5

LIVING ON A PRAYER

“Our government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.”

—Dwight Eisenhower

If modern conservatism “begins” with Edmund Burke, then the tale of evangelicalism in politics may well begin with Burke’s contemporary and colleague, William Wilberforce. His story has thankfully become more widely known in recent years, thanks to a Walden Media film and an Eric Metaxas book—both called Amazing Grace, which is a reference to Wilberforce’s mentor John Newton, an ex-slave ship captain who became a Christian, renounced his past, and penned the famous hymn by the same name.

Born on August 24, 1759, Wilberforce dabbled with Christianity as a child under the influence of his Christian aunt and uncle, who helped raise him, but drifted away from their simplistic, if sincere, version of Christianity in his youth. He attended Cambridge, experienced what pleasures the world offers, won election to Parliament, and moved to London.

The seeds of faith planted by Wilberforce’s aunt and uncle lay dormant for years, until he decided upon a road trip through the French and Italian Riviera. When his first choice for a travel companion was unable to accept, Wilberforce invited an old acquaintance named Isaac Milner on the all-expenses-paid journey. Milner was no ordinary man. He held the title of Lucasian Professor of Mathematics—a post that has since been occupied by such brilliant men as Stephen Hawking. Milner was also a devout Christian. And it was on this trip that Wilberforce came to discover that evangelicalism and intellectualism were not incompatible. In fact, being intellectually honest would require him to actually live the teachings of Christ in all spheres of his life—including his vocation.

Back in London, Wilberforce contemplated quitting Parliament altogether, fearing that politics would inexorably pollute his faith. First, however, he sought counsel from the aforementioned repented slave ship captain, John Newton, now a respected local church rector. Wilberforce had met Newton through his aunt (yet another example of his aunt and uncle’s early influence planting seeds that would later sprout). Much to Wilberforce’s surprise, rather than advising him to eschew politics, Newton advised him to use his perch for the glory of the Lord. But what would that look like? What great cause was he being called to champion?

Wilberforce later wrote in his diary that “God Almighty has set before me two Great Objects: The suppression of the Slave Trade and the Reformation of Manners.” With the help of a motley crew of Christians known as the Clapham Sect, a network of social reformers named after a wealthy London suburb, he would dedicate his life to these great causes. (It also didn’t hurt that he was a close personal friend of William Pitt the Younger, who at twenty-four, became the youngest prime minister in 1783.) Even with a little help from his friends, it still cost Wilberforce twenty-six years of constant struggle before Britain banned the slave trade in 1807, imposing fines on slave ship captains who transported slaves from Africa. Yet, Wilberforce continued the fight, until—just three days after hearing of passage of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833 (effectively banning the institution of slavery in the majority of the British Empire)—he died.

This is not the story of an overlooked or underrated hero; Wilberforce was celebrated in his day and for years after. Abraham Lincoln once declared that even “schoolboys know” that Wilberforce helped end slavery in Great Britain. Today, Wilberforce has been adopted as a hero to many social conservatives—a prime example of faith and politics intersecting for a Godly cause. Many modern right-to-life activists equate their fight to abolish abortion with Wilberforce’s uphill—but ultimately victorious—fight to abolish slavery. He fought the good fight, and one can think of worse men to emulate. Ultimately, William Wilberforce proved himself to be thoughtful, serious, devout, intelligent, and effective. He was also a happy warrior. British politician James Stephen recalled after Wilberforce’s death, “His presence was as fatal to dullness as to immorality.” If only we could say the same about many of today’s culture warriors.

Rise of the Christian Right

I began with Wilberforce’s story for several reasons: First and obviously, Christians are a key component of today’s conservative movement, and any evaluation or analysis of the movement’s strengths or weaknesses necessarily reflects their contribution. Wilberforce remains a prime example of how Christians can eloquently and effectively—and compassionately—contribute to public policy battles. This is not to suggest that Wilberforce (or Abraham Lincoln or Martin Luther King Jr.) was a conservative Republican. Though some comparisons can be made, the issue matrix has changed. Liberals may rightly claim ownership of some aspects of these men’s legacies. For example, Wilberforce fought against cruelty to animals, an issue today more closely identified with the Left than the Right. The larger point remains that Christians constitute a large portion of the conservative base, and though this has pros and cons, don’t discount the pros. I firmly believe that people of faith can and should make a positive contribution in politics. But I also believe that political involvement is seductive and fraught with danger. More and more young Christians are coming to the same conclusion. Decades after the Supreme Court’s ruling on 1973’s Roe v. Wade abortion decision, and as the culture has shifted Leftward on a variety of issues, Christians may fear that their involvement in modern politics has yielded little tangible results—except for, maybe, corrupting the faithful.

