America's Churches Are Radicalizing Themselves
What happens when politics trumps faith?
Still bleary-eyed one morning in a hotel restaurant, I plop my breakfast plate down at a random table and strike up a conversation with the stranger sitting next to me. Since I am attending a conference on religion and civic life, I’m not surprised when he introduces himself as an evangelical pastor. I’ll call him Mark. His church is Baptist, located in an oil town in west Texas. His congregants number about a hundred. Eighty percent are white, though the surrounding community is mostly Hispanic. “I love these people,” he says of his parishioners. Yet when I ask if he has considered quitting the pastorate within the past year, he replies without hesitation. “Absolutely.”
Why? He uses a phrase that comes up several times in our conversation: battlefield mindset. His parishioners take an aggressive tone, one which reflects anger, fear: Christianity is under attack and we have to do something about it. They bring to church the divisive cultural issues they hear about on Fox News, such as critical race theory—even though, he tells me, many don’t understand what that is.
And politics creeps in—not partisan campaigning as such, but a politicized, us-or-them worldview. “It’s like talking to a wall with some people,” Mark tells me, “because the Gospel is seen as political.” The battlefield mindset is not new, but the 2016 presidential race and its aftermath “amped it up.” Mark is worn down from hearing his white parishioners lament the loss of their country, so much so that he seeks out the company of his Hispanic friends outside church “because of what I don’t have to talk about.”
Will he continue in the pulpit? He takes it one day at a time. “I’m trusting God,” he says. “There’s a church within the church that really wants to follow Jesus.” They’re a minority, yet a reason to stay. “The gains are minimal, but you see them. But it’s slow work.”
Sixteen hundred miles from Pastor Mark, in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, Wayne (also not his real name), the pastor of an evangelical Presbyterian church, exhaustedly tells me he almost quit four times in recent years. “Theological belief has become a small factor in why people pick a church,” he says. “People got more in love with their lifestyle than their faith.” About 10 years ago, he started to be bothered by a “snarkiness” and an “almost Nietzschean ethic” among his parishioners. “All of the stuff that has come to the fore was there but incipient”—and then the Trump phenomenon “turbocharged” it, roiling and dividing the congregation.
When I ask what the last few years have taught him, he replies, “I think we’ve learned that our congregation wasn’t as spiritually mature as we thought it was.” He frets about what he calls spiritual rot. I prod him: can’t he, as pastor, do something about that? Isn’t it his job to guide his flock spiritually? “I can’t make them want it,” he sighs, with evident weariness. “That’s the biggest challenge.”
One can reproduce these conversations with pastors throughout the country. The words vary, but the tune is the same. Christian witness is in trouble in white evangelical America. And the biggest challenge is not from the secular world; it is sitting in the pews.
Here I will skate out on thin ice. Being no believer, I am in no position to lecture Christians on Christianity. Yet I am not unique in thinking that white evangelicals’ embrace of partisanship, culture war, and bully-worship betrayed their faith. Many prominent evangelicals (and some ex-evangelicals) believe the same thing. Writes Peter Wehner: “In important respects, much of what is distinctive about American evangelicalism has become antithetical to authentic Christianity. What we’re dealing with—not in all cases, of course, but in far too many—is political identity and cultural anxieties, anti-intellectualism and ethnic nationalism, resentments and grievances, all dressed up as Christianity.”
James Alison, a Catholic theologian and priest, provides a clarifying framework for thinking about the choices white conservative Christians have made. Asked by the podcaster and journalist Andrew Sullivan to summarize the teachings of Jesus, he said that they could be boiled down to three tenets. “I think the first one would be to not be afraid. The second one would be, imitate me [i.e. Jesus]. And the third one would be, forgive each other, because that’s how you’ll be forgiven. That’s it.”
