What Lies Within: Post-Truth Evangelical Christianity
What Lies Within: Post-Truth Evangelical Christianity
by Bruce Gourley
During the American Civil War, one Southern Baptist, speaking for many white Christians of the South, wrote that abolitionism was “the final antichrist.”
The gist of the statement, that black persons were inherently inferior to whites by decree of God, and that equality and freedom for all persons stood opposite the life and teachings of Christ, was daily “news” in the collective dozens, if not hundreds, of Christian newspapers in the antebellum and Civil War South.
This “news,” however, was entirely false. The Bible does not indicate that black persons are inferior to white persons, nor did Christ advocate for human inequality or slavery. Rather, Jesus, a first-century Jew, was most likely dark-skinned.
Yet so committed were many white Southerners to fake news that authorities in many of the region's states literally banished the truth about slavery. They confiscated and destroyed abolitionist literature. They ostracized anti-slavery southerners, driving many into exile. White southern evangelicals, meanwhile, did not want to publicly admit the brutality of slavery, especially the routine raping of enslaved black women by white men. Instead, they bragged of enslavement as the happy lot of black persons.
When slavery finally came to an end with the military defeat of the South, many white southerners embraced yet another lie by claiming that the Civil War was not about slavery – even though the leaders and constitutions of the Confederate states had clearly identified the enslavement of black persons as the reason for secession and the foundation of the Confederacy.
Denying historical truth, many white southerners thereafter lived lives grounded in a post-war, mythical story of a righteous Confederate States of America. From generation to generation, many history textbooks parroted the white supremacist lies. Conversely, voices of truth from black southerners were forcefully suppressed.
A native of the South, I was raised to believe the region's racist lies. Despite forced desegregation, my white culture remained no less certain of its racial superiority. But at the age of 17, a five-second, off-hand remark by a friend shook the make-believe world in which I unknowingly lived. Upon learning that I was a Southern Baptist, he responded, “Oh, the denomination that was founded to keep blacks in slavery.”
Absolutely stunned, I feebly replied, “No, that's not true.”
In reality, I had no idea whether it was true or not. I merely wanted it not to be true. As a Christian taught to seek the truth, I did just that, soon learning that my friend was right. I also discovered that few Southern Baptists had any interest in the truth about their denominational origins.
This was my introduction to a world of existential false narratives. At the time, I did not fully realize the power of cultural fables. Nor did I yet grasp the many other ways in which Christian communities often fail to tell the truth, whether willfully or unknowingly.
To be certain, the generations-old fake news and falsified history prevalent in much of the white South past and present is nothing new. In civilizations and nations, ancient to modern, systemic lies have served to reinforce what political elites, the wealthy, the socially privileged, the culturally dominant, or the discontented public want to believe.
Shakespeare, a great student and writer of the human condition, explored the dangers of imagined realities, or “false gazing,” in Othello. Craftily using words, performances and images to obscure the truth, Shakespeare crafted the character Iago with devastating effect to trick others into believing a false narrative.
By the time of Shakespeare, one of humanity's most influential advances, Gutenberg's printing press, had blurred the lines between fiction and truth through an unprecedented proliferation of written words.
The Protestant Reformation, initiated in 1517, was possible because of the Gutenberg-enabled flow of information.
Doing the world a great service by challenging a powerful, controlling and often abusive religious hierarchy, the Reformation nonetheless evidenced a dark side. In an emotional contest of words, purveyors of competing narratives feverishly published booklets and pamphlets. Clashing claims of religious truth on the printed page magnified conflicts between reformers, traditionalists, counter reformers and dissenters. Widespread tragedy ensued, too often in the form of death through execution or warfare.
One of numerous conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in the resulting free-for-all, the Thirty Years War of the 17th century alone resulted in some eight million causalities in Europe. In 17th century America, minority religious dissenters and dominant establishment churches utilized the press in a contest between freedom for all and discrimination in the name of religion. The dominant churches especially punished Baptists and Quakers, sometimes to the point of death. Undaunted, Baptists utilized the press effectively, ultimately playing a pivotal role in securing freedom of conscience, church-state separation and religious liberty for all in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Race, however, remained a great dividing line in America, and a bitter point of disagreement among Christians. A battle of printed words between abolitionist, progressive Christian evangelicals in the North and pro-slavery white, conservative Christian evangelicals of the South intensified the 19th century conflict over slavery. Thereafter progressive and conservative expressions of evangelicalism remained locked in theological, cultural and social conflict.
