Explaining White Evangelicals (again)

People are apparently still shocked that 75% of them voted for Trump over Haley

Even I thought that, given a clear, binary choice between a decent, pro-life human and Donald Trump, maybe maybe maybe a significant number (half? please?) of white evangelicals would opt for the former. Especially since polls indicate Haley would have an easier time beating the Great Elderly Satan, Joe Biden. Although it is hard to imagine how someone who has never even raped anyone or led an insurrection and who has zero criminal indictments (SO BORING! Also she has female body parts, WEAK) could best a demented, drooling but kindly grandpa, who nonetheless is a criminal mastermind/secret Black Panther surrounded by a pack of German Shepherds who appear to have been trained by the Stassi.

The East German secret police training Major and Commander Biden.

But the numbers don’t lie, Haley is in fact a better candidate against Papa Joe. Don't evangelicals want to win (answer: they don’t need to anymore, see second question)? Don’t they want to live in a democracy (see answer to first question)?

People are still confused as to What those crazy white evangelical kids are thinking. Including sane white evangelicals, many of whom I’m sorry to say are still not grappling with how their own theology has helped produce this unholy mess. Those lovely folks, whom I do admire, shake their heads in understandable horror and say things like, “They’ve lost their way,” “These Trump ones actually aren’t that devout,” “They have fallen too much in love with America,” “They have fallen too much in love with power.” They are right about all of that, no argument there.

But, again, I’m left frustrated by the myopathy. When history or science or basic human dignity or some other revelation that I personally consider of equal if not greater weight to the Bible, or even the Bible itself, shouts in your face repeatedly that the results of your belief system are in many cases cataclysmic—if the a large percentage of your tree’s fruit is rotten—I’m sorry, but pruning the tree a bit here and there is not enough. But white evangelicals have been pruning away for two hundred years now, doggedly retaining a toxic belief system that is overly certain, prioritizes doctrine over ethics, and is built on a grandiose sense of rightness and its flip side, an inability to confront one’s own failures and the natural, human uncertainties of life and death.

First of all, a super brief, broad strokes history lesson from Dr. Fletcher, and yes, I do have a degree in this stuff, although most of this knowledge, especially in any detail¹, has sat in the junk drawer of my mind for a while, along with math of any kind and apparently the face and name of a guy to whom I introduced myself for the 6th time at a party last night. I’m sorry, sir, my brain has apparently filed you in a drawer with the administration of Millard Fillmore and trigonometry. It’s not the best brain. Not my fault.

Back to American religious history for dummies. You know what, I’m just going to draw a picture (you’ll need to click on this to blow it up and also your supersonic reading glasses).

Got it? OK. My friend Dr. Diana Butler Bass, religious history scholar, probably just had a stroke from the crime against complexity and nuance I have committed here. Also, yes, my biases are evident. I’m not saying they are right, but they do have a Ph.D, so they’ve bought a lot of books.

Bottom line, white evangelicalism is a tradition that grew out of white southern American Christianity. It’s built on a doctrinal certainty that masks and compensates for some pretty catastrophic moral failings and preserves the bases for power, as they police doctrinal adherence. White evangelicals have elevated “correct” doctrine over all else, most importantly above ethics. Ethics are not about WHAT you believe, but HOW you believe it,² how you treat others, how you love others. In the religion of the Old South, you could say the Sinner’s prayer, accept a list of beliefs, and continue to hold slaves. You could even justify holding them by getting them to accept correct doctrine and thereby saving their souls from eternal damnation even as you kept their bodies in chains.

You can conveniently make a concrete list of doctrines and beliefs that everyone has to believe to be in the tribe and eventually in heaven—and use that list to keep everyone in line—but loving others as children of God is a lot squishier and harder. Ultimately, that’s less about doing specific actions and more the outgrowth of a pure and humble heart. My experience in evangelicalism is that relationship and love too often boil down to ministry, service, and charity. Those things are great, we should do those things, but they are not built on the kind of mutual relationship that brings challenge and accountability and growth. Charity/missions/ministry tend to reinforce the individual and group’s righteousness. And you don’t truly see a person or allow them to see you in a ministry context.

