Christianity Today, the evangelical magazine founded by Billy Graham, has editorialized that President Trump “should be removed from office.” Cue the dramatics. Richard Painter, a former George W. Bush White House ethics lawyer, said of Trump: “This is it. He’s finished.” Yoni Appelbaum, an editor at The Atlantic and a forceful advocate for impeachment, wrote, “If any endorsement still matters, it’s this.”
Count me skeptical.
In September, the Public Religion Research Institute found that white evangelicals overwhelmingly wanted Trump to be the 2020 Republican nominee. Eighty-two percent of white evangelicals preferred Trump to any alternative, compared to 75% of white mainline Protestants and 73% of white Catholics.
According to Christianity Today, removing Trump from office “is not a matter of partisan loyalties but loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments.” The magazine is open to this being done “by the Senate or by popular vote next election.” Carl Trueman, a professor of biblical and religious studies at Grove City College, calls this an “astounding claim” that amounts to “accusing every Trump voter of heinous sin, however reluctant or conflicted he may be.”
Christianity Today’s editorial is unlikely to have real political significance, but it is nonetheless an interesting window on the tensions within the evangelical world.
Evangelicalism has always been a populist movement, and its piety has always been closely tied to suspicion of religious and political elites. Movements as various as circuit-riding Methodism, Bible-thumping Baptists and black churches all encouraged the very American idea that the common man knows best.
This populist energy helps explain evangelicalism’s broad appeal, but it causes problems for the evangelical leadership class. It makes the phrase “evangelical elite” almost a contradiction in terms, like “Bilderberg proletarian” or “blue-collar Aspen attendee.” Those evangelical leaders who are recognized as leaders by the evangelical base possess a populist streak. They tend to have gained prominence through electoral politics, mass media or entrepreneurial forms of evangelism — all activities that require a sense of the crowd and a common touch.
By contrast, evangelical leaders who have come up through established institutions tend to acquire the training and tastes of the wider American elite. They often disdain the religious and political populism of the base. Whatever their theological convictions may be, these elites have ceased to be evangelical in a sociological sense. And evangelicalism is more exactly defined sociologically than theologically.
Christianity Today is a case in point. Ask an editor there what she thinks about Israel, Trump, feminism or Fox News, and you will get a very different answer than you would from most American evangelicals. The magazine’s young contributors more ardently desire to freelance for The New Yorker than to appear on Tucker Carlson, despite the fact that their parents would be more impressed by the latter.
These people hold less sway among evangelicals than the editors of liberal publications do among their constituencies.
They also have functionally ceased to be evangelical. There is no dishonor in that. As a former evangelical-turned-Catholic, I am well aware of the drawbacks of the evangelical movement. But writers who trade on an evangelical identity that they no longer really share ought to do the decent thing and admit it.
Occasionally one of my Jewish friends asks me whether he should be worried that evangelicals are turning against Israel. Each time I explain that though certain evangelical elites have turned against Israel, the evangelical base has not. And because the evangelical movement is innately populist, these elites are either irrelevant or sure to be replaced. Something like that is true with respect to Trump.
When I was a teen, I subscribed to Christianity Today and eagerly read the column written by Charles Colson, the Nixon fixer who underwent a jailhouse conversion after Watergate. Years later, I had the privilege of getting to know Colson through Evangelicals and Catholic Together, the ecumenical group he had helped to found.
I admired his ability to combine high principle with a clear-eyed view of politics. It is a difficult balancing act, one that Colson was not even attempting in his Nixon days. But even after his conversion, Colson remained a man of the right.
Nothing like that can be said of the current leaders of Christianity Today, who have moved to what is generally called “the left” but might be better described as the assumptions of university-educated professionals. It’s a shame. If one is going to leave evangelicalism, there are better destinations than gentry liberalism.
Matthew Schmitz is a senior editor of First Things.