By Oluseyi Akinyode
This article was originally published in Washington Independent Review of Books here.
As Election Day looms, have you pondered why Donald Trump so strongly appeals to Evangelical Christians and the far Right in America? Well, so has Joel Looper. In his new book, Another Gospel: Christian Nationalism and the Crisis of Evangelical Identity, he traces the roots of evangelicalism to colonial America, revealing how the movement’s cultural identity became enmeshed in national politics. Looper also examines the Christian mandate as modeled by the early church, arguing that, at its core, the Gospel is about witnessing Jesus Christ through the way we live our lives. An adjunct professor at Baylor University and coordinator for Shalom Mission Communities, a network of international Christian communities, Looper is also the author of Bonhoeffer’s America: A Land Without Reformation.
What personal experiences did you draw on while writing Another Gospel, and how did these shape the themes you explored?
I’m a Christian who continues to cling white-knuckled to the label “evangelical.” Whether I should or not is another matter, of course. One of the reasons I do is that the term evangelical actually means “gospel” or, better, “gospel-oriented person.” However, many people outside the movement, Christians and non-Christians, look at conservative evangelicals and at the Jesus of the New Testament, and they say, “Huh? How did you get here from there?”
I’ve had similar moments with evangelicals. One guy I know well — an extraordinarily generous man who would take an undocumented person into his home if he knew them and that they were in trouble. This same guy trumpets Trump’s nonsense claims about Haitian immigrants eating pets and worries aloud that immigrants are ruining the country. He’s hardly unique, obviously. I know dozens of others like him.
During the pandemic, many evangelicals like this man were terrified by lockdowns and mandatory masking, fearful that their rights were being taken away — even as more than one in 300 Americans died [of covid-19]. Even if I came to think the federal response was seriously misguided at certain times, this sort of reaction seriously disturbed me. Experiences like these convinced me that many, though not all, evangelicals aren’t being guided by Scripture or the commands of Jesus. And that realization was the seed of this book.
Given the upcoming election, how do you hope readers will engage with the book’s themes?
It’ll hardly surprise readers that I’m concerned about the election. I do think that Donald Trump represents a threat to our democratic republic. As a Christian, I’m even more concerned about what support for Trump has done to the church’s reputation. My hope is that, whether my name is attached to it or not, people will think about the book’s primary thesis — that Christian nationalism is a false gospel (Galatians 1:6). And, once they’ve mulled it over, that they would put it in their own words, discuss it, preach it, and get it out into the ether before November 5th. Perhaps the actuality of Christians putting Trump back in office won’t be another stumbling block to add to the pile we [as evangelical Christians] already have.
You argue that many Evangelical Christians are holding onto an idealized American way of life rather than living out the values modeled by Jesus Christ. How does this perspective help us understand Trump’s appeal within this community?
Many evangelicals fear that they’re about to lose the American way of life you’re referring to. Some of this is because of the LGBTQ movement — a long and complicated story for another day. Then Trump comes along and says again and again, “I will protect you,” “I’m standing in their way,” and “I’m the only one who can save you.” Evangelical Trump voters either don’t care or haven’t grasped that this Faustian bargain has scandalized millions, many of whom used to call themselves evangelical.
A key argument in Another Gospel is that Christian Nationalism is rooted in the nation’s colonizing of the church, not vice versa. Why is this a crucial point for readers to grasp?
Think about the kind of community envisioned in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. It’s supposed to be a “city on a hill” — but it’s not America. This city operates like no other polity that humanity has ever encountered. People would have to change dramatically for the better to live this way.
Therefore, attempts to turn Jesus’ ethics into public morality is a fool’s errand. Human societies just aren’t capable of it. There is a name for this inability to do so in the Abrahamic faith: It’s called sin. To live out what Jesus is talking about, we need a different sort of polity in which people are enabled by God to live the kind of life Jesus spoke about. The New Testament calls that polity the church. So, the church is supposed to have a very different existence from the nation.
When Christian nationalists try to take America back for God (to use Samuel L. Perry and Andrew L. Whitehead’s language), the result is that the church ends up becoming obsessed with national concerns rather than living this different sort of life. They baptize American culture and allow Machiavellian political maneuvers as means to supposedly righteous ends. But it just won’t work. America isn’t baptize-able, and neither is any other nation. Even if the church were spiritually in shape enough to “Christianize” America, America isn’t Christianize-able. Instead, the nation and its politics have shaped the church’s life. As I shared in Another Gospel, the nation has colonized the church, not the reverse. That is Christian nationalism.
You note that rising Christian nationalism often coincides with declining church attendance. How might this trend impact the future of the evangelical church in America?
I think the future of the evangelical church in America is bleak, numerically speaking. Fundamentally, the gospel that many evangelicals believe in has left them with no reason to go to church. If the Christian life is an individual pursuit where the aim is to go to heaven when you die, and the Christian character is primarily geared towards “owning the libs,” why do you need church for that? You don’t, at least in the long run. Again, this is true for many evangelicals but not for all.
So far, what has been the response to Another Gospel among the evangelical community? Has any of the feedback surprised you?
Some have been enthusiastic. Ralph Wood’s review in Christianity Today is one example. But then there are friends — and, really, extended family — who went into attack mode before the book had reached the shelves. The vitriol I got from some of them really did surprise me. Saying, “Read the book!” or “Okay, can we have a conversation, look at Scripture, think about this together?” has gotten me nowhere with most of them.
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