“Trump Should Fill Christians with Rage. How Come He Doesn’t?”

The title of this blog post is the title of Michael Gerson’s Sept. 1 opinion piece in The Washington Post. It probably has been the most often-read op-ed article in the WaPo this month. For those of you who haven’t yet read it (or can’t because of the paywall), I have posted it here.*  

Although the title appears to be quite politically partisan, Gerson’s piece is primarily about Jesus, about the political and cultural environment in which he lived and about the gist of his teaching. In particular, Gerson emphasizes that

* Jesus preached against religious hypocrisy.

* Jesus welcomed social outcasts whom polite society rejected. 

* Most important, Jesus proclaimed the arrival of a kingdom. 

Granted, those three points do not summarize the totality of Jesus’ message, but surely most Christians would affirm those points as being central to Jesus’ teaching.

Although Gerson’s portrayal of Jesus may appear “liberal,” Gerson has been and has remained a Christian evangelical, as I tried to make clear in my May 15, 2021, blog post titled “Michael Gerson: An Evangelical with Integrity.” Thus, he is not criticizing evangelicals from the “outside.”

In his Sept. 1 piece, Gerson clearly states, “Having known evangelicals who live lives of moral integrity and serve others across lines of race and class, I have no intention of pronouncing an indiscriminate indictment.” Then he goes on to assert that

all conservative Christians must take seriously a sobering development in America’s common life. Many who identify with Jesus most loudly and publicly are doing the most to discredit his cause.

He then boldly states,

The main danger to conservative churches does not come from bad laws—it comes from Christians who don’t understand the distinctives, the demands and the ultimate appeal of their own faith.

Consequently, Gerson declares that the evangelical support of Trump and what he calls the Trump movement “deserves some woes of its own”:

* Woe to evangelical hypocrisy.

* Woe to evangelical exclusion. 

* And woe, therefore, to Christian nationalism. 

I agree with Gerson not because I am a Democrat but because I am a Christian who, like Gerson, seeks to put faith above politics.

Although there seems to be “Christianophobia” abroad in the land, Gerson seeks to make it clear that much (most?) of the anti-Christian sentiment is reaction to the questionable public stance of the Christian Right and not to the core teachings of Jesus.

From soon after 9/11/01, there began to be talk of Islamophobia in this country. All Muslims were being vilified because of the vile deeds of the militant extremists. That was highly unfair to the vast majority of the Muslims in the country, most of whom were peace-loving people.

I first wrote about Islamophobia in my 5/5/13 blog post, and then on 1/25/16 I posted “Combatting Islamophobia.” The former article begins, “Islamophobia is defined as “prejudice against, hatred towards, or irrational fear of Muslims.” Such an attitude has been quite widespread in the land.

While the term is rarer, for several years now some have written about Christianophobia. For example, a 3/27/15 Christianity Today article is titled, “What Christianophobia Looks Like in America.”

In that article, author George Yancey, a university professor of sociology, says that his research has shown that in the United States, hateful bigotry is directed not only toward groups such as racial and sexual minorities, but also toward conservative Christians. . . . . It’s Christianophobia.”

All hateful bigotry directed toward racial and sexual minorities must be staunchly opposed. Christianophobia should also be opposed/combatted in the same way that I previously wrote about combatting Islamophobia.

All Christians should not be rejected/opposed because of the way those on the religious and political right are misrepresenting Jesus. This is one of the reasons I find Gerson’s essay so important and worth widespread thoughtful consideration.**

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* This article is quite long: when I put it on a Word document, it was over 4,300 words, more than the combined length of six of my blog articles, which I limit to a maximum of 700 words.

** It is not mentioned by Gerson, but I highly recommend a closely related book: Christians Against Christianity: How Right-Wing Evangelicals are Destroying our Nation and Our Faith (2021) by theologian Obery M. Hendricks.

Michael Gerson: An Evangelical with Integrity

Today (May 15) is the 57^th birthday of Michael Gerson, the well-known columnist for The Washington Post. Happy Birthday, Mr. Gerson! And thank you for being an evangelical Christian with integrity.

Michael Gerson, the Evangelical

As I have noted a number of times, there has been, and continues to be, considerable criticism of white evangelical Christians (WECs)—and for good reason. But, as I often have said to my “old codger” friends, not all WECs are the same. We must acknowledge significant differences among them. 

There is little question but that Michael Gerson has been a lifelong evangelical Christian. As he himself explained in “The Last Temptation,” an April 2018 article in The Atlantic, he “was raised in an evangelical home, went to an evangelical church and high school, and began following Christ as a teen.”

In that same article, included in full in a 2020 book titled The American Crisis, Gerson states that his experiences as a Christian through the years make him “hesitant to abandon the word evangelical. They also make seeing the defilement of that word all the more painful” (p. 258).

Gerson was named by Time magazine in 2005 as one of “The 25 Most Influential Evangelicals In America.”

Michael Gerson, the Writer

Although he has done other things, Gerson is chiefly known as a writer. For example, he was a speechwriter for Bob Dole and a ghostwriter for Charles Colson. Then from Inauguration Day in 2001 to June 2006, he was the White House Director of Speechwriting. As such, he helped write the second inaugural address of Pres. George W. Bush.

After leaving the White House, Gerson wrote for Newsweek magazine for a time, and then in May 2007 he began his tenure as a columnist for The Washington Post.

In 2010, Gerson also was the co-author of the book City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era. The Foreword was written by Timothy Keller, the well-known evangelical pastor, and it was issued by Moody Publishers.**

Michael Gerson, a Man of Integrity

In his opinion pieces for The Washington Post, it seems quite clear that Gerson writes as a man of integrity. Here are examples of what I mean.

On October 28, 2019, Gerson’s WaPo opinion piece was titled, “White evangelical Protestants are fully disrobed. And it is an embarrassing sight.” In that article, he writes, “Rather than shaping President Trump’s agenda in Christian ways, they [=WECs] have been reshaped into the image of Trump himself.”***

Gerson’s opinion piece for January 7 of this year, the very next day after the ill-fated events of Jan. 6, Gerson’s piece was titled, “Trump’s evangelicals were complicit in the desecration of our democracy.”

He pointed out in that piece, “As white nationalists, conspiracy theorists, misogynists, anarchists, criminals and terrorists took hold of the Republican Party, many evangelicals blessed it under the banner ‘Jesus Saves.’” Further on in that article, Gerson wrote,

It is tempting to call unforgivable the equation of Christian truth with malice, cruelty, deception, bigotry and sedition. But that statement is itself contradicted by Christian truth, which places no one beyond forgiveness and affirms that everyone needs grace in different ways. There is a perfectly good set of Christian tools to deal with situations such as these: remorse, repentance, forgiveness, reformation.

And then on May 3, Gerson’s opinion piece was “Elected Republicans are lying with open eyes. Their excuses are disgraceful.” (More about this later.)

And please note: Gerson still is listed as a Republican, so he not only is an evangelical Christian with integrity but also a Republican with integrity. This country badly needs more WECs and more Republicans like Michael Gerson.

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** A good reminder in a May 7 tweet by Tim Keller: “Less than 2/3 of evangelicals in the US are white and less than 10% of evangelicals in the world are American. (And not all white US evangelicals are the same). So, when you say, 'evangelicals have done this' or 'claim this'--keep this variety in mind.”

*** For those who cannot access The Washington Post articles by Gerson because of a paywall, click here to see those opinion pieces by Gerson. (If you don’t have time to read all three, at least see the first one, which was posted on May 3.)