I guess Ned Flanders goes to strip clubs now.
Until this week, I hadn’t thought in regards to the caricatured born-again Christian neighbor on the animated series The Simpsons in an extended time. New York Times religion reporter Ruth Graham mentioned him and his “cheerful prudery” as examples—together with Billy Graham and George W. Bush—of what were once the best-known evangelical Christian figures within the country. Indeed, a 2001 Christianity Today cover story dubbed the character “Saint Flanders.” Evangelical Christians knew that Ned’s “gosh darn it” moral demeanor was meant to lampoon us, and that his “traditional family values” were out of step with an American culture this side of the sexual revolution.
But Ned was no Elmer Gantry. He actually aspired to the type of private devotion to prayer, Bible reading, moral chastity, and neighbor-love evangelicals were supposed to want, even when he did so in a treacly, ultra-suburban, middle-class North American way. As Graham points out, were he to emerge today, Flanders would face withering mockery for his moral scruples—but more likely by his white evangelical co-religionists than by his beer-swilling secular cartoon neighbors.
As Graham says, a raunchy “boobs-and-booze ethos has elbowed its way into the conservative power class, accelerated by the rise of Donald J. Trump, the declining influence of traditional religious institutions and a shifting media landscape increasingly dominated by the looser standards of online culture.” (This article you’re reading without delay represents something of this shift, as I spent upward of quarter-hour pondering easy methods to quote Graham’s article without using the word boobs.)
Graham’s evaluation is vital for American Christians precisely since the shift she describes is just not something “on the market” within the culture but is as an alternative driven specifically by the exact same white evangelical subculture that when insisted that non-public character—virtue, to make use of a now distant-sounding word the American founders knew well—matters.
Yes, a part of the vulgarization of the Right is because of the Barstool Sports / Joe Rogan secularization of the bottom, through which Kid Rock is an avatar greater than Lee Greenwood or Michael W. Smith. But way more alarmingly, the coarsening and character-debasing is going on amongst politicized professing Christians. The member of Congress joking at a prayer breakfast about turning her fiancé down for sex to get there was there to discuss her faith and the importance of non secular faith and values for America. The member of Congress telling a reporter to “f— off” is a self-described “Christian nationalist.” We’ve seen “Let’s Go Brandon”—a euphemism for a profanity that when would have resulted in church discipline—chanted in churches.
Pastor and aspiring theocrat Douglas Wilson publicly used a slur against women that not only will I not repeat here but that nearly no secular media outlet would quote—and that’s without even referencing Wilson’s creepily coarse novel a couple of sex robot.
Wilson, after all, cultivates a cartoonishly “Aren’t we naughty?” vibe not representative of most evangelical Christians. But the issue is the way in which many other Christians respond: “Well, I wouldn’t say things the way in which he says them, but …” In the identical way, they characterize as just “mean tweets” Donald Trump attacking those claiming to be sexually assaulted by him for his or her looks or war heroes for being captured or disabled people for his or her disabilities or valorizing those that attack law enforcement officials and ransack the Capitol as “hostages.”
What’s worse is that evangelical Christians—including some I listened to pontificate endlessly about Bill Clinton’s sexual immorality (pontifications with which I agreed then and agree now)—ridicule as pearl-clutching moralists those that refuse to do exactly what they condemned Clinton’s defenders for doing, namely, weighting policy agreement over personal character.
In the midst of the late-Nineties Clinton scandal, a gaggle of students issued a “Declaration Concerning Religion, Ethics, and the Crisis within the Clinton Presidency,” which stated:
We are aware that certain moral qualities are central to the survival of our political system, amongst that are truthfulness, integrity, respect for the law, respect for the dignity of others, adherence to the constitutional process, and a willingness to avoid the abuse of power. We reject the premise that violations of those ethical standards ought to be excused as long as a frontrunner stays loyal to a selected political agenda and the nation is blessed by a powerful economy.
Those words seem much more distant than a Tocqueville quote now.
