Closing an open mind

Political Evangelicalism

The Third of May 1808 by Francisco Goya, 1814

On my drive to the coffee shop this morning, I found myself at a stop light behind the type of truck that makes me question my masculinity. It had some kind of huge tool in the bed, and on the back windshield were two stickers.

The first was a series of guns—I would try and tell you what types they were but…well…I can’t.

The second sticker was a campaign sticker that said “Joe” on it and at first I thought it was a Joe Biden sticker. Quite the fascinating contrast, I thought. Then I looked closer, and—partially covered up by the giant tool—I saw the sticker really said, “Joe and the Hoe.”

It reminded me of the woman who worked at the Evangelical college with me who had a “Let’s Go Brandon” sticker on her car. I wanted to ask her, “Do you know what that stands for?” and make her tell me what it meant and explain to me how that phrase could ever be appropriate coming out of a Christian’s mouth.

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If you can’t tell, I’m feeling angsty. This past week, on an airplane back from Oklahoma, I finished Tim Alberta’s book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism. I’m often wary about books like this because I assume they are written by people unfamiliar with—or even antagonistic towards—Evangelicalism.

But Tim belongs to Evangelicalism. His dad was a long time pastor in churches just like the ones I grew up in, and throughout the book he consistently preaches the Gospel. I did not find him attacking Evangelicalism so much as critiquing its modern, politically radicalized version of it.

All I’m saying is that it’s a good book. It makes you a good kind of angsty.

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I grew up in a small, Christian and Missionary Alliance church. On a good Sunday we’d have ninety people inside our white, clapboard church.

We often had special music sessions during offering, and every time it was Mrs. Brewer’s turn, she always sang “Give Me Jesus.”

“In the morning, when I rise,

In the morning, when I rise,

In the morning, when I rise,

Give me Jesus.

Give me Jesus

Give me Jesus

You can have all this world

But give me Jesus.”

By the time she came to the verse that goes, “And when I come to die…” she wouldn’t be able to sing through her tears. One by one, the congregation would stand up and begin singing for her, finishing the song as one voice, there in that small church. Most of the congregation, including me, cried.

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Alongside my book on Evangelicals, I’ve also been reading a lot of Frederick Buechner. He was a mainline Christian and was not Evangelical, so when he went to teach at Wheaton—the Evangelical Harvard—he entered it as an outsider of sorts.

He expected narrow-mindedness and legalism. However, what he found was something different. Students and faculty wanted to engage deeply with texts and the world around them. They wanted to wrestle with truth rather than try and establish a dogged doctrinal uniformity. Buechner concluded,

“Whatever evangelical meant, in other words, it did not mean closed minded.”¹

I experienced this open mindedness first-hand in my own college experience. I went to a major Evangelical college and was exposed to all kinds of new ways of worshipping and understanding God. I took a class on Eastern Orthodox theology and studied the great texts of Roman Catholicism. I sat after class with a professor, wrestling through my anxiety diagnosis and what God was doing in my life. It was the first place I went to therapy, and it was the first place I was exposed to ethnic diversity. It felt open in the way a college is supposed to feel open—a safe space to wrestle with the complexities of life.

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Today I’d be hard pressed to find anyone who would place Evangelicalism and open-mindedness in the same sentence. In its place is a closed-minded political rallying; “Let’s Go Brandon” and “Joe and the Hoe” and sayings like that.

In fact, during the Trump presidency, Evangelicalism grew among white Americans. The Pew Research Center writes,

“There is solid evidence that White Americans who viewed Trump favorably and did not identify as evangelicals in 2016 were much more likely than White Trump skeptics to begin identifying as born-again or evangelical Protestants by 2020.”

There was no great awakening within Evangelicalism during the years between 2016 and 2020. No, there was a political realignment within the country, and Evangelicalism became conflated even more with a specific political party, and a specific political candidate.

The Evangelicalism I grew up with in my home church, and the Evangelicalism I experienced on my college campus felt lightyears away from this political Evangelicalism.

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By 2016, my home church wasn’t immune. I had to mute former church members on social media because I just didn’t want to be reminded how different we had become. They posted about government conspiracies and Covid lockdowns and President Trump. They castigated democrats for being evil and believed there was only one right way to vote.

I don’t understand this political Evangelicalism, and I feel like I’m being shoved out of the big tent, that the lines are being gerrymandered in a way to leave me out of the fold.

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During the run-up to the 2016 election, the seminary I was at—one of America’s leading Evangelical seminaries—remained neutral, seemingly “apolitical.” They didn’t put out a statement about the politics happening around them, as if nothing of note was happening. The day after the election, an international student was at the grocery store when another shopper walked up to her and said, “You’re gonna be sent back to where you came from pretty soon.”

Last year a professor at an Evangelical university didn’t get a contract renewal because she included a

Jemar Tisby, PhD

quote on her syllabus. A number of Christian universities are limiting any speech about race, justice, and equity.

Finally, one of the nation’s largest Christian universities—Liberty University—is a mascot for Christian nationalism. It spent over one million dollars on a shooting range, and in March was fined $14 million dollars because it discouraged victims of sexual assault from coming forward over a number of years.

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Churches like the one I grew up in are complicated places. They are filled with KFC buckets for pot lucks and Christmas recitals. They are composed of a doctors taking house calls late at night and a piano teachers teaching students how to play and love hymns and Sunday School teachers planting the Psalms deep down in their students’ hearts. These are wonderful people, and I credit much of my faith to people like them.

But I’ve also seen the damage some of them have done. I’ve seen people leave the faith because of Facebook posts and hateful assumptions about perceived enemies. I know people struggling to cling to Christianity because of all the political rallying, the bad bed fellows, and the worship of Republican ideals. These people are complicated, yes, but they are also misguided, championing a false American gospel.

People are hurting and leaving the faith, and we can’t keep closing our eyes and pretending like we don’t know why.

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When you sing “You can have all this world, but give me Jesus,” do you really mean it?

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1. Buechner, Frederick. Telling Secrets, HarperOne, 2000. 80.