If, by some wonder of time travel, you were to go to a small-group Bible study in 2010 and someone were to ask you, “What’s the state of the evangelical church where you might be, up ahead of us in 2024?” you would possibly explain the entire divided congregations, all of the friendships broken, all of the estranged families. You might mention that just about no evangelical under the age of 40 wants to make use of the word evangelical in any respect.
And if someone were to ask, “How did all this occur?” you would possibly mention that a revolutionary leader emerged, demanding loyalty and vowing retribution and revenge against those that stand against him. You might add that this leader asks his supporters to wave away his sexual abuse of girls, his criminal charges for looking for to make use of mob violence to maintain him in power, his hush money to a porn star, his incitements to violence, his lies, his cruelty, his narcissism, and his dismissal of non-public moral character as weakness.
Maybe one in all those before-times Christians would slam their fist into their hand and exclaim, “This is strictly what Francis Schaeffer and Charles Colson and James Dobson all warned us about—that is what happens when evangelicals retreat from the general public square. When the culture war is lost, immorality, relativism, and filth fill the void!”
Another might ask, “What are you 2024 Christians doing to attempt to turn the young people away from the normalization of this type of decadence?”
“It’s not the young people who find themselves turning to this,” you tell them. “It’s us. That’s why many campus ministries won’t use the word evangelical. In 2024, the subsequent generation thinks support for this man, Donald Trump, is the truth is what it means to be evangelical.”
By then, the silence might give method to someone noting that it’s time to wrap up. Someone might ask for an “unspoken” prayer request since nobody would know what else to say.
Christianity Today doesn’t endorse candidates. While this author’s views of the previous (and possibly future) president’s fitness for office and its implications for the American republic are public and emphatic, they’re inappropriate here. CT readers and contributors have a variety of political opinions—Republicans, Democrats, Independents, Trump voters, Biden voters, conscientious objectors to voting in any respect, those that write in Steph Curry, and more. That’s appropriately. The implication that to be a Christian one must adopt a selected political ideology or partisan identity is very near the Galatian heresy the apostle Paul called a unique gospel altogether (Gal. 1:6–7).
The crisis we face now, though, is one in all witness and identity. Evangelical Christianity—for good or for unwell—has long been tied in the general public mind to a celeb. Many people prior to now, once they considered evangelicals, would have thought first of George Whitefield or Charles Finney or Aimee Semple McPherson or Billy Sunday or Billy Graham.
Every one in all those “celebrities” would reasonably have had Jesus as the primary considered the watching world, but at the least the general public recognized the person preaching him and his gospel. Now, when our neighbors hear evangelical, the face that flashes before their minds first could also be a mug shot—of probably the most divisive personas in American history.
This isn’t since the secular media has caricatured us or because Hollywood elites have ridiculed us. Not all evangelicals—not even all Trump-voting evangelicals—have sought this confusion. But relating to this crisis of identity, the psychological incentives are different.
Those who desire a separation of church and Trump are likely to be those that most want unity, who’re waiting for some magical happening to “break the fever” and return us to the before-times. They are likely to cringe if anyone even acknowledges the issue, speaking in vague generalities and avoiding the name Donald Trump.
Meanwhile, in far too many churches and schools and ministries, loyalty to Trump should be explicit and total to not risk being seen as a liberal, as not “one in all us.” And in those places, an individual is barely “one in all us” if that Christian is willing to consider, against all evidence, that the last election was stolen. One should be silent at the least or celebratory at most when seeing a person scream profanities at a rally after which market a Bible he endorses. One must pay no attention when a jury finds the leader answerable for sexually assaulting a lady. What is all of that doing to us?
Moreover, we’re in a time when even some Trump-voting evangelicals are noticing how destructive it’s that this one figure seems to dominate every facet of our lives. Think of all of the friendships which are gone. Think of all of the families which are estranged. Think of all of the churches which are in tension, the denominations which are splintered. Think of what this leader has asked you to disregard, to justify, so as to stay loyal to him. Think of the fear that overwhelms any pang of conscience for thus many—fear of donors, online mobs, or perhaps the clan text thread.
However you intend to vote—is that this the best way you need to live?
The Bible tells us that our father Jacob, in fear over meeting his brother, Esau, from whom he was estranged, told his servants to anticipate three questions: “To whom do you belong? Where are you going? And whose are these ahead of you?” (Gen. 32:17, ESV). We could do worse than to ask those self same questions of ourselves.
Have we replaced our primary sense of belonging—to Christ and him crucified—with politics and personality? Are we still following Jesus in looking for “a kingdom that can’t shaken” (Heb. 12:28), or are we groping toward a time when every foe is vanquished, every victory total—something that may never occur in a democratic republic? And those out ahead of us—the generations to come back—what are we telling them?
We cannot time travel to the past, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have time travelers throughout us. They are the girls and boys in our Sunday school classes, the adolescents in our youth groups, the young adults leading our mission trips. When they give the impression of being back on us, what is going to they think it means to be an evangelical Christian? Babylon asked for our souls, and we said no. Rome asked for our consciences, and we said no.
We take marching orders from Mount Zion, not from Mar-a-Lago. The watching world should know the difference, and so should we. We can pretend it doesn’t matter, but it surely does. What difference does it make who walks in to the tune of “Hail to the Chief” if our kids don’t consider us after we say, “Jesus is Lord”?
Russell Moore is CT’s editor in chief and host of The Russell Moore Show.
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