openpolitics.com

For those of us on the left and the middle (and for some on the right), the ethos, rhetoric, and politics of Donald J. Trump are self-evidently evil. Thus, we conclude that those evangelical Christians who support him must act from depraved motives to the extent that his depravity appeals to them.

We see two obvious explanations of the fact that these conservative Christians support him in large numbers:

1. they have abandoned their once-noble principles, or
2. those principles were only ever a smokescreen behind which operated racism, classism, xenophobia, and other forms of prejudice.

..  I am just as sure that the obviousness of the moral meaning of the cause is a serious hindrance to it. The meaning of the struggle is no less true for becoming trite, but it is not the whole meaning. What follows is an attempt to see the less obvious element of that whole: support for Trump on the part of many evangelicals is a consistent outgrowth of a coherent political theology, one undertaken with noble intentions.

.. It seemed clear to many in Niebuhr’s time that the more we were committed to victory, the less acceptable it was to question our virtues or our enemies’ vices.

.. Niebuhr, however, is a realist. To him, realism means that descriptions of situations should be realistic rather than ideal, accurate even where inconvenient, rather than simple but inspiring.

.. As long as we understand and express only the obvious roots of this phenomenon in prejudice, and ignore the way in which those supporters understand themselves to be acting, we will prevent both meaningful dialogue and our own clarity about what is really going on.

.. Trump does not traffic in moral language. His is an almost entirely amoral political vocabulary, so it is hard to see how his supporters understand themselves to be supporting a moral project.

.. in his 2012 book Time to Get Tough, Trump called Obama and his diplomatic corps foolish, brainless “pansies” for not demanding half of Libya’s oil for the next twenty-five years in exchange for taking out Qadaffi.

.. That there were reasons not to make this deal other than idiocy and weakness does not seemed to have occurred to Trump. International law and norms of geopolitics are, from Trump’s perspective, for suckers.¹

.. Many liberals thought Bush had mercenary intentions in the second Gulf war (making “No Blood for Oil” bumper stickers), but Bush made it easier to imagine his supporters’ noble intentions because he framed the conflict in moral terms. Trump gives us none of that. His discourse is almost exclusively about power, self-interested negotiation, nationalism, size, strength, and so on.

Making empathy harder still, Trump is not just amorally calculating and commercial; he is openly immoral: vulgar, dishonest, petty, mean-spirited, racially insensitive, and so on.

Conservative (and especially white) evangelicals have a political vocabulary that is almost exclusively moralistic. They also value personal integrity and Christian principles in their politicians. This makes their approval of Trump opaque to those who don’t share it. What follows is my attempt to make their thinking more transparent.

.. Benjamin Lynerd’s insightful book, Republican Theology: The Civil Religion of American Evangelicals.

Lynerd coins the term ‘republican theology’ (note the small ‘r’ in republican) to describe the way evangelicals understand American politics in relation to divine purpose. He provides a historical description of evangelical political thinking to explain what appears contradictory or hypocritical to many observers: the way evangelicals combine libertarianism with strict government regulation on moral issues, for example, being against government regulation of the economy, but in favor of government regulation of marriage.

.. he does not claim it is un-problematically consistent. Rather, he shows it to be part of a largely coherent, though imperfect, moral-political logic.

.. According to Lynerd, subscribers to republican theology—that is, most American evangelicals—believe that the United States has special religious and moral status—even to the point of being a “chosen nation.” That status is both ordained for and a result of our practice of proper religion and proper government. These form the necessary conditions of the development of personal morality, of virtue that allows citizens to direct themselves.

.. Political freedom, in turn, allows the practice of right religion, which inculcates virtue, which is required for limited government. Lynerd quotes evangelical writer Os Guiness: “Freedom requires virtue, which requires faith, which requires freedom, and so on, like the recycling triangle, ad infinitum.”³ For republican theology, America’s historic success resulted from a carefully maintained mutual reinforcement of proper religion, morality, and politics.

.. They see expansive government as a threat to both religion and morality. When the government interferes in religion and the economy, we lose the conditions and incentives to develop the morals that make self-government possible.

.. We can have the first sort of self-government if and only if we have citizens capable of the second sort: mature, self-sufficient, responsible, hard-working, generous people learning from and creating strong families, churches, businesses, and communities.

.. In such a society, government regulation of people’s lives is not needed or wanted. The one exception republican theology makes is for government action to preserve the conditions necessary for the formation of self-governing citizens: respect for life, marriage, family, decency, and so on.

