Evangelicalism

A Final, Clarifying Remark About My Stance on Trump, Evangelicals, & the 2016 Election

Kirk E. Miller

Some evangelicals are saying, “The election is over. What’s done is done. There’s nothing we can do about it now. Besides, maybe he won’t be as bad as you thought. Let’s see what happens.”

If that’s you, I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood folks like myself from the very beginning.

Large swaths of evangelicals defended and/or excused Mr. Trump’s moral corruption and damaging rhetoric — his racism, misogyny, degradation of the handicap, dismissiveness of sexual assault, inciting hatred towards immigrants, prompting fear and callousness towards refugees, etc. Regardless of what type of president Mr. Trump turns out to be, that still happened. That can’t be undone.

You see, for some of us — at least as much as I can speak for myself — our outcry against evangelical support of Trump has never been centrally about the electoral contribution of your vote Tuesday, as if we had some political agenda that now becomes moot after the election (“What’s done is done”). Nor has it ever been about “providing a solution” to a dilemma we never claimed to be addressing in the first place — the nomination of two generally unlikeable candidates.

Our primary concern is and always has been the spiritual condition of evangelicalism, about the church’s witness, integrity, and faithfulness to truth. And that’s something that obviously transcends the election itself. The 2016 election didn’t create (and therefore conclude) the concerning state we now see; it merely exposed it.

Theological Liberalism(s): The Many Faces of a Christianity Domesticated and Repurposed

Kirk E. Miller

Theological liberalism (as J. Gresham Machen described it so well) is anything that seeks to tame Christianity and use it for its own purposes.

It can take the form of the social gospel, where Jesus becomes little more than a means to relieving poverty and oppression, things that are certainly good, but Christless and gospel-less when you remove the cross and the necessity of conversion.

It can take the form of the prosperity gospel, where God is simply a means for the realization of my health and wealth — a cosmic vending machine if you will; a genie to grant me my selfish desires.

It can take the form of so much of what goes on in mainline evangelicalism, where sermons are no more than pop psychology lessons cast in Christianese, where Christianity is “Life in the Suburbs 2.0,” here to make your life a little bit more comfortable and functional.

And it can take the form of the Religious Right, where particular political ideologies and agendas get baptized as Christian, where appeals to faith are shallow attempts to mobilize Christians as political allies, and where scripture gets abused (think “people of God” texts for [insert United States here]) are used for one’s own end and as ammunition in a misguided expression of culture war.

On the other hand is a theological conservatism: Jesus does not exist for my purposes; I exist for his.