Americanized Christianity: A Galaxy Apart from Jesus

Authoritarian nationalism as an idol for white American evangelicals

Eventually, American conservative evangelicals will have to reckon with their zealous support for the Republican Party and for the Trump cult, both of which are antithetical to Jesus’s teachings in so far as the latter are presented in the gospels.

These misled Christians will have to tell their grandchildren which side they were on when thousands of delusional insurrectionists stormed the Capitol. Until then, we should hold up their dopey sermons and casuistic rationalizations as evidence of an ongoing Orwellian conspiracy against reality and decency.

See, for example, the writings of Tom Gilson who is an American evangelical writer and strategist. One of his latest articles is a masterpiece of chutzpah and cluelessness.

An Evangelical’s Obtuse Sermon

Gilson despairs that American society seems headed for totalitarianism — not as a result of Trumpism, mind you, but solely because of Democratic overreach, civil rights, cancel culture, and the like.

He cites several of his articles in support of this worry, one of which focusses on the emerging conditions of American totalitarianism, but without so much as referring even in passing to the four years of Donald Trump’s authoritarian “presidency.” Ironically, that latter, cited article was published just two days before the Capitol Hill riot.

In any case, despite the sinking church attendance in the US and the rise of leftist radicalism and “totalitarian” censorship of Trump and his supporters on Twitter, Facebook, and Parler, all isn’t lost, says Gilson, since he’s thankful he can look more towards Jesus in this time of need.

“I believe the American church may be heading for very hard times,” he writes. “I am completely convinced that God knows what he’s doing, and that he’s more than adequate to carry us through.”

Thus, Gilson’s subject is whether Christians will be true to Jesus as they opt out of the weakening church and the growing American secular culture. “American Christianity,” he says, “is weak, divided, unsure of its theology, unaware of reasons for belief, and too content in American normalcy.”

The key question for Gilson, then, is whether you’re “prepared to say you’ll follow Jesus, no matter what.”

Gilson lays down some markers to indicate whether an American Christian is true to Jesus rather than to “American normalcy”:

If they ask you to lie (whatever that lie might be), will you follow Jesus no matter what?

If they demand you make yourself an “LGBTQ Ally,” will you follow Jesus no matter what?

If your friends cut you off for your convictions, will you follow Jesus no matter what?

And Gilson poses several key questions a Christian should be asking herself:

Do I believe Christ alone has the words of eternal life?

Do I believe he is God, the Lord?

Am I convinced of these things? If I say, “I believe,” do I mean I actually consider it to be true? Or am I hedging on it instead?

If I say I consider it to true, do I have good reasons?

Evangelical Audacity

Again, it’s revealing that Gilson doesn’t include the evangelical support for Trumpism as a sign that things have gone awry for American conservative Christianity. (Roughly eighty percent of white evangelical Protestants picked candidate Trump over his rival in 2016 and 2020.)

The audacity of insisting that white evangelicals should be true to Jesus and should avoid godless American normalcy, while overlooking their steadfast membership in the cult of Trump is matched only by Gilson’s chutzpah in blaming Democrats and liberals, not President Trump’s four years of imperious demagoguery and his insurrectionist white supremacists for the rising conditions of American authoritarianism.

Yet the two audacities are of a piece with the greater con which is evangelical Christianity itself.

To see this, consider the history of evangelicalism. This movement began as a revival of Christianity in Britain and the American colonies in the early eighteenth century, in the face of the rational Enlightenment. The revival was known as the First Great Awakening.

Thus, evangelicalism began as a doubling-down against the upshot of scientific knowledge and philosophical skepticism. The Christian movement used theatrical displays of the “outpouring of the Holy Spirit” to gin up enthusiasm for the ailing religion that had become formal and institutional, and the early evangelicals took advantage of the malaise brought on by philosophical doubts.

Evangelicalism was a back-to-the-basics Protestant movement that drew from Pietism, Puritanism, and Calvinism. As a result, evangelicals emphasized salvation by grace alone through faith in Jesus’s sacrifice, the authority of the Bible, the born-again experience of conversion, a personal relationship with God, and the need to spread the Christian message.

Now ask yourself what this fundamentalist Christianity has to do with Republican politics or with the American culture war. Why do so-called evangelicals in the US care so much about abortion, creationism, the war on Christmas, and the alleged Christian basis of the American Constitution? Of course, a Christian can form opinions on these issues based on her reading of the Bible, but is any of them integral to the core, minimalist Christian principles that are supposed to define evangelicalism?

Evidently since the 1980s, at least, American evangelicalism hasn’t been so fundamentalist after all since the movement hasn’t focussed on the Christian fundamentals. The white conservative, “born-again” Protestants in the US are committed to American Christendom, to the use of American superpower as a symbol of Christian greatness. Thus, they’re ardent defenders not just of basic Protestant conceits but of authoritarian political values and of reactionary policies that couldn’t even have been formulated in Jesus’s day.

Indeed, this Americanized “Christianity” could have nothing to do with Jesus. At best, the question is whether a Christian can be true to the New Testament, to the documents that were Romanized, de-Judaized, and catholicized to suit the political conditions of the first few centuries of the church. As a few centuries of historical-critical studies have shown, there’s little if any historical Jesus in the New Testament.

