Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump (John Fea) - A Reposted Review for this Moment
BELIEVE ME: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump. By John Fea. Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2018.
Note:
This review was originally posted in 2018 on my blog Ponderings on a Faith
Journey. While many years have passed, since that review was published
Donald Trump lost an election, which he refused to acknowledge, has been impeached
and indicted, and is now the Republican candidate for the Presidency of the
United States, what John Fea shared in 2018 remains pertinent, as does, I
believe, my review, which is posted below (updated only in terms of grammar).
*****************
It is
said by pollsters that 81% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in
2016. The question on the minds of many is why? Why Donald Trump? After all, the
current President has demonstrated few if any marks of being a Christian, let
alone being an evangelical. His past is filled with morally dubious activities,
including affairs. He is course in his language. He seems to be a bully. He
shows little if any compassion for others. He feels most at home when bashing
others. Indeed, he doesn't seem at all concerned about matters on the heart of
Jesus. So, why did so many white evangelicals vote for Donald Trump?
Evangelical historian John Fea, who
describes himself as being among the 19% who didn’t vote for Trump, sets out to
answer that question. In a book titled Believe Me, which borrows a phrase regularly on the lips of Donald Trump, Fea lays
out the road map to the 2016 election, a road that extends back to the
beginnings of British colonization of the North American continent. As for the
2016 election, Trump wasn’t the first choice for evangelicals. Counted among
the more traditional candidates vying for the nomination, were candidates like
Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, and Marco Rubio, all of whom have deep ties to the
evangelical world and would seem to be a better fit. As Fea reveals, several
evangelical leaders anointed Cruz as God’s choice. Yet all these candidates failed
to win the nomination, losing to someone who seemed to have none of the
qualities that evangelicals have in the past looked for in their candidates. Trump
is not an evangelical, and yet as he solidified the nomination he consolidated
his hold on this important block of the electorate. If polls are to be
believed, this block remains solidly behind him, regardless of his antics. They
appear to see him as their protector in a world closing in on them.
Before moving on, I should
introduce my readers to the author of this important book. John Fea is
Professor of American History at Messiah College, a well-regarded Christian
college. Among his books is Was AmericaFounded as a Christian Nation? This also is an important book, as John
helps the reader make sense of the historical record, showing that the United
States has been in one sense Christian in its origins, due to the preponderance
of Protestant Christians who have made up its population. At the same time, the
founders had the chance and chose not to enshrine Christianity as the religion
of the nation, leaving Americans free to find their own paths. In many ways, Believe Me is a continuation of that
book.
As Fea tells the story of the 2016
election and the current presidency, we can trace the evangelical embrace of
Trump to three basic points: fear, the desire for power, and the embrace of nostalgia
(including the idea that America is a Christian nation and that Christianity
should be favored by the government). We can begin with the role that fear
plays in the story. Fea demonstrates that fear has been an important element in
the evangelical story from the beginning. It was instilled in the people by
Puritan leaders, who warned against impiety and heresy (whether from Quakers,
Baptists, or witches). From that starting point, fear has been part of the
story. Consider the role it played in the election of 1800 when the Federalists
sought to capitalize on Christian fear of Jefferson's religious skepticism to
re-elect John Adams (who might have been a Unitarian, but not a skeptic in the
mold of Jefferson). He points us to a Federalist newspaper that suggested a
Jefferson win would lead to "a wave of murder atheism, rape, adultery, and
robbery" (p. 15). We see similar visions in play later in the 1850s in
response to increased Catholic immigration. How different is MAGA from the
Know-Nothings of the 1850s? In other words, the fear of the other, whether
non-white or non-Protestant has been a staple of American religious and
cultural life. This was seen in the response to President Obama, who was seen
as exotic, maybe even subversive—a Muslim in disguise. So, Trump didn't invent
fear-mongering, but he was a quick learner when it came to its political
usefulness.
The second element is the desire
for power. While evangelicals were once politically quiescent, starting in the
1960s, with fear as a driver, they began to seek political power. As they began
to fight the culture wars, they came to believe that success required political
dominance. They’ve been seeking this power for a generation or more, but they
never quite got what they wanted, until now. Donald Trump offered a pathway to
power for evangelicals who had been stymied for years in waging a culture war
focused on abortion, gay marriage, and religious liberty (for themselves, not
necessarily for others—thus the support for Trump’s immigration policies). Trump
might not be a paragon of morality, but he offered them something they hadn't
seen before—a possible President who would use power on their behalf. Trump
promised that Christians would have their seat at the table of power. As Fea
demonstrates, Trump gravitated to particular forms of Christianity, including
the Christian Nationalism of Robert Jeffress and Jerry Falwell, Jr. along with
the preachers of the prosperity gospel. The latter appealed to Trump, because
this theology celebrated his portrayal of himself as a successful businessman,
and therefore despite all the evidence to the contrary, he must be blessed by
(chosen by) God for this position. Most specifically, Trump's strongman style
appealed to a form of Christianity that looked to strong male leaders. Even if
he's not specifically Christian, he could be the incarnation of the Persian
King Cyrus who liberated the Jewish exiles from Babylon. Trump, as Fea notes,
has delivered on important promises, most specifically appointments to the
Supreme Court of persons who would support evangelical concerns about abortion,
religious liberty (an important conversation in the book), and
immigration. Here is the kind of leader, who is mean enough to take on
their enemies.
