Hamlet and Trump

Something is rotten in the state of Evangelicalism . . . 

Each night my husband and I cuddle up with our trifocals and Cabernet and read Shakespeare. It’s either this or pickleball. We started with the Tempest because he knows it well; for me, it was an easy on-ramp to plays less reminiscent of Gilligan’s Island. A few nights ago we began Hamlet, a play I loved in high school but haven’t read since. As my husband recited the ghost’s account of murder at his brother’s hands (poison in the ear!) I felt an eerie sense of recognition. Where had I heard of a situation just like this . . . ?

Oh, that’s right. Evangelical America, 2024. The church some of us thought we knew has been poisoned. A faithless majority wallows with its murderer in the rank sweat of a lascivious bed. Did I mention that the lascivious bed is in Mar-a-Lago? In this analogy, I, and perhaps you, are Hamlet. We are the distraught evangelicals who see Christian Nationalism for the poison it is, and Donald Trump as an ear-debaucher.

I sympathize with Hamlet’s reaction to his predicament. Faced with his mother’s faithlessness he becomes cynical about humanity in general and then women in particular. God has given you one face and you make yourselves another. Or, to put it more personally, It turns out you weren’t who I thought! For a lot of people it’s easier to forgive moral failure than the sense of being lied to or made a fool. It’s destabilizing to find out that someone you love—especially a parent—is someone else entirely.

Hamlet’s women are my evangelicals. I never thought I was love blind. At least since my teens, I’ve observed that “my people” are prone to gullibility if not guile, over-simplification if not insincerity. At conversion, most of us undertake a quest for a relationship with God that is both interior and intensely communal. I’ve watched this quest detour into some nasty pits of narcissism. However, it usually starts with an honest conviction of personal sin and frailty, which can be a prophylactic against pride and self-obsession: Lord have mercy on me a sinner. 

In fact, an acceptance of frailty can energize faith in some beautiful ways. Humble yourselves that he may exalt you. Many devout evangelicals have tried to do just that, eschewing wealth and influence to pursue lives of service to others. On my parents’ wall in the 70s was a framed picture that declared Live simply so that others may simply live. My sister said that this motto was the reason we never had any good clothes. To me it was evidence that we weren’t hypocrites, that my parents intended to do what Christ taught in the Gospels.

There are still many humble and godly individuals in the evangelical church. I don’t mean to suggest that hope is lost or that I’m looking around for a bare bodkin. But either the general ethos has shifted or I’ve never seen my people clearly. When did the identification between America and conservative Christianity begin? And what about the chest-thumping that so characterizes it? Did it all start after World War II with preachers fighting the Cold War in the pulpit and Billy Graham cultivating friendships with three presidents? Did it shift into high gear with the self-congratulatory narrative of the Moral Majority in the 80s? Did talk radio amp up the boorishness in the 90s? Has social media now lit a fire under our arrogance and pride, turning Lord have mercy on me a sinner into Lord I thank thee that I’m not a trans freak, and Let’s Go Brandon.

Or are pride and the pursuit of political influence a feature rather than a bug—a part of the Protestant preacher cult that’s shaped American life since George Whitfield toured the colonies in 1740?

It’s instructive to watch online church with my dad at his assisted living facility. This Sunday we sit in front of an enormous screen and sing hymns youtubed in from a flagship church of the Southern Baptist Conference. The hymns are sweet—they are still the songs of my childhood, written in humbler times. After them cometh a sermon loosely based on Daniel 2. The pastor declares God to be in control. Then he artfully (as in: with duct tape and wire) connects the ten toes of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream statue to the horrors of globalism and the European Union. With a glob of superglue he attaches a map of the EU to the lack of true Bible teaching in Southern Baptist churches. Next, he affixes this rickety exegetical contraption to the vicious characters of some Baptists who have criticized him. These Baptists, he says, are the true enemies (for at least the globalists have left him alone). Finally, he opines on the stupidity of elites in Davos who believe that cows are warming the planet with all their farting. He does not use the word “farting,” which elderly evangelicals know is a curse word, though they do a lot of it. How dare the global elites restrict our access to hamburgers in order to solve the made-up problem of bovine flatulence?

Pulpit pound, smash goes the exegesis.

This message, which ends with a glittery flourish about trusting the Lord, is a preacher sandwich. It’s two slices of “God’s in charge” with a big wedge of “I should be running the country” between. In response, the wheelchair-bound lift hands to praise the Lord. For what? This really is not the Christianity of the Gospels. 

Maybe the self-referential gong-banging—the “it’s all about me” ear poison—was in production way before the twentieth century, even before the Great Awakening and the founding of America. Maybe it’s just the ancient human poison of pride, at least as potent in Jesus’ day as now. Christ had something to say about haughty leaders blowing their own horns and profiting from their access to power. You are those who justify yourselves before men, but God knows your heart. For what is highly esteemed among men is an abomination in the sight of God. 

I see Donald Trump as very dangerous, and I enjoy blaming him for the corruption of the church I still love. But that, I’m thinking, is like blaming flies for the rotten bananas you find on your counter after vacation. Nobody likes flies, but flies will be flies. You need to do something about your bananas. In 2016, when Trump first invited evangelical elites into his lascivious bed, was he surprised at how fast they pulled off their purity rings? Me too. Had he assumed that seduction would take a little longer? Me too. 

It truly is my own sense of being foolish or vulnerable—the realization that I didn’t know my people as well as I thought—that hurts most. I guess a lot of us find ourselves now in a time of reckoning. We love our people, but we see them, and perhaps ourselves, more clearly. Is that a good thing? Yes, but it also matters what we do next. Frailty, thy other name is humility. 

M. Elizabeth Carter is a counselor and writer living in Alabama.

^{David Tennant as Hamlet, BBC (2009)}