Abstract
Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Trump marks a new direction for John Fea, a specialist in early American religion and culture at Messiah College in Pennsylvania. Galvanised by his own sadness and anger at the actions of his fellow evangelicals in helping to elect President Trump (p. 6), Fea marshals his historical expertise to address the question of why so many white evangelicals supported Donald Trump for president. His answer is that evangelical enthusiasm for Trump’s candidacy was the fruit of underlying historical trends in American evangelical political engagement: namely fear, power and nostalgia.
The book’s dedication reads: ‘To the 19 percent’. So, this argument is offered partly to those, like Fea, who self-identify as evangelical and yet find themselves unable to make sense of their co-religionists’ actions. Yet, as Fea acknowledges, Believe Me takes him ‘beyond history and into social criticism’ (p. 179). In this way, he is also writing to the 81 per cent: seeking to show them where they have gone wrong theopolitically and to recall them to Christian hope, humility, and a concern for the realities of their nation’s history (pp. 9–11).
In arguing that three motivations—fear, power and nostalgia—explain evangelicals’ political engagement for much of American history, Fea begins with fear. In chapter 1, Fea writes that ‘[f]ear is the political language conservative evangelicals know best’, and draws attention to recent evangelical fears about Barack Obama, some of which were based in his policies whilst others were entirely rooted in fiction. Fea further argues that Republican presidential candidates sought to transform ‘legitimate concerns’ into ‘imminent threats’ (p. 16), and he describes this as the ‘politics of fear’ (p. 15). Whilst Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Ben Carson all engaged in that, they ended up ‘stok[ing] fear of a world they seemed unfit to tame’ (p. 39). By this assessment, Trump’s strongman image was instrumental to his success. As Robert Jeffress, a megachurch pastor and Trump favourite, put it: ‘When I’m looking for a leader who’s gonna sit across the table from a nuclear Iran, or who’s gonna be intent on destroying ISIS, I couldn’t care less about that leader’s temperament or his tone or his vocabulary. Frankly, I want the meanest, toughest son of a gun I can find’ (p. 39).
Here Fea helps the reader to get under the skin of what it has felt like to be a conservative evangelical over the past decade in America, evoking a sense of social dislocation engendered by the speed at which liberalising policies have fallen into place. With this sense of cultural alienation in mind, the reader is better placed to understand how evangelicals could be drawn to Trump. The second chapter then places the 2016 election in the context of a climate of evangelical fear since the 1940s, in which various liberalising policies (from Supreme Court decisions limiting school-mandated prayers and Bible reading to the loss of tax-exempt status of racially segregated Christian academies and colleges) fuelled concerns about the decline of Christianity in America. These fears gave rise to the ‘playbook’ of the Christian Right in the 1970s and 1980s, which aimed to ‘reclaim’ America as a Christian nation. This was to be achieved by seeking to elect presidents and members of Congress ‘who would pass laws granting privileges to . . . a “Christian worldview” and also appoint and confirm conservative Supreme Court justices’ (p. 60). The playbook originally encouraged evangelicals to support candidates who displayed not only socially conservative policies but also Christian character. Fea suggests, however, that the objective of securing conservative Supreme Court rulings became preeminent during the 2016 election.
Chapter 3 argues that American evangelicalism has in fact always defined itself in opposition to some perceived threat or another, since ‘the very establishment of European settlement in America’ (p. 112). Fea shows how fears ‘that Barack Obama was a Muslim, and that as president he would violate the Second Amendment and take their guns away, echo—and are about as well founded as—early American evangelicals’ fears that Thomas Jefferson was going to seize believers’ Bibles’ (p. 113). This is perhaps the most powerful chapter of the book, raising troubling questions about the extent to which evangelicalism is premised upon fear of the other.
In chapter 4, Fea turns his attention to power, and so to the ‘court evangelicals’ clustered around Trump: those loyalists who seem, in the manner of medieval courtiers, to prize most highly proximity to political power. These include representatives of three main groups: first, the mainstream religious right whose roots go back to the Moral Majority of the 1980s; second, leaders from Independent Network Charismatic Christianity (who claim the gifts of the Pentecostal tradition but do not belong to any established Pentecostal group); and third, advocates of the ‘prosperity gospel’. All of these courtiers are united by a view of Trump as a man assigned by God (regardless of any personal flaws) to restore America to its divinely set course, who must therefore be accorded absolute loyalty.
A strand running through Believe Me is concerned with evangelical understanding of America as a Christian nation. This comes to the fore in chapter 5, which addresses the nostalgia underpinning the desire to ‘Make America Great Again’. Fea powerfully displays how this nostalgia is for an America that never existed. Moreover, the version of the past for which many pine is one that was far from ‘great’ for non-white Americans. Proper attention to history, Fea argues, shows America’s past to have been deeply marked by ‘racism, xenophobia, imperialism, violence, [and] materialism’ (p. 159).
Believe Me is at its strongest when in a diagnostic rather than prescriptive mode. Fea offers a compelling account of the way centuries-long preoccupations with power, nostalgia, and (particularly) fear combined under specific social and cultural pressures to contribute to evangelical support for Trump. Predictably, the least successful sections of the book are where Fea, a historian, is writing theologically. In these sections, nuance is often somewhat lacking—as, for example, in his discussion of the ethics of abortion (p. 139). This is part of a wider lack of clarity around what Fea believes faithful Christian political action to look like. It seems that Fea is seeking a more Pietist or Anabaptist direction: he opens the book with a reflection on James Davison Hunter’s call for Christians to ‘stop fighting the culture wars and instead pursue a course of “faithful presence” in their local communities and neighborhoods’ (p. 2). In this vein, Fea argues that it is idolatrous to call the United States a ‘Christian nation’ and that the attempt to Christianise society will only end up watering down and corrupting Christianity (p. 163). This runs alongside a treatment of political power as pretty unambiguously dangerous and corrupting, and therefore as something that Christians should not be involved in exercising.
It is certainly true that Christians should always be alert to the dangers of corruption involved in exercising power, and particularly to be alert to our tendency to underestimate how far we are motivated by veiled self-interest. However, Fea ends up not leaving much scope for Christians to participate in quotidian democratic life. In the concluding chapter’s turn to African-American civil rights activism as a model for evangelical political action, for example, Fea overlooks the extent to which the civil rights movement sought emancipation into fuller participation in civic life. This is echoed in the legacy of civil rights activism today: for example, Ebenezer Baptist Church’s commitment to turning out the vote in general elections (as described by Kristopher Norris and Sam Speers in Kingdom Politics: In Search of a New Political Imagination for Today’s Church, Cascade, 2015). Believe Me is not able to offer the theological resources for understanding this kind of democratic participation as part of Christian discipleship.
It is fair to say, then, that Fea’s intention of countering the politics of fear and power with an account of Christian hope and humility is not fully realised. Nonetheless, Believe Me is valuable in providing a wider-lens view on the question of why American evangelicals approach political engagement in the way that they do, explaining how evangelical support for Trump can be understood not as an aberration but rather as the blossoming of a long history of fear, power and nostalgia in evangelical politics.