Remembrance candle
Image courtesy of Greg Weeks
Baptist News Global | Dec. 20, 2023
You may have seen Atlantic Monthly writer Tim Alberta on air talking about why he wrote his new bestseller, The Kingdom, The Power, and the Glory, one of a trio of extraordinary books out this fall warning about white supremacy and American religion (Robert P. Jones’ The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy and Andrew Whitehead’s American Idolatry are the other two). At his father’s funeral, Alberta says, he was handed an envelope in which a church elder wrote of his anger and disappointment:
He had composed this note, on the occasion of my father’s death, to express just how disappointed he was in me. I was part of an evil plot, the man wrote, to undermine God’s ordained leader of the United States. My criticisms of President Trump were tantamount to treason — against both God and country — and I should be ashamed of myself.
When Alberta showed this communication to his wife, she threw it in the air with a shriek: “What the hell is wrong with these people?”
I don’t generally write about partisan politics. But this fall, I’ve done interviews, research, conversations at home and abroad, and a series of public programs with Robert Jones about race, religion and the crisis of American democracy, and it seems vital in this moment to emphasize that Tim Alberta and his wife are far from the only ones wondering what in the world is going on with a substantial segment of American Christians and a huge segment of Republican voters.
What does it mean for American democracy — for the American experiment itself — if, as PRRI reports in an October poll release, 23% of Americans agree that “true American patriots” might have to resort to violence to save the country. When adjusted for religious identity, the polling looks similar; when adjusted for political identity, it grows yet more alarming: “One-third of Republicans (33%) today believe that true American patriots may have to resort to violence to save the country, compared with 22% of independents and 13% of Democrats.”
The warden of Gladstone’s Library (a theological library founded by the four-time British prime minister) asked me over for coffee in Wales to explain how Americans who call themselves Christians could align themselves with a man who displays no Christian virtues, why they support his third run for president with the same or more fervor as before he was twice impeached and then charged with 91 felony counts including trying to overthrow our electoral system. The archdeacon of The Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe asked similar questions on our walk back from lunch. So too did the head of chaplaincy for King’s College, London at dinner one night. And so too did audience members at public programs that Jones and I offered in December at the American Cathedral in Paris.
PRRI’s polling and the books by Alberta, Whitehead and Jones explain much; they demonstrate that white Christian nationalism in America is contrary to Christian values, and that now it serves to corrupt American values.
They indicate the skewed beliefs of these American Christians and fellow cultural travelers are a looming threat to our great democratic project of the past 200 years.
“I found myself often repeating a single phrase: ‘I am terrified.’”
Those of you who know me personally might regard me as a calm and relatively sober individual. I try not to overreact; I am not by nature hysterical. But over the past few weeks, as I have traveled in the UK and France, as I have been repeatedly asked what the hell is going on back here in the States, I found myself often repeating a single phrase: “I am terrified.”
Democracy seems to be failing. Elections as a democratic imperative are being questioned by the probable nominee of one of our two political parties. One of our major parties resists completing even necessary legislative actions.
When these concerns about democracy dysfunction are accompanied by a cascade of dehumanizing comments about Jews and immigrants, Muslims and people of color, gays and women, the fear grows among good white American men that they may need to take up arms against a culture that no longer centers them. They may need to seek a strongman who can rid them of threats to “our culture.” (And by the way, Robert Jones highlighted this in our Sunday morning forum at the American Cathedral in Paris: When folks use the phrase “our country” or “our culture,” it is always a white supremacist tell.)
As I was walking through the hallway of the Jewish Community Center this morning in my hometown of Austin — a campus forced to increase its security time and again over the past seven years — I listened to Rachel Maddow talking about what can happen, how fear of the “other” gets people to push past their moral boundaries and embrace a strongman who can get the job done, who can “destroy all those very scary enemies” who, by the way, happen to be human beings made in the very image of God.
“American Christianity should be light and leaven to a culture of fear.”
American Christianity should be light and leaven to a culture of fear, should be offering daily correctives to hatred and greed, and in some places, it is. But the most public version of Christianity, the one studied by Jones and Whitehead and Alberta, has hitched its saddle to a beast that slouches toward the abyss, to a belief that has abandoned the Jesus of the Gospels, that cannot be convinced of its errors even by the Scriptures they say they revere.
Tim Alberta’s book contains a story — I’ve heard it often of late, and maybe so have you — that Russell Moore has been telling about preachers in the SBC. When they preach from, say, the Sermon on the Mount, members of their congregations accost them after church and ask, “What kind of woke crap is that?”
These so-called Christians don’t want the Jesus of the Beatitudes and the Cross.
They want a Jesus with an AK-47.
So I am offering this column as a warning to those Christians who still believe in love and light, to all small-d democrats who still believe in the American experiment: Do not underestimate the power or the gravity of this American impulse away from democracy, this movement that seeks to preserve power and status for straight white Christian men, this faithless faith in something other than the liberating God of the Scriptures.
“Do not underestimate the power or the gravity of this American impulse away from democracy.”
Don’t let it fester and grow in darkness. Shine a light on it. Challenge it. Preach, teach, write against it. Love. Organize. Pray.
Above all, don’t believe this moment can’t happen here as it’s happened elsewhere.
It can. It already has.
Some of those in our Sunday morning forum in Paris seemed shocked when Robert Jones said he believes it very likely that the 2024 election will be marked by violence. But it seems all too possible; too many Americans are governed by their fear instead of their hope, and I can easily imagine how some of those who call themselves Christian may reach for a gun or support a strongman or strongwoman rather than live with vulnerability and change and accountability.
Maybe some folks have stopped, but I still listen to the Scriptures, and in Advent we are told this: “Arise. Shine. For the light has come.”
America is not and never has been a Christian nation, but faithful Christians always have worked toward an America that is just and compassionate, and many Christians still do. In this dark moment, the light still shines.
So please, I beg you, don’t ignore the darkness.
And don’t forget the light.
Greg Garrett
Photo by Rick Patrick
Greg Garrett teaches creative writing, film, literature and theology classes at Baylor University. He is the author of two dozen books of fiction, nonfiction, memoir and translation, including the critically acclaimed novels Free Bird, Cycling, Shame and The Prodigal. His latest novel is Bastille Day. He is one of America’s leading voices on religion and culture. Two of his recent nonfiction books are In Conversation: Rowan Williams and Greg Garrett and A Long, Long Way: Hollywood’s Unfinished Journey from Racism to Reconciliation. He is a seminary-trained lay preacher in the Episcopal Church. He lives in Austin with his wife, Jeanie, and their two daughters.