.. This need for exceptions to protect the conditions of morality is the source of the tension between libertarianism and moralism in evangelical politics: we must limit the government to foster morality and use the government to protect it. Understanding this relation, we can see how limiting government in most cases, while advocating restrictive moral laws in specific cases, is not hypocrisy, so much as a balance which must be struck between competing impulses—and there are such tensions in all political philosophies.⁴

.. For many on the left, for example, government assistance for the poor is an obvious moral good. From the perspective of those who subscribe to republican theology, however, the liberal drive to “help the poor” through redistributive policies is not moral heroism, but a naïve misunderstanding of what actually helps people and the economy. They see government intervention in the economy as creating dependence, enervating creativity, and stunting both economic growth and the development of human beings

.. While liberals are regularly scandalized by how little conservative Christians seem to “care about the poor,” conservatives often oppose the expansion of government, at least in part, precisely for the sake of the poor, both economically and morally.

.. The enthusiasm with which evangelical culture-warriors and champions of faith and family have embraced this secular, East coast, and thrice-married vulgarian is—on its surface—base hypocrisy, explicable only through unprincipled prejudice and ignorance. With reference to republican theology, however, we can see that—for many evangelicals—supporting Trump is at least in part the product of a coherent-if-imperfect, religio-political perspective faced with a difficult ethical tradeoff.

.. interpreting evangelical support for Trump as simply evil and ignorance obscures the drive for moral goods that lies behind it.

.. Lots of disastrous, even evil, political movements have been pursued for noble ends. It should prompt to us frame our criticism differently, however.

.. instead of dreaming up ever more strident denunciations of their evil intentions, we should try to show how their good aims have become confused or disordered.

Niebuhr helps us see that there are three confusions built into republican theology, affecting each of its three pillars:

1. moral self-government,
2. limited government, and
3. proper religion.

1) First, republican theology is confused about when the government should intervene to protect morality, favoring only a narrow and private set of issues—mainly marriage, gender issues, and the like. When they think about economics, the government’s job is exclusively negative. Republican theologians do not often think about positive government intervention as necessary to preserve the moral-pedagogical role of the markets.

.. actual political practice has been more pragmatic, collectivist, and proactive than our creeds describe. As an example, Niebuhr notes that Thomas Jefferson was a champion of small government and an idealist about the potential for citizens to self-regulate, but also a realist about the economic conditions required. Jefferson believed, like many evangelicals today, that the economy was a school of virtue, but he believed that one could only matriculate in that school through independent land ownership.

.. He used the government to distribute wealth to the common person to help shape a society in which his creed made sense. Thus, he saw that the exceptions to libertarianism we need in defense of morality included material interventions to make economic participation more generally available.

Niebuhr believes that Jefferson’s realism worked and the federal effort to expand the frontier in the 1800s served as a massive infusion of wealth into the working class.

.. Economic opportunity meant the government had to do much less to maintain social order. He writes: “It can hardly be denied that the fluidity of our class structure, derived from the opulence of economic opportunities, saved us from the acrimony of the class struggle in Europe…When the frontier ceased to provide for the expansion of opportunities, our superior technology created ever new frontiers for the ambitious and adventurous.”⁵We have been able to avoid more aggressive government involvement in society because economic fluidity has mitigated the social tension that requires government intervention.

.. With the frontier closed and industry no longer expanding, we will face new threats to our freedom: populist and authoritarian politicians who promise they can restore economic opportunity through regressive and nationalistic policies. Niebuhr foresees the end of easy economic fluidity if industrialization ever ceases to provide a path into the property-owning classes.  He concludes that, “ultimately we must face some vexatious issues of social justice” that have arisen in Europe and which will require the same sort of pragmatic social management they have developed.

.. Republican theology has become absolute in its opposition to government involvement in the economy. However, there is no reason it cannot learn from America’s past and see such intervention as in service of morality by allowing access to the economy, rather than as dependence-causing disincentives to such participation. This sort of exception to libertarianism should be in line with the basic logic of republican theology.

.. providing universal quality education, protecting sustainably productive land, ensuring a healthy population, and guaranteeing a path from steady work to property ownership. These strike me as areas in which bipartisan cooperation should be possible.

.. 2) The second confusion involved in evangelical support of Trump concerns the belief that limiting government always results in an increase of the kind of freedom republican theology values.

.. This confusion is the result of a naive view of power. Niebuhr’s description of the bourgeois liberal describes the modern conservative well. Such a person is, “oblivious both to the elements of power in society and to the disproportions of power in economic life. Power, in the thought of the typically bourgeois man, is political. He believes it must be reduced to a minimum.”⁶ In the discourse of contemporary conservatism, political power is the only type that threatens economic freedom. 

.. Conservative evangelicals believe that a reduction in government involvement in the economy removes the problem of power, resulting in free encounters between individuals. They are under what Niebuhr calls the “illusion of classical liberalism that power is not an important element in man’s social life.”⁷ They assume that competing interests make for justice without regulation.

