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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Tim Alberta’s recent book about the Christian nationalist takeover of American evangelicalism, “The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory,” is full of preachers and activists on the religious right expressing sheepish second thoughts about their prostration before Donald Trump. Robert Jeffress, the senior pastor at First Baptist Dallas — whom Texas Monthly once called “Trump’s apostle” for his slavish Trump boosterism — admitted to Alberta in 2021 that turning himself into a politician’s theological hype man may have compromised his spiritual mission. “I had that internal conversation with myself — and I guess with God, too — about, you know, when do you cross the line?” he said, allowing that the line had, “perhaps,” been crossed.
Such qualms grew more vocal after voter revulsion toward MAGA candidates cost Republicans their prophesied red wave in 2022. Mike Evans, a former member of Trump’s evangelical advisory board, described, in an essay he sent to The Washington Post, leaving a Trump rally “in tears because I saw Bible believers glorifying Donald Trump like he was an idol.” Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, enthused to Alberta about the way Trump had punched “the bully that had been pushing evangelicals around,” by which he presumably meant American liberals. But, Perkins said, “The challenge is, he went a little too far. He had too much of an edge sometimes.” Perkins was clearly rooting for Ron DeSantis, who represented the shining hope of a post-Trump religious right.
But there’s not going to be a post-Trump religious right — at least, not anytime soon. Evangelical leaders who started their alliance with Trump on a transactional basis, then grew giddy with their proximity to power, have now seen MAGA devour their movement whole.
Easy. They say Jesus is weak. I’m not even joking.
But before you go singing the praises of John Piper for getting it right about Trump, remember that recognizing authoritarians is the bare minimum a person should be doing. He’s not some hero just because he stands in opposition to his peers on this one thing.
His other beliefs include things like: homosexuality is “broken and disordered sexuality” and by extension, thinks it’s something you can overcome by believing in his god. He believes and teaches creationism, despite the overwhelming body of evidence that supports evolution. He believes and teaches about a literal global flood, despite multiple branches of science not finding any support for that fable.
He got one thing right, but that just makes him akin to a broken clock. Trumpism and Fundigelicalism are merging, because they’re authoritarian at their core, and John Piper believes in that very same kind of Christianity.
One thing I have to keep reminding myself about stupid people: they don’t know that they are stupid. Many of them honestly believed that they were “patriots” when they showed up at January 6 to “defend the Constitution”, even though they were participating in something that was meant as a soft-core coup. So yeah, if Jesus Himself says something that goes against what the TV man says to do, it is no surprise that they will throw out their religion as easily as they have done everything else. Brainwashing is strong.
About John Piper: my main point was that at least one person was courageous enough to call out Drump for being a massive POS. That said, I do not know everything about Piper - just that I agree with him on that one point.
Then again, whenever I dig deeper I do tend to only increase my respect for him, even as I also scratch my head about why this or that. e.g., based on my literally <5 minute search of his stance on Creationism - i.e., please take with a grain of salt there:-P - his POV seems to be that God created the world, and most importantly Man on it, but he also acknowledges not knowing much about “how” he did it, and in particular how long that took. He does seem to personally believe - and also wants to spread that belief to others - that man is only 10-15k years rather than hundreds of thousands (which isn’t quite “creationism”, this thought that is exemplified in Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 book 2001: A Space Odyssey, later adapted to film by Stanley Kubrick, where some “event” caused the rise of Man to sentience; and which was also present in Star Trek TOS and many other scifi works - though I do not know the proper term for that). So THAT is the part that is on quite shaky grounds, though also the issue seems fairly complex e.g. we kept pushing back the date of the earliest “humans” but eventually had to acknowlege that the earliest stone tools predate humanity itself by several millions of years (even half a million or so prior to the entire genus Homo). We also keep tinkering with what we call “humans” e.g. the out of Africa theory keeps getting refined to multiple waves of migrants, the earliest ones of which iirc were not fully “human” themselves.
Anyway, John Piper is old, but most important is not his personal belief structure (although he does want to preach it from the pulpit and that I think is something he should be called out on), but how he handles those beliefs, imho. For one thing, in that interview he mentioned that he would not let that stop him from bringing along even an Elder into his church who happened to believe the opposite, so it is an extremely minor matter in his eyes. And for another, he fully acknowledges that he simply accepted it without bothering to dig deeper into that issue at any time in his life.
I hear you that it reflects a weakness on the part of his thinking but… he’s old, and much of this evidence has been contradictory and confusing during his lifetime. Most important though is his character: I very much like when someone acknowledges the boundaries b/t what they know vs. what they do not!!! Except, even so, he says that he wants to preach what he believes so… (but then again, HAS he preached that? was that an off-the-cuff thought that he verbalized or did he actually go through with that? I don’t know)
Believing that the Old Testament is against homosexuality is just par for the course with Christianity though - the New Testament fulfilled the Old but people sure do like to return to it.
About the flood… wait, what? He really says that it is “global”? There are quite a lot of stories - e.g. Gilgamesh - that also talk about a flood about that time, so I really do believe that there was a massive flood in that region, but the only sense in which we know it to be “global” was in the sense that Alexander the Great conquered the “entirety of the world as it was known to those peoples, at that time” (but even then, it’s not like they believed that there was a sharp cliff that you would fall off of:-P). Anyway this would be pretty damning if true but… I searched and could find nothing about him saying this - are you certain?
Anyway yeah, we are all fallible, but if someone with some actual authority in the evangelical christian world says that Donald Trump is a pile of steaming garbage, I wanted to say “yeah - right on!”:-P
About authoritarianism: I would argue that there is a very narrow, very particular type of authoritarianism that we all should believe in - and that is that 1+1=2. Facts are facts, and truth is true, and whenever we find something that contricts what we previously THOUGHT was true, we should lay it aside in favor of the new evidence. e.g., if I met “Neo” and saw him fly, then I would believe in Him and that this is The Matrix (if he said it), but otherwise I will not believe in that. Christianity says similarly not that we should all bow down to worship an individual human man such as Drumpf, but that we should acede to the actual, real Truth, which differs from Atheism in saying that that Truth=God, and differs from Agnosticism in saying that it actually matters. Anyway, Piper seems one of the more vocal of people against putting our faith in individual humans, especially over Truth, so without hearing him say words to the contrary I don’t think that HE is very much like those Trumpists, or fundies (fundamentalists who say that we should all turn off their brains and allow the pastors to do 100% of our thinking for them), although I cannot speak to his position about Fundigelicalism.
Edit: the people who showed up on Jan. 6 say that they are “patriots”, and they say that they are “Christians”, and they say that they wanted to “defend the Constitution”, and they say that they do what they do b/c of their “belief in God”. However, they are stupid, and do not really know what they believe. Just b/c they say something, DOES NOT MAKE IT TRUE. I feel like the words of Jesus may, might, maybe, perhaps have more to do with what Christianity is all about than those people who didn’t even read the Constitution before they took a dump all over it (then tried to feed it to the rest of us, citing it as a “peaceful protest”).