God, Power, Fear, and Donald Trump

Posted on 11/23/2019 by the Salt City Sinner

What does it mean to love God, what does it mean to love power, and what does it mean to love Donald Trump? Are these separate questions, or have they become scrambled together? Given that 81% of Evangelicals voted for Trump, it’s safe to conclude that the latter is the case. Unpacking the tangled webbing of fear, greed, superstition, and credulity that binds white Evangelicals to Donald J. Trump, the most profane and libertine President in United States history, will be the project of generations. Religious conservatives didn’t get here overnight, and it’s an odd place for them to have arrived at, but the journey isn’t as mysterious as it might seem at first glance.

A good place to start is Believe Me: the Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, by John Fea. Fea’s book is an attempt to answer these questions in a serious way, and from the standpoint of one who shares many of the values and presuppositions of the average parishioner. Fea’s book is a sharp rebuke and warning offered to his fellow Evangelicals, but if it were only that, it wouldn’t be worth wading through hundreds of pages of pious prose. It is, however, also a well-researched and meticulously-documented history of the journey from point A (the Puritan/Protestant colonization of the North American continent) to point Z (the election of President Trump).

It’s hard to disagree with those who look at Evangelical support for Trump and see naked hypocrisy, but that view is an oversimplification. That’s not to cut the Evangelical movement any undue slack – Fea is almost as unsparing in his history of Evangelical culture in North America as I would have been, had I set out to write this history. But I didn’t – Fea did, and he’s not as easy to write off as some crackpot Satanist like me who doesn’t even believe in the phony-baloney god of Mike Pence and George W. Bush. Fea is a serious scholar, a historian at Messiah College, which is itself a venerable Evangelical institution. For now, and I say that with dark foreboding provided in part by Fea’s book, because the path that it charts is not one that ends in liberal arts, intellectual discourse, and biblical hermeneutics.

Fear is the name of the game throughout Believe Me. The white Evangelical fear of change, of the loss of treasured privilege, and of the revocation of the Visa-Platinum-Plus citizenship that Christians currently afford themselves. This fear has obvious racial overtones that go back at least as far as 1619 and are as current as the Southern Baptist Convention’s 2017 debate about the alt right. Fea takes a couple of decent stabs right at the heart of these issues. He avoids, for example, repeating the common Evangelical lie that anchors the current generation of Christian Right activism to the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe vs. Wade. Throughout the first half of the 20^th Century, abortion was seen as a “Catholic issue” by most Protestants. It wasn’t until desegregation – and the white Evangelical establishment of Christian “segregation academies” – that folks like Jerry Falwell Sr. and Pat Robertson took an interest in Republican Party politics.

And speaking of Pat Robertson, how did we get from his sanctimonious run for the White House in 1988 to the impious but nonetheless beloved figure of Donald J. Trump? For one thing, reads Believe Me, Trump surrounds himself with “court Evangelicals” (a reference to Church courtiers in bygone monarchies). These hangers-on to the throne fall into three camps, according to Fea’s taxonomy: prosperity gospel preachers, Independent Network Charismatics, and figures from the paleo-Religious Right like Ralph Reed. What unites these sometimes-bickering tribes behind Trump? A good portion of Fea’s book (and his most interesting thesis) concerns the history of Protestant fear in North America. Fear of their god, to be sure, but that’s a fear Fea appreciates and shares. No, the fear he specifies has a distinctly racial and sectarian flavor. The early Protestants of North America feared just about everything, but their most potent paranoias over the years have concerned First Nations people, black people (first because they feared slave revolts, then because they feared black political emancipation), and immigrants (especially of the Catholic persuasion). Today’s bugaboos aren’t all that different: the LGBTQIA+ community, immigrants (this time from Central and South America rather than the “wrong parts” of Europe), and women stand out as frequent targets. These are groups that, like previous scapegoats, have *less* power than Evangelicals do, and can thus be the objects of abuse as well as fear, a much more satisfying combination than simple fear alone.

Among the many sources that Fea draws from is one that is particularly interesting. Corey Robin is a political theorist and professor at Brooklyn College, and is the author of several books including The Reactionary Mind and the one that Fea cites, Fear: the History of a Political Idea. Robin is an unlikely author for an Evangelical Christian to read, even one who is a professor of history. Why? Wikipedia has a simple and straightforward breakdown of Robin’s areas of expertise:

 Although he is on the left, Robin is unique among political theorists in focusing his attention on the darker arts of politics on the right: counterrevolution, political repression and intimidation, revanchism and reaction.