Twentieth century radio and television further elevated the struggle over information. Television images of white brutality against black persons helped propel Civil Rights victories in the 1960s. But in the marketplace contest for audiences' ears and eyes, professional journalism gradually lost ground to far-right radio hosts and television programming broadcasting false narratives attractive to yet defiant white Christians.
The late 20th-century invention of the Internet completed the revolution, giving everyone his or her own personal digital publishing platform paired with free, global distribution. Enabled by the Internet, conservative and liberal ideological echo chambers proliferated in the early 21st century, the former resonating with many evangelicals South and North, the latter with progressive evangelicals. Empowered in dark corners and alleyways of the online world, racists and white supremacists emerged with renewed prominence as hate crimes rose dramatically during the presidency of Barack Obama, the nation's first black president. Among more highly educated Christians, progressive evangelicals enjoyed greater prominence even as their public influence waned in the broader evangelical world.
By the second decade of the 21st century “evangelical,” a term typically equated with Republican Party-oriented white Christians, often associated with racism, and never truly embraced by black Christians, by-and-large became shorthand for conservative Christianity. A growing stream of progressive Christians drifted away from the term altogether, convinced that it publicly conveyed an ideology at odds with the person of Christ himself.
Then came 2016, the year in which false narratives and fake news played a critical role in electing a presidential candidate who campaigned on … false narratives and fake news. From his long-voiced racist lie about Barack Obama being born in Kenya, to his designation by fact-checking organizations as far and away the greatest liar of any presidential candidate they had ever examined, Donald Trump routinely and brashly flaunted his disdain for the truth.
Many evangelicals, for years absorbing fake news about Obama from conservative Fox News, far-right radio talk shows and extremist conspiratorial websites, were convinced that Obama was a foreigner and a Muslim. In reality, President Obama was an American Christian evidencing exemplary personal religious, moral and family values. Against the backdrop of evangelicals' captivity to false narratives about President Obama, in September 2015, presidential candidate Ben Carson declared that “I cannot advocate any Muslim candidate for president.”
The anti-Constitutional comment reflected post 9/11 fears about terrorism and served as a backhand swipe at Obama for refusing to use the phrase “Islamic terrorism” when discussing terrorist acts committed by Muslim extremists. In the minds of many evangelicals, Obama's reticence only fueled their belief that the president himself was a Muslim. Robert Jeffress, evangelical pastor of the influential First Baptist Church of Dallas and a long-time critic of Obama, praised Carson, who is black.
“To say that a candidate's faith doesn't make any difference is absolutely ridiculous,” pronounced Jeffress. “I mean, our faith gives us our worldview,” the pastor added. “It's the essence of who we are.”
Few black Christians, however, supported Carson. Rather, they typically viewed him in the tradition of a subservient black person who curried favor with dominant whites in order to achieve individual success, in the process ignoring white lies about and suppression of the black community. Ben Carson eventually faded from contention in the presidential contest.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump gained steam by systematically denigrating his Republican opponents on the one hand, and speaking to the racially-charged fears of white America on the other.
As late as the spring of 2016, evangelicals remained largely ambivalent about Trump. The New York billionaire was vulgar, sexually predatorily and – in his own estimation – had no sins of which he needed to ask God for forgiveness.
Nonetheless, two prominent evangelicals openly and enthusiastically sided with him. In January 2016, Jerry Falwell Jr., president of the evangelical Liberty University, endorsed Trump. Falwell's early support of the New York billionaire strained credulity. “In my opinion,” Falwell declared, “Donald Trump lives a life of loving and helping others as Jesus taught in the great commandment.”
The surprising and controversial endorsement angered many of his university's students. Although typically conservative in politics, Liberty students largely reflected the anti-racist views of their millennial peers throughout America. In the estimation of many, Trump was far from Christ-like.
“Donald Trump does not represent our values and we want nothing to do with him,” a public statement from a group of university students noted later in the year. “… He has made his name by maligning others and bragging about his sins. Not only is Donald Trump a bad candidate for president, he is actively promoting the very things that we as Christians ought to oppose.”
Christ-like or anti-Christ? Other than Falwell, few evangelicals ventured to bestow the qualities of Jesus upon Trump. For his part, the billionaire's limited personal interest in Christianity seemed to be summed up in his affinity for the non-Christ-like and controversial “prosperity gospel” pioneered by Norman Vincent Peale.