.. Niebuhr, however, insists that such organic justice would be possible “only if the powers which support interest were fairly equally divided, and they never are.”⁸ What Niebuhr recognizes and republican theology misses is that imbalances in economic power are as great a threat to the wellbeing and freedom of individuals as political power.

.. It was largely impossible for black Americans to buy homes in the South under Jim Crow. This is overt political power, the kind that worries republican theology. What is less well known is that it was also largely impossible for black Americans to buy homes in places like Chicago. Private real estate covenants outlawing selling or renting to African Americans in whole neighborhoods, racist lending policies, and great inequalities in capital did the job nearly as effectively as the laws of the South.

.. All great imbalances in power lead inevitably to injustice. Corporations and the rich can collude to lower wages, to create dangerous conditions for workers, to pollute the air and water, to sell dangerous products, to sway elections and public opinion, and generally exert their influence irresponsibly. Less insidiously, the wealthy can simply outcompete the poor in the race for important goods and services.

.. there is no reason to think that a decrease in the deployment of political power in the economy will automatically lead to a proportional increase in individual freedom. Covert forms of power will fill the vacuum emptied by the state

.. We must use the power of constitutional democracy to check both the rise of authoritarian politics and the hegemony of irresponsible capital. We need checks against tyranny, but we also need strong consumer and labor protections and corporate transparency, and we must protect democracy from distortion by the influence of money. Freedom does not blossom where government retreats; freedom is possible when power, including the government, checks power, including economic power, in defense of the individual.

.. 3) Finally, there is significant confusion regarding the third and final leg of the republican theology stool: proper Christian faith as a necessary precondition of a flourishing democracy. I see many problems here, but allow me to highlight just one.

.. Niebuhr notes that the earliest Puritan settlers believed God’s will to be inscrutable and did not count their initial successes as merited blessings. He calls their transition from such pious humility to bright confidence that their success came from their faith and virtues a “descent from Puritanism to Yankeeism.”¹⁰ Lynerd, likewise, notes that the “evangelical gospel of the First Great Awakening” (think Jonathan Edwards), with its “dim view of human perfectibility” was something “republican theology…had to overcome.”¹¹

.. Niebuhr’s work picks up a strain of pessimism about human perfectibility that runs through Augustine and Luther, which is deeply ambivalent about any straightforward connection between either faith and virtue or virtue and flourishing. Republican theologians would be well served to recognize that their take on this is not the only, or even the majority, Christian position.

.. In a forthcoming article¹² in Sociology of Religion, Samuel L. Perry, Andrew L. Whitehead, and Joseph O. Baker argue that what they call “Christian nationalism” was a “robust predictor of voting for Donald Trump, even after controlling for economic dissatisfaction, sexism, anti-black prejudice, anti-Muslim refugee attitudes, and anti-immigrant sentiment, as well as measures of religion, sociodemographics, and political identity more generally.”

.. Where republican theology holds up political liberty as the necessary condition of right faith, Christian nationalism prefers the government to privilege Christianity. Sociologists identify Christian nationalism in their subjects by testing agreement with statements like, “The federal government should declare the United States a Christian nation” or disagreement with ones like “the federal government should enforce strict separation of church and state.”

.. According to the authors of the study, Christian nationalism draws heavily on Old Testament themes wherein Israel was “commanded to maintain cultural and blood purity, often through war, conquest, and separatism.” Christian nationalism, in actual practice, thus often carries with it racialized notions of purity. 

.. “Christian nationalism is a strong predictor of antipathy toward racial boundary crossing,” including interracial marriage. In surveys, Christian nationalism correlates strongly with racism and xenophobia.

.. I do not think that republican theology is necessarily tied to Christian nationalism or that Christian nationalism is necessarily racist. That said, it is an empirical fact that republican theology, Christian nationalism, and racism often overlap in our society.

.. This is a sociological, not a priori, criticism. While there is no necessary causation between republican theology, nationalism, xenophobia, and racism, I want to suggest that their overlap is also not accidental.

..  As long as we identify early America as a successful economic and political experiment and credit that success to morality and religion and we are willing to make exceptions to libertarianism to protect the preconditions of that success, then we will face the constant temptation to elide culture, race, religion, and morality and to use the government to enforce racial, cultural, and religious purity.

.. If republican theology is going to persist as a defensible option in American politics, it has to separate itself, consistently and vocally, from the tribal and bigoted elements of Christian nationalism. 

.. The more evangelicals support figures like Trump, who embody “nationalism” more than “Christian” and are so publicly and unrepentantly immoral and who (at the very least) signal to bigots that they are friendly to their cause, the harder it will be for others to see any moral meaning to their behavior. The obvious meaning of that support will become, even more than it is now, the only visible meaning.