In any case, what’s crucial to the established church isn’t the gospels’ portrayals of Jesus’s Jewish teachings, but Paul’s focus on the risen, metaphysical Christ and on the Christian version of the dying-and-rising god mytheme which appealed more to non-Jewish seekers.

Thus, Pauline Christianity sold out Jesus from the very beginning. By the time we get to white American evangelicalism, after two thousand years of Christian union with earthly empires, the sell-out is so appalling that it would make a fitting subject of a series of epic horror novels. What Gilson would call authentic, strong, rational Christianity would follow not Jesus but some of the most egregious American cultural confusions that Gilson claims to be eschewing.

Gay Rights and Political Propaganda

For example, Gilson posits that a true Christian wouldn’t be an ally of homosexuals, since presumably Gilson thinks Jesus wasn’t one. Yet how could the late-modern Christian know what a first-century Jew would have thought about an LGBTQ movement when there wasn’t an inkling of such a concept in that period, when there was no idea of the biological basis of sexuality or of human rights as explicated by Enlightenment philosophers?

Of course, rough and rebellious Jews in first-century Judea might have been sexist and contemptuous of forms of marriage not featured in their scriptures. But asking them about rights for homosexuals would be like asking a four-year-old about nuclear physics.

It’s hardly a coincidence that Gilson singles out this issue of gay rights as a test of Christian faith when the gospels’ Jesus is much more emphatic in condemning wealth and materialism (Matt.19:16–30). On either issue, the evangelical’s stance is decided not by an appeal to what Jesus allegedly said or did, but by the dictates of the plutocratic Republican Party and by the authoritarian values of the American conservative tribe that’s locked in a culture war with progressives and “socialists.”

In the twenty-first century, Christian evangelicalism is more like political propaganda than like a religious or spiritual movement.

Far from condemning the Gilded Age style of economic inequality that’s been widening in the US since the 1980s, evangelicals would be more inclined to side with the prosperity gospel of hucksters like Joel Osteen. Would that be staying true to Jesus and avoiding American normalcy? Obviously not.

But consistency for these Christians is irrelevant here because evangelicalism is an application of the evolutionary Handicap principle, the point being to saddle yourself with absurdity by way of demonstrating your loyalty to the cause. The more contradictions you can harmonize away and the more you appear to compromise Christian principles by selling out to imperial and to social Darwinian interests while demonstrating your allegiance to the group with embarrassing displays of mawkish emotion, the more you seem to bear the burden of taking up Jesus’s cross.

The operative test of Christian faith in conservative white America has nothing to do with being a follower of an historical Jesus’s teachings; rather, the test is whether you have the gall to pretend that an outpouring of nationalistic social and economic conservatism is essential to authentic Christianity.

Pick your Master

Or take Gilson’s citing of John 6:67–69, in which Peter reassures Jesus that he won’t abandon him, by saying, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.”

Gilson approves of how Peter called Jesus “Lord” or “master.” But although he concedes that the early Christians were only beginning to view Jesus as God incarnate, Gilson seems to take Peter’s response as evidence of the later doctrine of the Incarnation, when Gilson says the Christian needs to ask herself, “Do I believe he is God, the Lord?”

Just to be clear, the Greek for “Lord” in the New Testament is kurios, which isn’t just a name for God, but which can mean “sir” or a human master in relation to servants. Thus, in Matt.8:25–27, the disciples in the boat wake Jesus to save them from a violent storm, saying “Lord, save us! We are perishing!” Jesus obliges, and ‘The men were amazed and asked, “What kind of man is this? Even the winds and the sea obey Him!”’

If by calling Jesus “Lord” they were calling him God, the disciples would hardly have been amazed that he could perform such a miracle. No, they call him a man because that’s all that “kurios” need imply, a human master.

Likewise, Luke 20:13 speaks of the “master of the vineyard,” and the same root word is used in Col.1:16, which speaks of “things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions [kyriotētes, lordships] or rulers or authorities.” So there can be evil lords, too.

The Christian lordship, though, is consistent with Jesus’s warning that he came to bring not peace on earth but division between family members (Luke 12:51–53), which is the likely basis of Gilson’s insistence that Christians should leave their non-Christian family members to retain their good standing with God.

And this lordship is also identical to the kind practiced in cults which require their members to surrender all their worldly ties that violate the cult’s commandments. The cult leader is the master, and the cult’s followers are slaves to that master. The gospels indeed suggest that Christians should be slaves to Jesus in something like that social sense.

Mind you, as Robert Eisenman, the biblical scholar and historian explains, that talk of lordship was a hangover from when the Jesus movement was a rebellious Jewish one, before it got squashed by the Roman Empire in the Jewish-Roman wars and transformed itself into a Romanized, post-Jesus chameleonic religion that would go on to make friends with dozens of ungodly empires just as it did with the Roman one.

The question, then, is whether white evangelical Christians serve Jesus or the mentally ill con man, Donald Trump, as well as the Republican Party, American nationalism, and their authoritarian conservative impulses.

A better indicator of whether a white evangelical is a slave to Jesus would be his or her renunciation of the Republican Party for being — over the last century at least — a bastion of militarism, plutocratic capitalism, white supremacy, and the Trumpian idol.