Why evangelicals don't care

Why Evangelicals Just Don’t Care

March 18

Neil Carter

A week ago Forbes published an opinion piece by Chris Ladd, a lifelong Republican who ditched his own party in 2016, but then they took the article down because the editors felt the subject matter was too controversial for their audience. The article was spot on in my opinion, and Ladd put his finger on something I’ve never read anyone express so succinctly.

At the end of my most recent post about the passing of Billy Graham I argued that today’s evangelical theology was significantly influenced by a political party desperate to survive into the next generation by cobbling together a unified base of voters in the Deep South no matter what it took. In a kind of reverse Faustian bargain, the GOP sold their collective soul to Jesus in exchange for another 40 years of existence.

Baptists changed their view on abortion (something the Bible never condemns but actually prescribes in at least one place) to match that of the Catholic Church only after the Supreme Court ruled that fundamentalist Christian schools couldn’t discriminate on the basis of race. Suddenly Baptists and Catholics began holding hands and moving as a unit, and thus was born the Religious Right.

But after reading Ladd’s article I realized I didn’t go far back enough. If you truly want to understand all the cultural and economic influences that have shaped the evangelical mind of today, you have to go all the way back to the Civil War.

Ladd states his thesis at the outset:

Modern, white evangelicalism emerged from the interplay between race and religion in the slave states. What today we call ‘evangelical Christianity,’ is the product of centuries of conditioning, in which religious practices were adapted to nurture a slave economy. The calloused insensitivity of modern white evangelicals was shaped by the economic and cultural priorities that forged their theology over centuries.

He then proceeds to back it up with a concise thumbnail sketch of how things got to be the way they are. He begins by pointing out that the largest evangelical denomination, Southern Baptists, formed in 1845 during a split over slavery. From that point forward, social and economic pressures dictated how white Christian churches in the South read the Bible, leaving them with a selective biblical memory so curiously inverted it makes you wonder if you’ve stepped into a Bizarro world where up is down and wrong is right.

Ladd gets right to the point:

If all you knew about Christianity came from a close reading of the New Testament, you’d expect that Christians would be hostile to wealth, emphatic in protection of justice, sympathetic to the point of personal pain toward the sick, persecuted and the migrant, and almost socialist in their economic practices. None of these consistent Christian themes served the interests of slave owners, so pastors could either abandon them, obscure them, or flee.

Jesus clearly belongs to that dissenting prophetic tradition within Judaism which calls out the rich and the powerful, demanding that they share their bounty with the less fortunate. But this central theme to his ministry is all but erased by the way that evangelicals read their Bibles today.

Social benevolence is alternately the secular government’s business and not the government’s business depending on whichever answer at the moment will ensure that nothing is demanded of them personally to ameliorate the living conditions of those who aren’t white or male.

And now you know why: Any teachings of Jesus which favor the poor, the immigrant, the widow, and the marginalized were systematically expunged from the Southern white Protestant hermeneutic until they were left with a Savior who only cares about what happens to you after you die...