One of my colleagues in the Messiah University English Department asked ChatGPT to summarize my critique of evangelical Christians who support Donald Trump for president. Here’s its response:
John Fea, a historian and author, has been a vocal critic of evangelical Christians who support Donald Trump for president. His critique centers on several key points:
- Moral Inconsistency: Fea argues that evangelical support for Trump is morally inconsistent. Many evangelicals traditionally emphasized the importance of character, integrity, and Christian values in leadership. Fea finds it troubling that some evangelicals are willing to overlook Trump’s personal behavior, including his history of dishonesty, vulgarity, and accusations of sexual misconduct.
- Fear-Based Politics: Fea contends that much of the evangelical support for Trump is driven by fear, particularly fear of losing cultural and political influence in a changing America. He believes this fear leads them to embrace a candidate who promises to protect their interests, even at the expense of Christian principles like love, humility, and justice.
- Power over Principles: Fea also critiques evangelical leaders for prioritizing political power over religious convictions. He argues that by supporting Trump, evangelicals are compromising their witness for the sake of political gain, aligning themselves with a figure who, in his view, embodies values antithetical to the teachings of Jesus.
- Historical Perspective: As a historian, Fea often situates this evangelical support within a broader historical context, noting how American evangelicals have, at various points, aligned themselves with political movements that promised protection or influence, sometimes at the cost of their core beliefs.
Overall, Fea’s critique highlights the tension between evangelical values and the political pragmatism of supporting Trump, questioning whether such support aligns with the teachings of Christianity.
That’s pretty good!
I have caught students using AI inappropriately by asking a question such as “Summarize Fea’s thesis,” without using the title of which work I assigned. Those who copy that sentence into chat gpt will likely get results for your most famous work and not necessarily the one I assigned. I had a large number of students recently give me an excellent synopsis of Greg Grandin’s End of the Myth, even though they were assigned Empire’s Workshop. I did not start out to trap them by the way, just kind of backed into it.
Generative AI often does a good job summarizing a specific piece. I asked Unriddle a couple of questions about Michael Holt’s “The Politics of Impatience,” and it gave quite reasonable responses.
On the other hand, though, I asked ChatGPT about a fairly obscure episode in antebellum economic history, and it confidently started with complete nonsense: “The ‘hidden depression’ of 1853-1855, a period of economic downturn that followed the Panic of 1857 …”