Even so, the Republican candidate courted evangelicals with promises of political favoritism. Robert Jeffress, abandoning earlier assertions that a presidential candidate's faith mattered, spoke for a growing majority of evangelicals in the summer of 2016 who were desperate for a return to political power. Refuting Falwell's assertion that Trump reflected the teachings of Jesus, Jeffress declared: “You know, I was debating an evangelical professor on NPR, and this professor said, ‘Pastor, don’t you want a candidate who embodies the teaching of Jesus and would govern this country according to the principles found in the Sermon on the Mount? I said, ‘Heck no.’ I would run from that candidate as far as possible, because the Sermon on the Mount was not given as a governing principle for this nation.”
Declaring that he sought a “strongman” as president, Jeffress said, “I want the meanest, toughest, son of a you-know-what I can find — and I believe that’s biblical.” Embracing Trump for the same reason that many Liberty students rejected him, Jeffress welcomed a bully, anti-Christ figure as the savior of American evangelical Christianity.
Rather than offending, Trump's campaign messaging of religious, racial and ethnic hatred spoke to the anger and prejudices of evangelicals fearful of Islamic terrorism, biased against black persons, and spiteful of Mexican immigrants utilizing government welfare. The candidate's promises to discriminate against Muslims, reticence to criticize white supremacists while condoning violence against African Americans at campaign rallies, and pledge to build a “great wall” to block illegal Mexican immigrants from gaining access to America routinely brought cheers from his supporters. Christian white supremacist groups praised Trump. Tellingly, most evangelicals made light of the endorsements.
Anti-democratic Russian President Vladimir Putin, like Trump a strongman figure, also praised the Republican candidate. Putin ordered his country's intelligence agencies to digitally hack the election process in favor of Trump, and against opponent Hillary Clinton. Trump publicly cheered Putin's efforts to damage Clinton, encouraging the Russians to do even more damage to the Democrat candidate.
Evangelicals, historically at odds with Russian ideology, shrugged at Trump's love affair with Putin and seemingly welcomed Russia's efforts to help elect Trump. After all, Putin had enacted anti-gay legislation and restricted independent media in Russia, policies America's evangelicals believed Trump would pursue in America if he were elected president.
Economically, many middle-class evangelicals suffering from years of economic inequality wanted to believe Trump's promise to “make America great again,” a reference widely understood as returning America to a 1950s nostalgic time of white prosperity and privilege. A great majority of economists, however, insisted that Trump's economic plan would richly benefit large corporations and wealthy Americans, do little for the middle class, harm the poor, and plunge America into much greater debt.
At the same time, evangelicals also applauded many of the candidate's most obvious lies. The more Trump parroted lies about Obama, Clinton, the Constitution, religion, welfare, the press, the Iraq war, unemployment statistics, immigrants, inner city crime, his tax returns and much more, the more evangelicals gravitated to him. In addition, evangelicals voiced no discernible concern about Trump's own history of employing illegal immigrants, outsourcing American jobs to foreign countries, or his track record of some 4,000 or so lawsuits resulting from his shoddy, illegal or otherwise unethical business practices.
When journalists pointed out the falseness of Trump's statements, evangelicals, preconditioned to false narratives, found comfort in their world of fake news that embraced self-serving lies as desired truth. Even warnings from conservative dissenters did little to persuade the growing chorus of evangelicals praising Trump in late summer and fall.
Although Hillary Clinton retained an advantage over Trump in almost all polls, fake news undermined reality. The polls ultimately proved unable to quantify the surging influence of far-right lies. As predicted, Clinton easily won the national popular vote. But in stunning fashion Trump triumphed in the electoral college.
Fake news had won. Who was most to blame was hard to tell, for Trump's campaign strategy had consisted of simply and effectively parroting the false narratives of his most rabid supporters.
The origin of the “fake news wasn't from Trump so much. It was from the people who hated Hillary Clinton,” reflected Brooke Binkowski, managing editor of Snopes.com, the grandfather of fact-checking websites. Speaking to how years of fake news swayed the 2016 presidential election results, John Ziegler, a conservative talk radio host, lamented, “Over the years, we've definitely brainwashed the core of our audience to distrust anything that they disagree with. And now it's gone too far.”
