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Faith in Your Team

Faith in Your Team

Last updated on: February 4, 2026 at 9:58 am by James F. McGrath

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Faith in Your Team 2026-02-04T09:58:13-05:00 James F. McGrath

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

One of the key topics I address in my new book Beyond Deconstruction is how so-called conservative Evangelical Christianity distorts the meaning of faith into something idolatrous.

As we have been witnessing the transformation of that group from one that claimed the ethical conduct of a candidate mattered deeply, to one that claims their conduct is irrelevant, I found myself thinking about this unquestioning allegiance to a party, which mirrors their allegiance to their church or denomination. The same attitude that ignores the Epstein files is at work in the covering up of sexual abuse in religious communities.

There is a marked contrast with how people commit to a sports team. They may make a decision to commit for life as a fan, but that doesn’t lead them to pretend that players do not make bad plays. It doesn’t lead them to refuse to see any player benched or fired for misbehavior.

I was skeptical of a claim that I saw circulating, but it turned out to be true. Donald Trump is mentioned more frequently in the Epstein files than Jesus is in the Bible.

Let’s come back to the similarity between modern Evangelicals’ political and religious allegiance, and the contrast with allegiance to sports teams. What is at the heart of this problem, and what can be done about it?

A good place to start is with how Evangelicals view faith as unquestioning allegiance to a party, whether political or religious. This seriously distorts the meaning of faith in comparison with the Bible, or rather, it substitutes the appropriate object of trust and allegiance, namely God, with something human-made. That is the very definition of idolatry.

When faith is understood as allegiance to a party and to its dogma, one has to stop believing one’s eyes. In the Bible there is a blessing pronounced on those who believe without seeing. There is no blessing upon those who see and yet refuse to believe (John 6:36). In the Bible, that is the very definition of hardness of heart.

When faith is understood in the biblical sense as trust in God, recognizing the limitations of one’s own understanding and ability to perceive and judge rightly. Fundamentalism inverts this. They claim that the Bible is given so that we may be certain, not acknowledging either that the Bible it the work of human hands (just like other idols in which people place their trust), and even if it were indeed infallible or inerrant, that would not change the fact that our interpretations would remain fallible. Once again, fundamentalism distorts the meaning of faith as articulated in the Bible.

They also turn believing the right things into a work that one does to earn one’s salvation.

As I wrote some years ago, “One can overemphasize doubt, but without any willingness to allow it to sift out those things that do not deserve our confidence, we are left with a blind faith that is essentially worthless, because blind faith can be placed in anything.”

If this kind of allegiance to either a religious group or creed, or a political party, distorts the meaning of faith, then the two become all the more diabolical when they are merged. Of course, when Christianity is involved, there is so much in the teaching of Jesus that challenges nationalism that the Christian label will be nothing more than a team name, lacking any of its authentic substance. That doesn’t mean that it won’t be harmful all the same, and perhaps even catastrophic. Take this quotation from a famous political leader:

The national government will maintain and defend the foundations on which the power of our nation rests. It will offer strong protection to Christianity as the very basis of our collective morality.

Today Christians stand at the head of our country. We want to fill our culture again with the Christian spirit. We want to burn out all the recent immoral developments in literature, in the theatre, and in the press – in short, we want to burn out the poison of immorality which has entered into our whole life and culture as a result of liberal excess during recent years.

We have been hearing more and more language of this sort in American religious and political life lately. This quote is from the address that Adolf Hitler gave after coming to power in Germany (from My New Order: The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, 1922-1939, pp. 871-872, edited by Baynes and published by Oxford University Press). If your response is to say that Hitler was a manipulator, garnering support from Christians while not being one himself, my reply is to say yes of course, and that is precisely what so many of us who are mainline and liberal Christians today are warning about!

Many people have lost their faith in Christianity or at least in Evangelicalism because of the way that their churches and leaders have kept warning about veering too far to the left, and yet have seen no danger in veering too far to the right, or at the very least have not taken steps to prevent it.

The message of Beyond Deconstruction is to say that it is good, truly a wonderful step in the right direction, that you lost your faith in your religious tradition, your unquestioning allegiance to your political and church team. It welcomes you into a more authentic form of Christianity, one in which the appropriate expression of faith in God and following Jesus is not to cover up the evil being done in God’s name, but to expose and challenge it.

When faith is in dogma or church or texts, one has to keep defending these idols from criticism, because their flaws cannot be hidden forever. Faith as trust in God frees one to explore, to ponder, to rethink, and do so many things that were previously off limits, but are crucial to a healthy and mature spiritual life.

I hope my book can provide the encouragement you need as you take your first step into a larger world of faith.

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