Our situation today can be comprehensible in a world through which words that come out of an individual don’t represent what’s present in the center, or in a world through which external conduct may be severed from internal character. The problem is that such an imagined world is one through which there isn’t any Word of God. Jesus, in any case, taught us the precise opposite, explicitly and repeatedly (Matt. 15:10–20; Luke 6:43–45).
Ironically, among the very individuals who advance the parable of a “Christian America,” through which the American founders are retrofitted as conservative evangelicals, now embrace a view that each the orthodox Christians and the deist Unitarians of the founding era would, in full agreement, denounce. From TheFederalist Papers to the debates across the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, virtually every Founding Father—even with all their differences on the specifics of federalism—would argue that constitutional procedures and policies alone weren’t enough to conserve a republic: Moral norms and expectations of some level of private character were obligatory.
Do these norms keep people of bad character from ascending to high office? Not in any respect. Hypocrites and demagogues have at all times been with us. What every generation of Americans have recognized until now, though, is that there’s a marked difference between some leaders not living as much as the character expected of them and leaders operating in an area where there aren’t expectations of private character. You might hire an accountant to do your taxes, only later to seek out that he’s a tax fraud and an embezzler. That’s quite different from hiring an open fraud since you’ve concluded that only chumps obey the tax laws.
That’s because no leader of any community, association, or nation is an abstract collection of policies. We select leaders to make decisions about matters that haven’t happened yet, or which may not even be contemplated. A dentist who screams profanities at opponents and guarantees a practice built around “revenge and retribution” and the tearing down of all of the norms of contemporary dentistry is just not someone it is best to trust with a drill in your mouth. How way more so on the subject of entrusting an individual with nuclear codes.
Moreover, what conservatives generally, and Christians specifically, once knew is that what’s normalized in a culture becomes an expected a part of that culture. Defending a president using his power to have sex along with his intern by saying, “Everybody lies about sex” isn’t only a political argument; it changes the way in which people think about what, within the fullness of time, they need to expect for themselves. This is what Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously called “defining deviancy down.”
Louisianans defending their support for a Nazi propagandist and former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan because he’s allegedly “pro-life” is just not only a “lesser of two evils” political transaction. The words pro-life Nazi—just like the words pro-life sexual abuser—change the meaning of pro-life within the minds of a whole generation.
No matter what short-term policy outcomes you then “win,” you’ve ended up with a situation through which some people imagine authoritarianism and sexual assault may be offset by the best “policy platform,” while others imagine that opposing abuse of power or sexual anarchy must necessitate oppose being “pro-life.” Either way you have a look at that, you lose.
What happens long-term together with your policies in a post-character culture is vital. What happens to your country is much more essential. But consider also what happens to you. “If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilization, which can last for a thousand years, is more essential than a person,” C. S. Lewis wrote. “But if Christianity is true, then the person is just not only more essential but incomparably more essential, for he’s everlasting and the lifetime of a state or a civilization, compared along with his, is just a moment.”
The Bible not only warns us about what character degradation—from immorality to boastfulness to heartlessness and ruthlessness—can do to the souls of those practicing such things, but in addition in regards to the ruinous effect on those that “approve of those that practice them” (Rom. 1:32).
Ned Flanders is just not, and never was, the Christian ideal. Personal piety and upstanding morality will not be enough. But we must always ask the query—if The Simpsons were written today and wished to make fun of evangelical Christians, would the caricature be someone inordinately dedicated to his family, to prayer, to churchgoing, to kindness to his neighbors, to the awkward purity of his speech? Or would Ned Flanders be a screaming partisan, a violent insurrectionist, a woman-ogling misogynist, or an abusive pervert?
Would that change be since the secular world has grown more hostile to Christians? Perhaps. Or would it not be because, when the secular world looks at the general public face of Christianity, they wouldn’t dream to think now of Ned Flanders but only of yet one more leering face on the strip club?
If we’re hated for attempted Christlikeness, let’s count all of it joy. But if we’re hated for our cruelty, our sexual hypocrisy, our quarrelsomeness, our hatefulness, and our vulgarity, then possibly we must always ask what happened to our witness.
Character matters. It is just not the one thing that matters. But without character, nothing matters.
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today and leads its Public Theology Project.