Additionally, a growing sense exists among an increasingly secular group of Americans that religion has done more harm than good in the world.56 And here, I’m not just talking about the Crusades, fundamentalist cults, or today’s radical Islamist movements like ISIS. Even libertarian-leaning conservatives sometimes argue that “do-gooder-ism” leads to a big-government “nanny state”—that “if we learned anything from Prohibition, it’s that you can’t legislate morality.” Yet, Wilberforce’s antislavery campaign stands as a shining example of why men and women of faith must involve themselves in the political process. And it wasn’t the last time people of faith flexed their political muscles for the good of humanity. Would our politics have been better served without William Wilberforce or Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.? Certainly not.

Still, while some of today’s evangelicals (a short definition of the term being “Protestant Christians who believe in a conversion experience and in sharing the Gospel as a mission”) are doing good work and enriching the intellectual discussion, the sad truth is that in recent decades, the influx of Christian conservatives into the GOP has arguably left both groups worse off. Meanwhile, as some more cynical observers have declared, it made the party resemble something akin to the cantina scene in Star Wars. It has been said that Christianity would be great if it weren’t for the Christians. I suspect this is a common lament of any group. As Sartre said, “Hell is other people.”

The Moral Majority

How did we get from William Wilberforce to the Duggar Family (of 19 Kids and Counting fame)? It was a process that began with the rise of the Christian Right in the late 1970s, which gave the GOP its foot soldiers and helped elect Ronald Reagan. And it didn’t happen by accident. Leaders of the conservative movement specifically sought to bring Christians into the movement. “During one conversation, I said, ‘Theologically conservative Americans are the largest tract of virgin timber on the political landscape,’” recalls Morton Blackwell, one of the leaders involved in courting the Religious Right.57 These conservative leaders discussed which pastor they should recruit. But, at that time, most theologically conservative religious leaders believed politics to be outside the scope of their calling. “We agreed that Reverend Jerry Falwell should be approached,” Blackwell continued. “He already had a popular, syndicated national TV program called The Old Time Gospel Hour.”

Among the delegation sent to Lynchburg, Virginia, to meet with Falwell was conservative leader Paul Weyrich, who observed, “There’s a moral majority out there waiting to be organized.” Falwell adopted the phrase as the name of his organization. As Falwell increasingly employed his TV program to encourage political participation, his viewing audience grew. Other religious leaders took note. They, too, started to urge their flocks to rise up and exercise their political rights. The news media dubbed the phenomenon the Religious Right. By 1980, millions of theologically conservative Americans were newly active in politics.

In many ways, the politicization of the church was a positive development. It certainly contributed to Ronald Reagan’s election, as well as to 1994’s Republican Revolution. New adherents brought numbers and zeal to the movement, but also an often less salutary “zealotry of the convert.”

Ideological Immigrants

The influx of Christians into the political process changed the GOP. How could introducing a large number of Southern evangelicals not change things? The Republican Party has struggled to absorb ideological “immigrants” into its ranks. As previously noted about the activists who became politically active after 9/11, just as ethnic immigrants contribute to a nation, making it more diverse and dynamic, political immigrants can help grow a party. But the influx of outsiders also poses serious challenges to any existing culture. Over time newcomers usually assimilate and provide tremendous advantages, but they also bring new ideas and customs to the party—and, for better or worse, this ultimately leads to change within it.

In the 1960s and 1970s, for example, the conservative movement gained the support of neoconservatives; a relatively small group of New York intellectuals (often, but not always, Jewish) whom Irving Kristol described as former liberals who had been “mugged by reality.” Just as many evangelicals departed the Democratic Party in the late 1970s and early 1980s, neoconservatives paved the way by abandoning the Left when the Democratic Party radicalized in the late 1960s. Whereas evangelicals provided ground troops, the neoconservatives infused the conservative movement with much-needed gravitas and intellectual firepower. Today, the neocon contribution is more controversial than ever. Because of the role played by some neoconservatives who served as the intellectual architects of the unpopular Iraq War, neocon has become an epithet meaning “warmonger,” and sometimes, even, an anti-Semitic code word—a perversion of the term’s original meaning. Some conservatives lament the neoconservatives’ involvement within the GOP, even suggesting that Bush-era adventurism was a result of their influence. Regardless, the addition of neoconservatives clearly injected a dose of intellectualism into the Republican Party. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the rise of Christian conservatism.

