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Why are Christians So Angry and Fearful?

Why are Christians So Angry and Fearful?

Last updated on: July 26, 2020 at 6:00 am by Vance Morgan

Why are Christians So Angry and Fearful? 2020-07-25T13:21:02-04:00 Vance Morgan

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I am currently working my way through Kristin Kobes Du Mez’s brand new book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. It’s a scholarly account of how white evangelical Christians not only supported, but continues to support the least Christian president in American history. The author investigates this phenomenon, not as a “one off” aberration, but rather as the culmination of many decades of repackaging and reinventing the Christian gospel, successfully fusing it with a particular political and social agenda. As the book jacket describes,

The values and viewpoints at the heart of white evangelicalism today—patriarchy, authoritarian rule, aggressive foreign policy, fear of Islam, ambivalence toward #MeToo, and opposition to Black Lives Matter and the LGBTQ community—are likely to persist long after Trump leaves office.

I share with Kristin Kobes Du Mez a rootedness and history in the very white evangelical Christianity that she describes and evaluates. We both grew up in it. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about her book when I have finished it (I’m about halfway through). For the moment, I am reminded of an essay I posted on this blog a bit over a year ago. How exactly is it that the message of the gospel becomes angry, fearful, and aggressive?

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At its best, faith is the overflow of gratitude, the attempt to live as if we are loved, the fragile hope for something better on the other side of pain and death. And this feather of grace weighs more in the balance than any political gain. Michael Gerson

One of the great liberating moments of my life was when I was given the opportunity as an undergraduate at a secular liberal arts college to read, analyze, critique, and appreciate the Bible as literature. I had spent the first eighteen years of my life with this book looming over me, forced to read it in its entirety every year and to memorize significant portions of it, not as perhaps the most influential book ever assembled, but rather as the inspired and literal Word of God. Studying it as literature in college turned what had been a lifelong burden into a voyage of discovery.

I was reminded of this when reading “Slander,” the final essay in Marilynne Robinson’s fine collection of essays, What Are We Doing Here? She writes that when many years ago she applied for a faculty position at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, from which she recently retired, part of the job description was that the successful candidate would be able to teach the Bible as literature. Noting that “people always seemed surprised to hear this,” she goes on to describe why she is surprised that people are surprised, since “the Bible is so important to our literature that young writers are usually interested in it, if only because it helps them to understand earlier writers they admire.”

In short order, though, she reveals one of the primary reasons why people might be surprised at a professor teaching the Bible at a secular, public university.

Many of [my students] were uncomfortable at being seen carrying a Bible on campus because the groups who have been so successful at claiming Christianity as their own exclusive province have also been successful in associating it with intolerance, guns, and hostility to science, among other things.

In this essay, Robinson clearly and provocatively describes how “Christianity” has, in the imaginations of many in our country, come to mean something that is both slanderous and scandalous. Two years ago in The Atlantic Monthly, Michael Gerson—the former main speech writer for George H. W. Bush and an evangelical Christian—describes this twisted version of Christianity, an unholy marriage of faith and politics, this way:

For a package of political benefits, these evangelical leaders have associated the Christian faith with racism and nativism. They have associated the Christian faith with misogyny and the mocking of the disabled. They have associated the Christian faith with lawlessness, corruption, and routine deception. They have associated the Christian faith with moral confusion about the surpassing evils of white supremacy and neo-Nazism.

Michael Gerson The Atlantic Montly

No wonder Marilynne Robinson’s students are uncomfortable carrying Bibles around campus. Making it personal, no wonder I am far more inclined to call myself a “person of faith” than a “Christian.”

It is well-known by now that eighty percent of white voters identifying as evangelical Christians in this country voted for Donald Trump in November of 2016; the numbers of support in this demographic have not diminished. Any chances for Trump’s reelection in November 2020 depend, at least partially, on his receiving similar support from evangelicals at the polls. Robinson’s and Gerson’s stories of how this happened are somewhat different, but share one fundamental observation: a primary motivator for the world view of many American Christians is fear. Gerson writes that these Christians have turned to Donald Trump for protection as a playground weakling might use his lunch money to pay for protection from the schoolyard bully. Protect my interests at all costs. Gerson writes:

The primary evangelical political narrative is adversarial, an angry tale about the aggression of evangelicalism’s cultural rivals. In a remarkably free country, many evangelicals view their rights as fragile, their institutions as threatened, and their dignity as assailed. The single largest religious demographic in the United States—representing about half the republican political coalition—sees itself as a besieged and disrespected minority.

Robinson agrees, noting that

They imagine they are coerced by other people when they are in fact trapped in their own fears, and they resent those imaginary others for posing this dreadful threat. They imagine the outside world as being attended with every undesirable trait they associate with secularism, having invented most of them or learned them from the like-minded . . . The great surrender of meaningful freedom, the great cession of freedom, is the habit of fear. It seems to be assumed that any cultural or intellectual jostling that results from a diverse population together in one place must be hostile and threatening. Lord have mercy. We are normalizing cowardice.

Keeping in mind the apostle John’s directive that “perfect love casts out fear,” those of us who claim to be followers of Jesus would do well to remember what a faith rooted in love rather than fear looks like. Marilynne Robinson writes that

Christianity is not scorned or rejected because it is the Gospel of faith, hope, and love but because this Christianity of theirs, on whatever pretext, is determined to bring bad news to the poor and the stranger, and is even self-righteous about this . . . Always, but certainly in situations when great things are at stake, it behooves Christians to think and act like Christians. This would mean practicing self-restraint, curbing our speech, remembering that our adversaries are owed the respect due to the divine image . . . In the great majority of cases, a sin is injury done to another person, other people, who, we must assume, God loves at least as much as he loves us. The loving-kindness Jesus models for us is very largely a matter of feeding and healing those in need of such care.

Accordingly,

People who claim to care for the future of Christianity should listen to their critics rather than falling back on resentment and indulging the notion that they are embattled and abused by rampant secularism . . . If slander is a factor in all this, the first object of slander, the one traduced, is Jesus of Nazareth. And this is not the work of the atheists.

One way to ensure that one’s faith is not co-opted by fear is to remember that, as the New Testament narrative frequently shows, love often looks like failure—the sort of failure that we naturally seek to protect ourselves against using any means necessary. But often that protection turns what we claim to value most highly into a mockery of itself. At the heart of faith is something fragile, holy, pure, and impossible to destroy—something that thrives not when protected but when openly exposed and released. As Michael Gerson beautifully describes at the end of his article,

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