Our president has his head in the sand. Yesterday’s ABC News interview with George Stephanopolous was painful to watch. Instead of taking the opportunity to admit that the American evacuation of Afghanistan was an utter disaster, Biden gave the impression that if he had another chance to lead the American withdrawal he wouldn’t change a thing.
Meanwhile, the Taliban is executing Afghan troops. Afghan Christians are under surveillance. Afghan civilians and thousands of Americans are desperately trying to get out of the country. We all saw the video of some of them clinging to the fuselage of a U.S. military airplane.
Afghanistan’s democratic experiment is over. American allies in the country—translators, civil society workers, military personnel—fear for their lives. The advances in human rights that took place under the 2004 Afghanistan Constitution are in jeopardy.
Biden won the votes of many Americans in 2020 because he presented himself as a man of compassion. His empathy for people suffering under the weight of COVID-19 and systemic racism was palpable.
Neither of those character traits was on display in his interview with Stephanopoulos.
But the president’s lapse in compassion and empathy pales in comparison to the way some members of the Christian Right are responding to the Afghan crisis. We are witnessing yet another example of how the political captivity of conservative evangelicals has compromised their witness.
Rather than seeing what is happening in Afghanistan as an opportunity to put their faith into action by finding solidarity with the oppressed, standing-up for Afghan women, and welcoming the stranger in the form of thousands of suffering refugees, the Christian Right has used this moment to score political points, advance the culture war, strengthen media brands, and revisit the nativism that has long been a fixture of the evangelical experience in America.
Take, for example, Charlie Kirk. He is a Twitter provocateur, mobilizer of conservative youth, the founder of Liberty University’s Standing for Freedom Center (formerly Falkirk Center), and a regular speaker at evangelical megachurches. On his August 16th radio program, Kirk, with a voice filled with righteous indignation, claimed that Biden allowed Afghanistan to fall to the Taliban because he wanted “woke” middle-easterners like Minnesota congresswoman Ilhan Omar to enter the country and “change the body politic permanently.”
Jenna Ellis, Donald Trump’s election fraud lawyer and one of the first fellows at the Liberty University Standing for Freedom Center, tweeted, “Lawless elections have consequences.” Former Christian Right presidential candidate Gary Bauer called for Biden’s impeachment and warned that soon Americans will also be rushing to airports to flee not the Taliban but socialism.
The Twitter account of Christian Right political operative Ralph Reed has been relatively quiet in the Biden administration, but the smell of red political meat in the form of the president’s missteps in Afghanistan shook him from his slumber. In the last few days his feed has offered a steady stream of anti-Biden rhetoric. Robert Jeffress, the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, seems more concerned with comments made by MSNBC’s Joy Reid that compared the Taliban to the Christian Right than he is about using his influence to mobilize his followers to respond to the Afghan crisis.
In an August 17 interview with Christian radio host Eric Metaxas, Sean Feucht, a Christian Right activist known for his worship concerts and resistance to COVID-19 restrictions, called the Biden administration “a total failure.” He added, “What really frustrates me are all the social justice warriors that just a few months ago were out making everyone feel ashamed if they didn’t have a black square, and now they are just silent, they are complicit.”
Richard Land, the former president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, recently tweeted, “What is now happening to women and girls in Afghanistan is horrific and ghastly! Where is the outrage from American ‘feminists’ and liberal women’s rights groups?”
Some conservative evangelical pundits are using their platforms to attack evangelicals who voted for Biden.
But thank God there are evangelicals awake to the needs of the oppressed in Afghanistan and the refugees fleeing the tyranny of the Taliban. While the default response of the Christian Right is to bash Biden, these men and women—let’s call them social justice evangelicals—look past the political posturing and focus on real needs on the ground.
The National Association of Evangelicals, Council for Christian Colleges and Universities, the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, Bethany Christian Services, and a host of other evangelical organizations are calling on the Biden administration to welcome refugees.
The evangelical social justice ministry World Relief is working to promote peace and justice in the Middle East and serve the Afghan refugees arriving in the United States. Jenny Yang, World Relief’s Senior Vice President for Advocacy and Policy, said that the “United States should have been better prepared to respond to the humanitarian fallout in Afghanistan,” but she is encouraged by the U.S. commitment to evacuate as many people as possible.
According to reporting at Christianity Today, Christian aid workers have been present in Afghanistan for a long time providing food, medical care, and education. They have built bonds of friendship and community with the Afghan people. Many of them are committed to continuing their work in “whatever form it takes.”
Social justice evangelicals are faithfully engaged in a different, more Christian, form of politics. If they are “silent” at this moment, it is because they have little time to pontificate. They are too busy bringing the healing balm of the Gospel to a broken world.
John Fea is Executive Editor at Current