The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind

Christian historian Mark Noll wrote in his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind that the scandal is that “there is not much of an evangelical mind.” Anyone who has observed the stereotypical “dumb” Christian conservative (think Michele Bachmann) knows what I’m talking about. Things have improved since Noll wrote his book two decades ago, but evangelicalism still struggles intellectually. “Evangelicalism as an identity has lost its shape,” Gregory A. Thornbury (now president of the King’s College) said in a 2013 interview.58 “When prominent thinkers convert to Roman Catholicism, they speak of returning ‘home’ to the Great Tradition—it’s a milieu.” Meanwhile, evangelicals wander diffused, theologically and culturally, all over the map. It’s likely a predictable result of evangelicalism lacking the type of hierarchy and tradition that Catholicism, almost by definition, provides. Reinforcing this point, Thornburg quotes Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al,” saying that the evangelical worldview has “gone soft in the middle now…now that our role model is gone.”

Is Evangelicalism Destined to be Dumb?

So what’s to blame? How did Christianity (preserver of literacy in a barbarian-ravaged world; protector of the weak; the most powerful advocate of mercy and forgiveness) become associated with ignorance and intolerance? Why are people of faith so often portrayed in the entertainment world as either rubes and/or hypocrites? And why is this portrayal not always exactly unfair? (Hint: original sin!)

Can evangelicals blame their poor reputation on the inevitable product of a theology that lacks a clear hierarchy to instill order and discipline? Is the problem too many denominations? Competition is a good thing, but when it comes to matters of faith, isn’t it predictable that the denominations that prosper will be the ones preaching a gospel of emotion and prosperity—not of sacrifice or tradition? It hasn’t always worked out that way, but there is always a temptation to tell people what they want to hear.

It’s easy to gaze fondly back at the intellectual accomplishments of brilliant, saintly medieval philosophers such as the thirteenth century’s Thomas Aquinas and juxtapose them with a modern televangelist like, say, Joel Osteen. And this might even lead us to fix blame on the Protestant Reformation. But this is a logical fallacy. One could just as easily suppose that the Protestant belief in the “priesthood of the believer”—the notion that each Christian is responsible for his or her own salvation and therefore doesn’t need a priest to serve as an intermediary—is a powerful argument for taking charge of one’s own intellectual development. It seems that both Protestants and Catholics once took education very seriously. Consider, for example, that universities such as Harvard and Yale (originally Puritan) and Princeton (originally Presbyterian) started as religious institutions, to say nothing of numerous Catholic schools like Georgetown and Notre Dame, let alone the medieval church’s creation of the university system itself.

Moreover, early Protestants like Jonathan Edwards, one of the leaders of the Great Awakening, were clearly brilliant minds. But Edwards (and later, revivalists like Charles Finney) may bear some responsibility for the anti-intellectual urges that followed. Religious revivals, for example, were terrific at gaining converts and stirring emotion, but they were much less successful at imbuing believers with theological information. Even before television raised its first primitive antennae, intellectuals could lament how the spoken word was replacing the written word. Things we say extemporaneously tend to be less eloquent and more emotional. Demagoguery and sophistry are made easier. And while Edwards was a brilliant and intellectual writer, the era’s other leading revivalists, such as the pioneering Methodist George Whitfield, were great showmen—great orators. And once public speaking (not written sermons) became the primary way converts were won and sermons were understood, the die was cast. New adherents to the faith would necessarily be less intellectual and more populist. Edwards inadvertently helped, as Noll writes, to “plant the seeds of individualism and immediatism that would eventually exert a profound effect on Christian thinking.”

Another uniquely American element contributed to evangelism’s emerging anti-intellectual strain. As Noll notes, because the American government didn’t support any particular denomination, churches were “now compelled to compete for adherents,” which, in some cases, resulted in a virtual race to the bottom. I doubt if anyone reading this book wants to live in a nation that doesn’t support the free exercise of religion, and one supposes that competition and a free market have many positive effects, even for religions and places of worship. Because the stakes of eternal damnation are so huge, one can certainly appreciate the desire to place great emphasis on “fire and brimstone” salvation sermons meant to tug at emotional strings and win converts, and much less emphasis on discipleship or worldview—or how to actually follow the Christian walk—after the revivalist packs up his tent (think the very real Billy Sunday and Aimee Semple McPherson—or the very fictional Elmer Gantry) and heads off to the next town. Selling religion the way we sell used cars is, itself, a form of worldliness. A result is a large number of nominally Christian Americans who are neither spiritually committed nor intellectually equipped to live a Christian life. They have built their houses on the sand.

