I have a piece today at Commonweal. Read it here.
A taste:
On April 5, 2020, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Donald Trump announced via Twitter that he would be streaming the Palm Sunday service at Harvest Christian Fellowship, an Evangelical megachurch in Riverside, California, run by Pastor Greg Laurie.
Laurie’s biography is a large part of his appeal. Imagine a member of the Beach Boys getting saved and forming a megachurch. Now seventy years old, he still exudes California cool: always tan and usually clad in blue jeans, denim jackets, sunglasses, and sneakers. Born in Long Beach, Laurie was raised by a single mother—a “raging alcoholic,” in Laurie’s words—who married seven times. At the age of seventeen, Laurie found God through the ministry of charismatic “hippie” preacher Lonnie Frisbee and the Jesus People Movement, which turned California hippies away from acid and sex and, during mass baptisms in the Pacific Ocean, toward Christ. Influenced deeply by the Jesus People Movement, Laurie pursued a dual calling as a pastor and an evangelist. Soon he was holding Billy Graham–style crusades in Anaheim’s Angel Stadium. Today, Laurie’s Harvest Fellowship reaches more than fifteen thousand people at four different campuses, including one in Maui.
Trump was already familiar with Laurie, who had earlier visited the White House to offer a “history” lesson to the president, Mike Pence, Ben Carson, and more than a hundred Evangelical leaders gathered for a thank-you dinner for their support during the 2016 campaign. Along with a number of Evangelical leaders and “historians,” Laurie has seized on a dubious, decades-old thesis that posits a close connection between the First Great Awakening and the American Revolution. This history is central to MAGA Evangelicalism, which sees in the former president’s movement signs of a new Great Awakening that will set the stage for another political transformation and solve the country’s countless problems.
Read the rest here.
Thanks for this, John.
One thing you touched on that’s been on my mind lately, in light of long conversations with old and dear Christian friends who have been swept into this movement: the relationship between evangelicals and scholarship. Suspicious on the one hand, but eager to grab onto to any outward form of scholarship that furthers or supports our agendas–whatever the basis or aims of those agendas might be.
I’m not giving up–I still recommend your work and others like it, I think it’s important, and I’m glad it’s there–but I am increasingly taking a different approach from duel scholarship (or “scholarship”). It’s theological: no matter what the “founders” thought or tried to do or really meant about Christianity and the nation, the ends for which those claims are employed today are heretical. There can’t be any such thing as a “Christian nation,” and there isn’t any responsible reading of scripture that shows otherwise. “Show me from the Bible how this promotes the gospel, or fails to distort or even deny the gospel” is where I’m at in these conversations.
Of course, I’m a philosopher not a historian, and these days more of a lay (amateur) church teacher and theologian than a scholar, so this approach in on my mind…
In any case, thank you again for your work.
That is an excellent article, John! A couple of things stood out for me. The first was your succinct description of Evangelicalism as “inherently populist and anti-intellectual.” That exact phrase could be ascribed to the MAGA movement as a whole, and it made me ponder whether the Evangelical movement’s swift and enduring embrace of Donald Trump and Trumpism is because, at their core, they share the same cultural DNA.
The second is your observations about the self-proclaimed “public intellectuals” to whom Evangelicals turn to defend their narrative. I took over an online course on American Exceptionalism in 2012 at my previous institution, and it was less historical than propagandistic, based on a Newt Gingrich book (I was mildly surprised not to see his name in your article!). Over time, I introduced more scholarship and less polemics into the course until, by the time I departed in 2022, it bore no resemblance whatsoever to the original course, and it challenged students to critically examine the concept of American exceptionalism to include the topic of America as a “Christian nation.” In the process, I weeded out several of the texts in the course to include articles by and interviews with David Barton, Eric Metaxas’ “If You Can Keep It,” and, eventually, the Gingrich book on which the course was initially based. I added John Wilsey’s excellent book on American civil religion, “American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of an Idea,” and German professor of British and American studies Volker Depkat’s “American Exceptionalism.”
Keep it up – I always enjoy your work!