Indeed he does. Fear is a book that examines the ideological bases of political fear through a reexamination of Thomas Hobbes, Montesquieu, Alexis de Tocqueville, and Hannah Arendt. Robin is a Leftist, at least half a revolutionary, and a political analyst not unacquainted with concepts like class consciousness, liberation, and ideological hegemony. (Full disclosure: he is also currently my favorite writer about politics.) Believe Me draws on Fear at times in framing Evangelical anxieties, but where Robin roots his ultimate concerns in the material plane, Fea puts liberation in the hands of the Almighty. Fea’s Christianity focuses on inequality and injustice to some extent, but he is highly skeptical of political power. Indeed, if there’s a fear that appears to animate Fea, it is the fear of power: or, more specifically, of power’s spiritually and morally corrupting influence on those who wield it.

Not so the court Evangelicals, our modern Sadducees. They have turned, in their fear, to the instruments of raw political power. These lambs, to preserve white Christian supremacy in the face of a pluralizing nation, have elected a wolf. This is not exactly how Robin would frame it: he would probably maintain that, while fear has led to Evangelicals’ direct political participation since the 1970s, those fears were themselves born of the frictions and inequalities of the previous order. This might seem like a chicken-or-the-egg problem, but it makes a big difference whether a person’s political ideas shape what she is afraid of, or whether what she is afraid of shapes her political ideas. In Fea’s case, this inversion might be what’s behind some of his stodgier and more conservative views.

Despite the fact that I am a Satanist and Fea is an Evangelical Christian, I think here is much to be learned from Believe Me (though not, perhaps, as there is from Fear). While it’s never directly articulated in Believe Me, the reasoning he ascribes to court Evangelicals mesh nicely with a parable you won’t find in the Bible. You see, the bargain that these disciples have struck with power is charted in the work of journalist Jeff Sharlet, first in his book The Family and then in the Netflix documentary of the same name. Sharlet’s research describes the foundations, structure, and ambitions of a group loosely referred to as “the Fellowship,” or (as the title implies) “the Family.” Founded by a religious zealot named Abraham Vereide, the Family is sort of like the Christian Dominionist answer to the Freemasons or the Mafia, but with much more power than either of those august and secret organizations ever wielded, if you calculate power in megatons. I say that because Mike Pence is associated with the Family, and is one heartbeat away from the power to eliminate human life on Earth with the metaphorical push of a button. The Family has managed to worm their way into positions of extraordinary influence, and generally they operate behind the scenes.

The leaders of the Family, like all Christians, enjoy a good parable, and they have one of their own. As far as parables go, it’s more The 48 Laws of Power or The Satanic Bible than it is the Holy Gospel. Vulture describes the parable of the Wolf King:

 Family founder Abraham Vereide openly admired the Nazis’ anti-democratic discipline. In the decades since, the Family’s associates have formed working relationships with some of the world’s bloodiest dictators. In the United States, Trump is just the strong man they’ve waited to serve. Vereide’s successor David Coe had no time for sheep and wished instead to reach the wolf. Bring in the “Wolf King,” as Coe called this strong man, and you have a figure who could finally create a God-led government.

This suggests, pardon the pun, bad faith on the part of this vanguard of theocracy. They aren’t honest about their motives: indeed, they seem to relish the ridiculousness of their lies, to take pleasure in bearing false witness to those less churchy than they. How else can we explain their behavior toward Donald Trump, the most ostentatiously godless President in American history? They excuse his lewdness with pious debates about David and Bathsheba. They prophesy that he is an instrument of the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. They frequently call him a modern echo of Cyrus the Great. What might an honest statement of the bargain they’ve made with Trump sound like?

“We are frightened. Crime rates have fallen, but we feel that crime is everywhere. We are faced with the increasing visibility and growing influence of people who don’t look like us and people who don’t love like us. New ideas and new facts eat at the foundations of our philosophies and challenge our monopoly on both politics and dominant narratives in the United States. In our fear, we have abandoned rules, laws, and customs. You ask us, ‘what would we forgive Donald Trump, in exchange for power?’ and we answer: anything.

“Anything.”