Doctrinal certainty ultimately is a coping strategy for fear and insecurity. I think I’ve mentioned before a book by psychologist (and Christian) Dave Verhaagen, but it has set off all kinds of lightbulbs for me regarding the white evangelical culture in which I was raised. He says the foundation of that culture is a collective narcissism and presents data showing there’s a disproportionate number of individual narcissists in white evangelical spaces. That’s almost certainly not causative, but rather the result of such folks being drawn to a culture and belief system that is already narcissistic.

Now I’m going to butcher psychology the way I just did American religious history. So fun! PS, I did minor in psychology, and I’ve also watched a lot of Oprah.

I mean, if expertise in psychology were a face, this would be it, and also I can do that face.

The essence of Narcissistic Personality Disorder is a deep-seated, unconscious shame and and inability to confront one’s failures and weaknesses. So the person constructs a grandiose sense of self that is amazing, heroic, important, talented, always right, brilliant, enlightened, all the things that we all want to be (but most of us know we aren’t, at least not all of them, all the time, and we’re OK with it). They completely absorb themselves in this persona and store the other one, the one that isn’t all that and a bag of chips, in a dark room somewhere (maybe with Millard Fillmore).

A narcissistic group culture does this collectively. In the case of white American evangelicalism, it’s a grandiose group identity that has always had at its center the idea that they are the only ones, even among Christians, who completely know the truth about God, about how to live, about morality, salvation, politics, policy, everything. They juxtapose their identity with that of “others.” Those others can be pitiable—the lost, the heathen, the “unreached,” the “unsaved”—or dangerous—the liberals, the atheists, the gays, the feminists, the woke. Whereas the former are potential converts/future group members that reinforce the group’s narrative, the latter folks directly challenge its rightness and cultural/political power. Either way, white evangelicals as a culture relate to those outside the tribe with an implicit, if not an explicit, assumption of superiority based on their correct belief.

And this grandiose self-concept deflects from a history of failure. Again, it’s important to understand how white evangelical culture grew out of the American South. Proslavery/segregationist Christianity was a psychological coping strategy to that defined faith and morality in personal terms, interpreted the Bible literally, eschewed modern ideas that threatened white male power, and elevated doctrine over ethics.³ White southern Christianity also spiritually justified southerners’ secular claim to America itself, defining American ideals in terms that perpetuated white supremacy. Ultimately, white southern Christians went to war to defend this claim. And when they lost that war in abject, costly humiliation, they were unbowed. They simply reformed their beliefs and culture to move on quickly and accommodate the blow as a discreet failure rather than proof of something more fundamentally wrong.

To use more modern examples of how collective narcissism works, you only have to look at the abuse crisis in evangelicalism, which on the surface, beggars belief—Why on earth would these institutions and leaders—who place such importance on sexual morality!—cover up and ignore such acts? But through a frame of collective narcissism, it makes perfect sense. White evangelicalism is existentially invested in being right, having the strongest families, the best morals, the most successful lives—all of it proving correct doctrine—as opposed to “the world,” which is clearly going to hell in a hand basket. Abuse is something that happens out there. If it happens in here, it must be defined as a personal failing and hidden away. Just get past it as quickly as possible.

I—and others, this isn't my insight alone—have said it before and I’ll say it again—both abuse victims and African Americans challenge white evangelicals’ self-conception simply by existing. They are the embodied reminders of that culture’s sins. So, we forgive and forget! We are color blind! We blame the feminists and the wokesters for society’s ills!

