, which makes Trump an antichrist by definition of I John 4:1-3.
Thankfully, there are Christians whose faith experience and educational background not only allow them to see this for what it is, but who are able to show how this clearly contrasts with the Christian gospel preached by Christ, and point out that white, Christian nationalism is not Biblical, is un-American and anti-Christian and corrupts both the church and the nation.
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