Attempts to disentangle evangelicals from Trump

Thank you to my friend Diane for sending a link to this article in The New Yorker:

https://www.newyorker.com/news-desk/on-religion/at-a-private-meeting-in-illinois-a-group-of-evangelicals-tried-to-save-their-movement-from-trumpism


It's about a recent meeting at Wheaton College to try to extricate evangelicals from the snares dt has set for them.

The first afternoon session at Wheaton began on a sombre note. “This gathering is not an occasion for celebration of evangelicalism,” Mark Labberton, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, said. “This gathering emerges instead from worry, sorrow, anger, and bewilderment—whether we are Democrats or Republicans.” That so many white evangelicals supported Trump had created a “a toxic evangelicalism” that has turned “the Gospel into Good News that is fake.” He charged that U.S. evangelicalism had been complicit in violence against people of color over centuries, and that where denunciation was needed there had only been silence.

Thank you to author Katelyn Beaty, former managing editor of Christianity Today, for reporting on this conference.

Among those present were the president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena CA and Mark Noll, author of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. 

The main organizer, Doug Birdsall, had hoped that a statement refocusing the word evangelical on Jesus Christ and the Church would be hammered out. 

But, days before we arrived at Wheaton, Birdsall clarified to attendees that our gathering was not meant to be held in opposition to the June meeting. He pointed out that he had planned the event long before the one with Trump became public. Organizers seemed to be getting nervous that their efforts would be seen as partisan and anti-Trump. After two days of often tense conversations, it became clear that no statement would be released at all.

Thank you to those who organized and tried to do something.  Katelyn ends it on a positive note, but clearly she is disappointed.

Evangelicals against Trump

FYI, not all evangelicals love the current president.  

Check out the recent covers of Sojourners Magazine:

• February --"Is this a Bonhoeffer moment?" https://sojo.net/magazine/february-2018/this-bonhoeffer-moment-American-Christians  
• March -- "How to handle a power-hungry narcissist"  https://sojo.net/magazine/march-2018/we-will-not-bow-down  
• April -- "How evangelicals became white"  https://sojo.net/magazine/april-2018/how-evangelicals-became-white

Theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer decided that killing Hitler was what Christians in Germany needed to do in 1944-45.  He was captured and killed for his plotting with others.  Lori Brandt Hall and Reggie L. Williams consider his example for evangelicals in the US today.

William Barber II analyzes King Nebbuchadnezzar in the book of Daniel to find out how to deal with our current president.

Racism among born-again Christians is an old phenomenon, writes Kelly Brown Douglas, dean of the Episcopal Divinity School at Union Seminary.  

Online the website offers a timeline of "evangelical backsliding" by Jim Wallis.

https://sojo.net/articles/1970s-chicago-2018-wheaton-timeline-evangelical-backsliding

Mark Labberton, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena CA, is also out there speaking on "The Crisis of Evangelicalism."  https://sojo.net/articles/crisis-evangelicalism

It's a veritable snowstorm of evangelicals against Trump--but will his base hear it?  

Probably not--they're actually not very much into church or following Jesus or reading articles on faith/dt/any other topic.

The Evangelical Left

Thank you to Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist on Patheos.com, for this post of a protestor's sign contrasting the Bible and the religious right on a list of key biblical commands.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2017/02/14/this-is-the-perfect-protest-sign-to-troll-the-religious-right/

The poster says:

ALT JESUS
Fear everyone
Expel the stranger
Blame the poor
Ignore the sick
Feed the rich
Love only thyself
Trust only Caesar
Throw lots of stones

Clearly, these positions are the opposite of many things Jesus said, as well as opposite of the central teachings of Torah:

Leviticus 19:33-34New International Version (NIV)

33 “‘When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. 34 The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.

Just one problem with this post: it concludes with the comment "Not that evangelical Christians ever had any moral authority."

Wrong.  Evangelical Christians like Catherine Booth founded the Salvation Army, which is still doing good work today.  In many small, untrumpeted actions, born-again Christians are still following the words of Jesus in Matthew, chapter 25, verse 40:

If you did it to the least of these my sisters and brothers, you did it to me.

Evangelical and mainstream Christians are a major force protesting Trump's ban on refugees because many churches do hosting of refugees.

I love the sign of the protestor, and it's true that many evangelicals overlooked 45's sexual assault and racism to get an anti-abortion vote on the Supreme Court, but don't smear all evangelicals of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries.

Some of us are left and progressive--such as my favorite group, Christian Feminism Today, which is inclusive of LGBTQ folk and fights for women's equality in Christian churches and parachurch organizations.

www.eewc.com.

Thank you to Karen Kidd, who alerted me to this post on Patheos.