Fittingly, the Oxford Dictionary named “post-truth” the “word of the year” for 2016. “Post-truth,” according to Oxford, is an adjective defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.” Use of the term rose some 2,000 percent from 2015 to 2016. It is most commonly associated with “post-truth politics.” In other words, 2016 was the year of crowd-sourced lies, false narratives that especially resonated with evangelical Christians who no longer valued reality or truth that ran counter to their personal beliefs. Safely ensconced within their alternative world, they condemned or ignored truths reported by the “mainstream media.”
“Making everyone equal as an information source doesn't work very well in practice,” Snopes.com founder David Mikkelson reflected in hindsight.
More than any other medium, the Internet enabled the current manifestation of false narratives and fake news. Thanks to the Internet, the lies spread faster than ever, enabled by unethical entrepreneurs who financially profit from the selling of lies.
“It used to be,” lamented Kim LaCapria of Snopes.com, “that if you got too far away from the mainstream, you were shunned for being a little nutty. Now there is so much nutty going around that it's socially acceptable to embrace wild accusations. No one is embarrassed by anything anymore.”
Why is this? Speaking of online social media, Ziegler observed that “We now live in this fragmented media world where you can block people you disagree with. You can only be exposed to stories that make you feel good about what you want to believe.”
As during the antebellum and Civil War-era, embedded in the center of today's world of self-serving false narratives and fake news are evangelical Christians. But unlike the early-to-mid-19th century in which evangelicals were fairly evenly split ideologically regarding black slavery, today's evangelicals are far more likely to side with false narratives and fake news than the truth, in part evidenced by more than 80 percent of evangelical voters casting ballots for the largely fact-devoid Trump.
With Trump now in the White House, evangelical Christians are closing ranks even more tightly around their strongman. In the estimation of some observers, so few are the evangelicals who remain committed to a world of truth that American evangelicalism may have finally destroyed itself.
Christian dissenters across the ideological spectrum lament the separation of truth from evangelicalism.
More educated and focused primarily on Jesus' teachings to love neighbors as oneself, progressive and liberal Christians are struggling to counter a Trumpian world of false narratives and fake news. Some conservative Christians are also struggling in their dissent against pervasive lies, magnified many-fold by Trump, that foster racial and ethnic hatred. Russell Moore, executive director of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention and for years a conservative voice for racial and ethnic equality, consistently warned Southern Baptists about embracing Donald Trump. During the presidential primary season, Moore criticized the Republican candidate for fostering racism, nativism and bigotry. Now, many Southern Baptists, turning blind eyes to Trump's dark side, are demanding Moore's ouster. Dissent against the anti-Christ strongman is viewed as unChristian. In a world of false narratives and fake news, ethical voices like that of Moore are no longer welcome in much of Southern Baptist life.
More than anyone else in America, black persons understand the dynamics of cultural lies. Responding to the racial overtones of Trump's campaign, some 90 percent of black voters cast ballots against the bombastic Republican in the general election. Many black Christians perceive the election of Trump as merely the latest incarnation of hundreds of years of white supremacist politics, not coincidentally following the two terms of America's first black president.
Rev. James C. Perkins, president of the black Progressive National Baptist Convention and pastor of Detroit’s Greater Christ Baptist Church is deeply disappointed at white evangelical support of Donald Trump. Lamenting that white evangelical leaders ignored “justice and character,” he asserts that “the white church has to do some self-examination to see whether they are in line with the Gospel or just pushing a civil religion.”
Other minority Christian groups also voted overwhelmingly against Trump. Evangelical Kathy Khang, a Chicago-area Asian American Christian writer, questions the future viability of evangelicalism. Her reaction to Trump's election “was one of disappointment and honestly deep concern for myself and my family and my friends. It left me wondering if it’s worth continuing to call myself an evangelical, because white evangelicals have shown their support for him.”
Liberal Christian leader Lisa Sharon Harper sums up the pressing problem of evangelicalism in the age of Trump: “The white church demonstrated on November 8th that it is more white than Christian, and has a [greater] commitment to white supremacy than it does to Christ.”
Freedom and equality for all persons, although reflecting the life, teachings and spirit of Christ, yet remain abhorrent to many evangelicals, who for generations have fled from the biblical Jesus in order to protect their own selfish interests.
From the perspective of progressive and liberal Christians, the fake news and false narratives that empower much of evangelism past and present remain a blight upon Christianity and, perhaps more than at any time since the Civil War, a national, existential peril. America will soon discover just how deep and wide runs this clear and present danger.
Bruce Gourley is the executive director of the Baptist History and Heritage Society (baptisthistory.org) and the author of eight books. This essay is written especially for Christian Ethics Today.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