Don’t be afraid. Imitate Jesus. Forgive each other. I am in no position to judge whether those are the essential elements of Christianity, but they certainly command broad and deep reverence in America’s Christian traditions. In any case, they are the elements of Christianity which resonate most with me, the unbeliever, and which strike me as being (along with the concept of grace) Christianity’s distinctive and transcendent moral innovations.
Don’t be afraid is one of the Bible’s most frequently repeated commands. Yet today’s white evangelical world seems consumed by fear. There is fear of the left: “Fear,” as historian Paul Matzko has said, “that if Donald Trump doesn’t win in 2016, isn’t reelected in 2020, that is the end of American Christianity as we know it, that the godless humanists and feminists and civil rights activists are going to swamp America and destroy what makes us great.” There is fear of cultural change. More than three-fourths of white evangelicals say the country is in danger of losing its identity and culture—by which they mean their identity and culture.
Above all, there is fear of loss of status. “They realize they no longer have numbers on their side,” the historian Kristin Du Mez told me. “They see that the democratic process will not secure their aims for them. We’ve lost the culture; they’re coming for us; we’ve got to defend the right to live as obedient, faithful Christians.”
My understanding of Christianity and of its totemic instruction not to be afraid is that the Christian’s eyes should focus on the next world, not this world; and that, although fear is natural, faith is supernatural, so that the prospect of redemption in the next world should assuage our fears in this one. “Apocalyptic and hysterical rhetoric is inappropriate for people who are children of the King,” James Forsyth, the senior pastor at Cedar Springs Presbyterian Church, said in 2015. “Christians should not be characterized by white knuckles of fear and terror.”
Imitating Jesus is something that many evangelicals, including many culture warriors, often do admirably in their capacities as friends, family members, churchgoers, and local volunteers. The west Texas pastor who complained of his congregants’ battlefield mindset told me his parishioners generously help the needy who are in their line of sight. “But so much of the Gospel message is to love the marginalized, love the foreigner; and that falls on deaf ears.”
Still farther from the personal line of sight is the realm of politics, and there a new wall of separation has arisen: not between church and state, but between personal Christianity and public Christianity. It rationalizes political conduct whose cruelty Christians would abhor in their church lives; it sets up two incommensurable moralities, an absolute one in the personal realm and an instrumental one in the political realm.
Many Christian activists and theologians maintain that Christianity is a seamless garment. It does not accept a distinction between the values Christians display in their personal lives and those they display in their public and political lives. It rejects the attitude that David French, speaking at a Trinity Forum event in 2023, described piquantly as: I know I’m a bit of an asshole on Twitter, but you should see me in the soup kitchen. “That’s just not the way it works,” he said. “You can’t cabin off parts of your life. . . . If we wall [civic life] off, we are not exhibiting the virtues that Christ asked us to exhibit.”
Nor, he and others add, does Christianity accept that the command to imitate Jesus is conditioned on worldly success: on Christian behavior’s succeeding or “working,” whatever that means. In a speech to an audience of young conservatives in 2021, Donald Trump, Jr., said: “We’ve turned the other cheek, and I understand, sort of, the biblical reference—I understand the mentality—but it’s gotten us nothing. Okay? It’s gotten us nothing, while we’ve ceded ground in every major institution in our country.”
One wonders what exactly Jesus “got” in exchange for being tortured, mutilated, and crucified.
Forgiving each other as God has forgiven us, and letting God settle our accounts, is the beating heart of Jesus’s ministry; of late, though, white evangelicals have not been in a very forgiving mood. In 2023, Trump told a thrilled conservative audience, “I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.” One might ask: is this doctrine not a root-and-branch repudiation of the ministry of Jesus? If Christians have given their hearts over to “retribution,” have they not become antagonists of the creed they claim to follow? Don’t they sound an awful lot like the mob that brayed for Jesus’s execution?
Can we really, then, blame the secular world for the path conservative Christians have chosen? Or should we rather say that white evangelical Christianity, in its embrace of MAGA values, has repudiated itself? If so, can we expect the secular world not to notice?
