PicoBlog

David French has emerged as one of American evangelicalism’s foremost ombudsmen. His criticism of this community—a group of predominantly white Christians to which French most certainly belongs—has both convicted and irritated evangelicals in recent years. I imagine this is because his words carry more weight than if they were coming from, say, a secular liberal lamenting the role of religion in public life. Indeed, French’s history as a religious liberty and First Amendment lawyer for groups like Alliance Defending Freedom demonstrate his Christian bona fides.

And perhaps it is because of his history in conservative evangelicalism that French has taken to occasionally castigating his brothers and sisters in the church, on issues ranging from racial justice to support for Donald Trump. At the risk of putting words in his mouth, it’s not that evangelicals are easy marks for his “elite” sensibilities; rather, he laments the direction of this influential Christian body and yearns for a healthier (and more Christlike) political engagement, one that does not confuse our calling as Christians with the necessity of winning at all costs.

His latest essay for the New York Times—titled Who Truly Threatens the Church?—is quintessential French. He accuses conservative evangelicals, having seen the possibilities of Trumpian politics, of adopting “the authoritarianism of previous American political eras.” He sees his fellow believers becoming more and more comfortable using the levers of state power to enforce “speech codes” and “purges” against speech and conduct they deem objectionable.

The reason for this, French believes, is the posture or mindset so often prevalent in American evangelicalism. This, he writes,

sees the Christian use of power as inherently protective, and the desire to censor as an attempt to save children from dangerous ideas. The threat to the goodness of the church and the virtue of its members, in other words, comes primarily from outside its walls, from a culture and a world that is seen as worse in virtually every way.

This perspective, he goes on to say, ignores the problem of sin as omnipresent in our fallen world, including among the faithful:

We are all our own greatest enemy — Christians as fully as those who do not share our beliefs. We do not, either as individuals or as a religious movement, possess an inherent virtue that should entitle any of us to rule. We shun the will to power because we rightly fear our own sin, and we protect the liberty of others because we do not possess all wisdom and we need to hear their ideas.

Christians are right to see the world as in need of salvation. This is the essence of the Great Commission. We ought to prioritize a cultural engagement that showcases the hope we have in Christ to those unfamiliar with Jesus’ good news. What we must be careful of, however, is confusing our command to “go … and make disciples of all nations” with “defeat the enemies of God using the power of government.”

“The attempt to control others,” French concludes, “will not preserve our virtue, and it risks inflicting our own failures on the nation we seek to save.”

This (finally!) brings me to the title of this entry. There is an unmistakable irony accompanying the rise of certain evangelicals’ adoption of Trumpian politics — namely, it is emerging at a moment when Christianity and religious belief in general have never been more protected in the American legal system.

Here is an incomplete list of recent U.S. Supreme Court cases since 2015 where the interests of Christians and other religious Americans have been, to some extent, affirmed:

That’s 10 cases in less than 10 years, each of them rendering decisions favorable to Christians and other religious Americans. While many of the same evangelicals discovering the appeal of power politics have lamented decisions like Obergefell v. Hodges and Bostock v. Clayton County, there are far more cases in which these same Christians have emerged victorious at the nation’s highest court.

And this is to say nothing of the growing infrastructure of Christian legal advocacy, with its eight figure budgets, smart attorneys, and increasingly savvy media and political operations.

This does not mean there aren’t legitimate challenges ahead for evangelical Christians, especially regarding cultural and political headwinds. Nor does this mean Christians should decline to pursue policies and a vision of government consistent with a Christian worldview. What this does mean, though, is things are not as dire as too many are claiming — certainly not dire enough to abandon our liberal democratic framework in favor of a post-liberal framework that just so happens to align with certain Christian beliefs.

David French is right: The state of American religious liberty (at least as conservative evangelicals understand it) is very, very strong. This alone should temper the allure of a politics of domination, even in an era when such a politics is becoming the norm. That, for now, should be enough.

If you clicked through to French’s essay, you ran across the name of Robert Tracy McKenzie. McKenzie is a history professor at Wheaton College, and is the author of the award winning We The Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy.

This reminded me that I haven’t yet made an important announcement: Reimagining Faith & Public Life 2023 will feature Robert Tracy McKenzie and Regent University’s Mark David Hall for a discussion on the role of American history in making sense of contemporary debates in faith and public life.

The prolific historian Thomas Kidd called McKenzie’s book “rollicking and insightful,” while French described it as “one of the best recent books about the American founding.” Prof. Hall, meanwhile, has written several books on religion and the founding era, including the recent Did American Have a Christian Founding?

We’ll be sharing more information in the weeks to come, but for now, go ahead and mark Thursday, September 14 on your calendars.

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