While Trump figures prominently in
this story, it is larger than him. His rise to power and partnership with the
Religious Right fits with the playbook developed decades ago by people like
Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority. Whereas white evangelicals had been
rather quiescent in the 1950s, the advent of the civil rights movement, and
with it the push for integration of schools and other venues (leading to the
dreaded race-mixing) raised concerns. This was especially true as alternative whites-only
Christian academies in the South came under scrutiny. Concerns about
integration, coupled with changes in the immigration codes, along with a new
awakening on abortion, led to the creation of a movement. With the movement
came a playbook to push back on trends that threatened their place in society.
Part of this effort included advocating for smaller government, even as they
took seats on local governmental entities. They also sought to gain control of the
Supreme Court. Fea writes: "The fracturing of the nation's Christian
consensus, the Christian Right argues, took place at the hands of unelected
liberal justices such as Hugo Black, whose decisions could only be overturned
by new justices who had to be nominated and appointed by officials in the two
elected branches of the federal government" (p. 61). Trump didn’t
write the playbook, but he has embraced it.
Fea coined the term Court
Evangelicals to describe evangelical and charismatic preachers, people like
Robert Jeffress, Jerry Falwell, Jr., and Paula White. These preachers not only
have the President's ear, but they have been strong advocates for the President
and his policies. White vouches for his salvation, and Jeffress, who is
Southern Baptist, has promoted Trump the Strongman, believing that his vision
of Christian nationalism requires someone in the mold of Trump. Fea quotes Jeffress
telling a Dallas paper that "frankly, I want the meanest, toughest son of
a gun I can find. And I think that's the feeling of a lot of evangelicals"
(p. 39). Since Trump fills this requirement, much is forgiven. For those who
are unfamiliar with the idea of the Court Evangelicals, the chapter on them is
must reading.
All of this—the fearmongering and
the search for power, is rooted in nostalgia (not history). While Trump has
never specified when America was great, it is clear that whenever that was, it
was an age when white Christians were the dominant party in American life. He
notes that Black evangelicals are not nearly as supportive of going back to
this undefined great American age, for the American past includes slavery and
Jim Crow. For many white evangelicals and allies, whether spoken or not this
beloved past likely existed at a time when schools were opened with Protestant
prayers, abortion was illegal, women knew their place, immigration was limited,
and race-mixing was discouraged (to put things mildly). For at least some
Americans the utopia that once existed is not something they would like to see
return.
What I've given is not a chapter-by-chapter
exploration of the book. I've picked up some of the themes present in the book,
which I deem highly important. If we are to understand what is at stake and
what is in play at this moment in time, at least for Americans, if not the
world, we need to understand what drives this core base of Donald Trump's
power. Fea notes that Trump's base is older—with an average age of around 57—and
thus younger evangelicals are less attracted to it. Therefore, the reason many
have embraced Trump is that there is the feeling that this is the last
desperate effort of the culture wars. Fea compares this embrace of Trump to
Picket's Charge, that last-gasp attempt to turn the tide at Gettysburg.
Fea writes that his approach is
that of a historian. He wants to tell the story from as objective a position as
possible and is reticent to offer solutions here. However, he realizes that
there is too much at stake not to offer an alternative to this narrative.
Therefore, in the conclusion, he counsels his fellow evangelicals to take a
different course. This starts with an embrace of hope rather than fear, humility
rather than power, and history rather than nostalgia. He draws this response
from Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights Movement. In the end, Fea counsels
his readers that "evangelicals can do better than Donald Trump" (p.
190). By better he doesn’t mean Mike Pence or Ted Cruz (though they fit
better the traditional picture). He recognizes the validity of some concerns on
the part of evangelicals, but the trajectory taken is dangerous both for the
nation and for evangelicalism.
Believe me! This is a book that
must be read, especially by those of my more liberal/progressive community who
seem stymied by Trump's popularity among evangelicals. In Believe Me John
Fea gives us insight into why they might entrust their future to someone whose
values and personality don’t seem to fit the Christian mold. Reading the book might
even lead to conversations that can create hope, humility, and respect for
history. So, please read carefully!
Comments
Our concerns are not confined to "church v. state" issues, such as education vouchers or the Dobbs decision by the Supreme Court. Other concerns that are prudential in nature include a disastrous addiction to Trillion-dollar deficits; anti-Israel foreign policies; and a general unwillingness to acknowledge that the US has enemies that really do aim to bring catastrophe to America. Books like "Believe Me!" completely miss this prudent approach to political reality as seen in real life and in real time. Call me a careful Reformed evangelical.