The Rise of Anti-intellectualism (and Its Notable Exceptions)

A famous moment that helped give evangelicalism its anti-intellectual reputation was the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial, in which a substitute Tennessee high school biology teacher named John T. Scopes violated state law by teaching evolution.59 As Richard Hofstadter notes in Anti-intellectualism in American Life, “The evolution controversy and the Scopes trial greatly quickened the pulse of anti-intellectualism. For the first time in the twentieth century, intellectuals and experts were denounced as enemies by leaders of a large segment of the public.”

John Scopes was actually found guilty (and fined $100—a sum he never paid), but that hardly matters. In the world of public opinion, mainstream culture has long accepted his ideas, while those opposing teaching evolution have gone down in history as inbred Neanderthals. But it’s worth asking why some Christians saw this as a hill to die on? Certainly, John T. Scopes, himself, did not present a serious danger. He was but a symbol. Moreover, the danger was not merely, or even principally, that people would start believing in evolution. No, like so many of our political battles today, the danger was that this would have a domino effect. People might begin to say, “If humans came from animals, then humanity isn’t anything different or special.” This opens a can of worms that might lead to all sorts of dangerous conclusions. In other words, the question wasn’t even really about evolution, but instead about human dignity. But there were other implications. If people began doubting the validity of what they thought about creation, then the entire Christian weltanschauung might be one big house of cards about to come tumbling down.

It’s worth noting that the Scopes trial happened in Tennessee, which is at least technically considered part of the South. The previous chapter discussed the South’s impact on the GOP, and, of course, there is a huge continuing overlap between Southerners and evangelicals. Gallup’s Frank Newport reported in 2014 that “residents in the South are more likely to believe in the creationist view of the origin of humans than are those living in other regions, making it clear why the fights to have creationism addressed in the public schools might be an important political issue in that region.”

The Scopes trial damaged the cause of Christians even though William Jennings Bryan actually won the case. It was a Pyrrhic victory; the national media trashed Bryan and treated the verdict with the same respect as O. J. Simpson’s acquittal. As John Maynard Keynes said, “Ideas are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else.…Sooner or later, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.” In the case of evolution, the introduction of this idea was more powerful than court defeats or electoral results. As Frederick Lewis Allen observed, “Legislators might go on passing anti-evolution laws and in the hinterlands the pious might still keep their religion locked in a science-proof compartment of their minds; but civilized opinion everywhere has regarded the…trial with amazement and amusement, and the slow drift away from Fundamentalist certainty continued.”

The Scopes trial laid the groundwork for the culture war divide that we’re still fighting today. As such, it is understandable why Bryan—a three-time Democratic nominee, a quintessential agrarian populist, and a foreign policy isolationist (to give you an idea of how much our politics has changed)—would take the stand during the trial, arguing for the prosecution and objecting to the notion that salt-of-the-earth taxpayers should fund a curriculum they find morally objectionable.60 Instead of a faith that recognized the need to be in this world but not of this world, these culture war fights led to an unfortunate split within twentieth-century Protestantism. There were, of course, exceptions. But it’s fair to say many believers were forced to make a binary choice between the devout, but dumb, fundamentalists on one hand, and the respected mainline Protestants, many of whom endorsed a sort of saccharine Christianity that in some cases rejected even the existence of a heaven and a hell, on the other. In the second half of the twentieth century, fundamentalists prospered numerically, while mainline churches withered.

In even what might be considered some of the darkest days, there were plenty of evangelicals interested in ideas. Billy Graham, for example, was the bridge between the grassroots and intellectual classes. Another notable example was Francis Schaeffer, who founded a Swiss commune called L’Abri that became a sort of Christian safe haven for 1960s expats trying to “find themselves.” L’Abri’s guests included hippies like Timothy Leary and Eric Clapton—all of whom were presumably subjected to Schaeffer’s nightly talks about Christian worldview. Another voice in the wilderness was that of Carl F. H. Henry, the first editor of Christianity Today, and one of the twentieth century’s most significant evangelical scholars. “Two of his works,” writes First Things, “provide the bedrock for what we now know as Evangelicalism (contra ‘Fundamentalism’), particularly as it intersects with Catholic thought.” Ensuing generations included some terrific thinkers and theologians, including names like John Piper, Albert Mohler, R. C. Sproul, Russell Moore, Lee Strobel, William Lane Craig, James K. A. Smith, Tim Keller, and Gregory Thornbury—just to name a few. Today, there are probably more evangelicals doing scholarly work than ever before, laboring to fix the “scandal of the evangelical mind.” But there’s much to do, because for too long Christians got away with ignoring ideas—in large part, because they could get away with it.