Most individual evangelicals of course are not themselves narcissists, and so many of them are wonderful people. In fact, while I lived in that world, I noticed an unfortunate dynamic in which the non-narcissists took seriously the Gospel messages of grace, humility, and repentance—serving quietly and faithfully, deeply aware of their own sins and often feeling unworthy, even staying silent at times in the face of their own subjugation and abuse—while the real narcissists aggrandized themselves and often achieved power, first in the church, before marching into the political realm, too. But co-dependency is part of the narcissistic construct, too. Narcissists exploit and manipulate those who are able to feel normal human shame and guilt, often overly so. While the hardcore narcissists wage culture wars, steamroll people, and brazenly f*ck everything up, the co-dependents are doing all the “good” work, helping the poor, baking the funeral casseroles. But ultimately propping up the group narcissism by smoothing off the rough edges.

Tim Alberta, in his recent book The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory, includes a discussion he had with an evangelical woman named Nancy, who insisted to him that Democrats were coming after the church and among other things, allowing immigrants to spread disease around the country (with the help of the Catholics). "I was struck by her tone--and by the fact that Nancy had been involved with supporting missionaries," Alberta writes. Elsewhere, Alberta chats with Southern Baptist Daniel Darling, who bemoans all the negative stories about his denomination, acknowledging the "crazy" antics that have attracted such attention. He pleads his case to Alberta by rattling off all the money Southern Baptists have sent here and there and all the wonderful ministries it has funded, arguing, without irony, "Anywhere you see human suffering in the world, you see Southern Baptists, you see evangelicals."

On first glance, it does seem like quite a disjuncture, a people serving Christ earnestly with one hand, while stabbing him in the back with the other. But that is exactly the point. Of course, they don't think they are stabbing him in the back. They think everything they do is part and parcel, a holistic defense of a God who apparently needs defending. But beyond that, they believe they are justified in any stabbing because they are doing the serving. Collectively, the good deeds make up for the bad, and always have. The good distracts and subtracts from the bad. The good creates a self-image that can withstand its alter-ego-evil-twin. Or, to return to psychologist Dave Verhaagen's analysis of white evangelicalism as a collectively narcissistic culture, missions are the "golden child"--the child onto which a narcissistic parent projects their idealized self--and Trumpism is the "scapegoat child"--where the narcissist's deepest fears and latent self-hatred find their expression. In earlier times, Trumpism was slavery, segregation, and brutal violence. The residual bigotry, nativism, misogyny—and above all, the hunger for power driven by fear—are still alive and well today.

Deep down, white American Christians have always known their fears and failures have led them to dance with devils and demons. They know, but they can't face it. In the words of Navajo Christian writer Mark Charles, white America has "traumatiz[ed]" itself with centuries of "dehumanizing injustice." So we have constructed alternate universes and stories to avoid reckoning with the reality of ourselves.

When I look out at the white evangelicalism with which I grew up, I keep coming back to the opening salvo of I Corinthians 13: "If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing."

And what is love? I'll tell you what it is NOT: "There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear."

And whether voting for a wannabe authoritarian because he will defend "Christian interests," storming the Capital in an attempt to overturn democracy, insisting on a rigid doctrine of theological certainty, shutting down alternate views and voices, or, yes, putting mission above people, idolizing heroic calling over every day faithfulness, or using power to maintain ownership of the Gospel, American evangelicals demonstrate a fair amount of fear, which manifests in the need for control.

They proved it again in South Carolina yesterday.

The “good” evangelicals need to break free. Not only from their toxic relationships with the true blue narcissistic people and institutions in their midst, but from a rigid religion of doctrine, rules, certainty, exclusivity, insularity, and arrogance that has produced far too much bad fruit to keep cultivating.

1. Please do not ask me to put the mediocre antebellum presidents in the correct order. I think I could get through the mediocre postbellum presidents under duress. Basically, it’s (mediocrity), LINCOLN, (mediocrity, with some love for Grant). Done.

2. I must credit David French, Jonathan Rausch and various others from whom I’ve probably stolen this.

3. See Robert P. Jones, White Too Long, but many other scholars have the theological connection between proslavery Christianity and modern evangelicalism.