And can we blame the secular world for losing confidence in Christianity if so many Christians have lost confidence in Christianity? The minister and journalist Russell Moore told the Trinity Forum:
The church is bleeding out the next generation, not because “the culture” is so opposed to the church’s fidelity to the truth, but just the reverse. The culture often does not reject us because they don’t believe the church’s doctrinal and moral teachings, but because they have evidence that the church doesn’t believe its own doctrinal and moral teachings. They suspect that Jesus is just a means to an end—to some political agenda, to a market for selling merchandise, or for the predatory appetites of some maniacal narcissist.
The pastors I interviewed are not, admittedly, a representative sample. Still, I found it meaningful that they were not inclined to blame outside forces for the secularization and “battlefield mindset” they see in their congregations. They acknowledged challenges like social media and cable news and online pornography; but, like Moore, they were unsparing in their assessment that the church has failed to stand its ground. One Southern Baptist pastor told me that the next great mission field is not abroad or among nonbelievers but within the American evangelical church itself. It needs to be reconverted, he said, to the message of the gospel.
Secular liberals like me need to wish him well with that mission and help when we can. We need to try to be part of the solution rather than the problem—and, I believe, we can and should do better on that score. Ultimately, however, we did not cause Christianity’s crisis, and we cannot resolve it.
Jonathan Rauch is a senior fellow in the Governance Studies program at the Brookings Institution and a member of the Persuasion Board of Advisors.
Excerpted from Cross Purposes: Christianity’s Broken Bargain with Democracy by Jonathan Rauch, to be published February 4, 2025, by Yale University Press. Copyright © 2025 by Jonathan Rauch. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission.
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FYI, mainline Protestant churches associated with the National Council of Churches have been radicalized to the Left at least since the early 80s, and African American churches have actively boosted the Democratic Party in urban areas since the 60s. Perhaps the author just forgot to mention this, or maybe his notes were left in disarray by the cleaning staff. I'm sure it was unintentional.
Another article in Persuasion dumping on Christianity, though Rauch seems to have spent time learning something about the religion, all the while signalling his distance. Passing over hypothetical reactions on the part of adherents of other faiths to a professed unbeliever's "lecturing" them on the congruence of their conduct and beliefs, I will say that Rauch's take on some basic Christian principles seems accurate. Having done Buddhist practice for years, I've had occasion to object to Christian characterizations of that tradition, all the while emphasizing that I did Theravadan practice and can't really speak about Zen or Tibetan Buddhism. The scope of Christianity is equally wide. The headline on this piece ignores that fact, and Rauch focuses on right-wing evangelicals. All too often Christianity in this country is reduced to the most extreme forms of evangelicalism or fundamentalism, and caricatured.
Part of that caricature lies in the emphasis on "white" evangelicals. The word "white" seems to have become a pejorative, but with unclear referent. Not all people one would think of as white (of European descent) are included in the adjective "white." To whom does it refer? My guess is those of British descent, perhaps also those of northern or northwestern European heritage, whose ancestors arrived on these shores in the seventeenth, eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Another guess is that the "white" evangelicals about whom Rausch writes mostly come from those same groups. Are they under threat? Not violent threat, but surely a cultural threat. I haven't taken the Trump route and am holding out (without much hope) for a renewed Left that acknowledges its working class roots, but I've become totally alienated from a progressive Left that stigmatizes people like me as inherently racist, condemns my humble ancestors (indentured servants even) as racist, imperialist colonialist invaders, mocks their religion (in my case Puritan/Calvinist rather than evangelical), and rewrites American history so that they and their like are the villains of an endless morality play in which they can only be booed off the stage.
There's a way of telling the story of this country, both past and present, that includes everybody, acknowledges wrongs and also achievements. Trump doesn't offer it. Nor does the progressive Left. Until that story is found (or rediscovered), people on both sides will feel threatened, and will think of politics as a battle.