The Moral Majority Meets Highly Educated Americans

During much of the twentieth century, the secular elite still constituted a small number, and the Moral Majority could simply turn inward and tune them out. They really were the majority. But more and more Americans starting to attend college (partly because of the GI Bill, etc.), coupled with the ubiquity of a secular and often anti-Christian mass media, immeasurably complicated the political challenge of winning the hearts, minds, and votes of urban and college-educated Americans. This “evolution” happened over the course of decades, if not centuries. In the 1963 book The Lively Experiment, Sidney E. Mead writes that since about 1800, Americans have been “given the hard choice between being intelligent according to the standards prevailing in their intellectual centers, and being religious according to the standards prevailing in their denominations.” Granted, this is a false choice. But to the extent this was perceived to be true in 1800, imagine how true it is today.

Still, until World War I, most Americans could believe they were safely isolated from the outside world and, to a large extent, they were. And this didn’t just mean that our two great oceans separated us from entangling international alliances. Except for the very elite, most Americans were shielded from the world’s ideologies, philosophy, art, and literature. But just as we were eventually thrust into Europe’s world wars, we were also eventually thrust into the culture wars. Isolationism failed. We would have to be in this world, if not of this world. Christian conservatives’ failure to keep up intellectually—and even to acknowledge the necessity of doing so—had serious political implications that would eventually manifest. Is it a coincidence that, out of nine justices, not a single Protestant sits on the US Supreme Court? When they have gone looking for the most intellectually fit minds and temperaments for our nation’s highest court, Republican and Democratic presidents alike don’t tend to think of evangelicals.61

The Problem for Politicians

Today’s Republican politicians confront these lingering problems, contradictions, and conundrums. The tension between a conservative base consisting largely of evangelicals and an American public who increasingly holds in contempt some Christian values (and some Christians) creates problems. Politicians can pander to their bases but alienate the larger electorate, or pander to the larger electorate but alienate their bases. A third option is perhaps even worse: adopt a weak-kneed tentativeness that seeks to nuance everything and be all things to all people. Neither the politicians, nor their Christian supporters, have developed a coherent worldview that allows them to square their beliefs with science or modernity and to explain them in ways true to their faith yet eloquent and compassionate.

As recently as a decade ago, conservatives counted on winning on hot-button social issues. Today, these issues drive a wedge between a Republican politician trying to win a general election and his base. Answering these questions is too often a lose-lose proposition. The mainstream media constantly seeks opportunities to put Republican presidential candidates with evangelical backgrounds on the spot. For example, in 2015, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker (son of a preacher man) visited London and local journalists felt compelled to ask him about…evolution. Walker punted, setting off a debate over whether he was prepared to be president. Yet, he got off easy. During an interview with GQ right after the 2012 presidential election, Florida senator Marco Rubio, normally one of the GOP’s most eloquent spokespersons, was asked, “How old do you think the Earth is?” Rubio’s hemming-and-hawing answer, which included lines like “I’m not a scientist, man,” drew predictable scorn. (In between the Walker and Rubio question, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, a Rhodes scholar who majored in chemistry as an undergraduate, answered a similar question by declaring, “The reality is I was not an evolutionary biologist.”) Rubio’s dodge probably didn’t hurt his standing in the “invisible primary” that much, but it played into a larger narrative that Christian conservatives are antiscience.

Are these legitimate queries “wedge issue” questions? Some questions, even if they are “gotcha” questions (“Is it lawful to give tribute to Caesar; or shall we not give it?”), need to be answered head-on. Is such questioning an unfair example of the secular liberal media trying to destroy conservatives? The press certainly deserves some blame for helping to dumb down the discussion. During a 2008 debate, Republican presidential candidates were asked to raise their hands if they did not believe in evolution. John McCain, after affirming his belief in evolution, wisely elaborated with a smart and nuanced observation. “I believe in evolution,” he said. “But I also believe, when I hike the Grand Canyon and see it at sunset, that the hand of God is there also.”

In hindsight, it was the perfect answer. Whether he knew it or not, McCain was summoning a worldview that had been around for a long time. Galileo wrote, “God reveals Himself to us no less excellently in the effects of nature than in the sacred word of Scripture.”

Regardless of the media’s motives, good politicians have a worldview and have thought about philosophical questions. The good thing about these “gotcha” questions is that they reveal conservatism’s current incoherence. Forcing people to grapple with, and flesh out, their beliefs to comport with reality is a long-term service—especially for politicians who otherwise might never get around to doing it.