“I wanna be in the room where it happens.” ~Aaron Burr in Hamilton
“Some people say we’ve already lost
But they’re afraid to pay the cost
For what we’ve lost.” ~Half Light II (No Celebration), Arcade Fire
Few things are more necessary and more avoided than reading history especially when that history critiques a movement you hold dear. Over the last few years such works have served as historical colonoscopies for 20th century American evangelicalism. And like a medical colonoscopy they are inconvenient, irritating, and revealing. And, perhaps, even lifesaving.
Kevin Kruse’s One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America provides an evangelical-historical critique based on secular business interests. He argues that modern “religious identity” in America was formed in the 1930s and early 40s in opposition to FDR’s New Deal policies.
Decades before Eisenhower’s inaugural prayers, corporate titans enlisted conservative clergymen in an effort to promote new political arguments embodied in the phrase “freedom under God”…[T]his new ideology was designed to defeat the state power its architects feared most—not the Soviet regime in Moscow, but Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration in Washington. With ample funding from major corporations, prominent industrialists, and business lobbies such as the National Association of Manufacturers and the US Chamber of Commerce in the 1930s and 1940s, these new evangelists for free enterprise promoted a vision best characterized as “Christian libertarianism.” (p xiv)
While Kruse’s work is not a critique of evangelicalism per se, that movement’s embrace of American capitalism and free enterprise aligns with Kruse’s broader study. One need only survey the warnings from pastors about “socialism” in the 2020 election to see it in action.
Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation, by Calvin University’s Kristin Kobes Du Mez, describes how evangelicals adopted among other things military postures and a prominent patriotism that “would help them overcome their reputation as extremists and their marginal status” (p. 24). In the shadow of Vietnam, authors from Jerry Falwell to John Price to Hal Lindsey connected revival or renewal to reinvigorated American military might. In his book Listen, America! “Falwell lamented that the United States was ‘no longer the military might of the word.'” Price saw that “only when America ‘comes to its senses’ and ‘repents of its sins and turns to God’ would its military position be restored.” Lindsey’s The 1980’s: Countdown to Armageddon treated rearmament as “a religious requirement” (all quotes p 111). Fortunately, as with most prophecy books, the countdown timer slowed considerably. Now 40 years on, no one can accurately project how many ticks are left, no, not even the angels of heaven.
Helping evangelicals overcome “marginal status” is another way of saying “they wanted to be in the room where it happens.” But did they sell their city down the river in exchange? Augustine has entered the chat.
I recently began God’s Law and Order: The Politics of Punishment in Evangelical America, by Wheaton College grad and Sattler College assistant professor of history, Aaron Griffith. In the introduction is a section that tied together cords that had been flailing in my mind unconnected. In the aftermath of the Leopold and Loeb murder trials in the 1924, Americans wanted more law and order around two points: recognition that increases in crime reflected increasing secularization, and that punitive state action was needed to address the increase. Griffith writes,
Political leaders drew on these shared sensibilities as they built national support for the expansion of tougher law enforcement efforts. This broad consensus meant that future religious movements that want to exert widespread cultural influence would need to take crime seriously. (p 9, emphasis mine)
I saw here that religious groups who wanted broad cultural influence would have to adopt a specific position on law and order. Admission to the room was incumbent on knowing the password. Over time we note a trend: specific political positions adopted for access in one generation becomes gospel in the next. Specific positions adopted for continued access in the second generation becomes gospel in the next. So that, several generations down the line “gospel fidelity” is far more than Jesus dead, buried, risen, and coming again, reigning King of a kingdom of light; it’s a compilation of gospel-truth and political deal-making, nearly indistinguishable in the hearts or minds of the adherents. In the end, if someone disagrees on a political point, they’ve denied the gospel.
Such syncretism could inflame Paul to write Second Colossians from his eternal dwelling.
Desiring to be in the room where it happens does not at the outset require a naked, drooling lust for power. It need not because power is its own corrupter. It is a short walk and an inviting door from desiring to be to needing to be, political power-seeking being a genetic mutation of cultural influence. When any group—evangelicals included—is given access to the room, a seat at the table, a pass to the corridors of power, they leave the room with an expectation that the door will remain open, the seat available, and the corridor swept and well-lit. And if that means bowing to principalities and powers in barter for kingdoms of the world, just throw in a set of Shamwows to seal the deal.
In American history, evangelicals have adopted certain power-postures and political positions, perhaps with a desire, as Griffith notes, for sincere cultural influence but ending with greater alignment with the political party that has the room. Being lights in this world does not require Hollywood-esque, pseudo-spiritual gimmickry, a variation of The Truman Show Goes to Church.
We never see Jesus seeking to be in the room where it happened. He was called and content to live his life and manage his ministry from the margins with regular folks. When he finally gained an audience with Rome, it was because he’d been accused and arrested. In metaphor: Jesus is his Church, Pilate is American politics, and the religious leaders are, well, the religious leaders. Choose you this day whom you will serve and all that.
Jesus stood before both Pilate and Herod lacking earthly power yet having all power. He put no trust in horses, chariots, lawyers, or judges. Jesus was never willing to trade his kingdom authority for temporal position, not even to stay his execution. Jesus did not need to be in the room where it happened because he owned the room. Our willingness to trade away spiritual power and biblical witness for political soup and a moldy baguette is a sorrowful example of Paul’s warning against claiming a type of godliness but denying the power of it. Have we forgotten that Jesus has given us the Kingdom? (Luke 12:32) What are we doing?
American Christians often look back at the early church and marvel at its spiritual power yet forgetting it had no political influence and its cultural influence was limited to the people personally touched by their witness. When plague hit Rome, Christians ministered from the margins, largely viewed as a sect. Their influence was hardly broad; they adopted none of Caesar’s policy positions, and no one was in the room where it happened. But they had been in a room: an upper room, where the Spirit of God empowered them for the task they were assigned.
My argument is not that Christians should ignore politics altogether, refuse to vote, or merely throw darts as disaffected grumblers. My argument is that the embrace of worldly power comes at a cost, a cost that is often unrecognized at first and unrealized until later like generations of a damaging family trait. Worse, the bad trait is then minimized, since, intoxicated by power, we become unable or unwilling to give up what we’ve gained, afraid to pay the cost for all that we’ve lost.
fides quarens intellectum
