Challenging the American Heresy

Obery M. Hendricks, Jr., Christians Against Christianity: How Right-Wing Evangelicals Are Destroying Our Nation and Our Faith

Christianity, a faith founded by a country preacher who called followers to feed the hungry and challenge the powerful, has become the religion of American dominion. Jesus called the lowly and disfranchised to band together and raise one another up; but the loudest, most media-savvy portion of American Christendom has thrown its weight behind militarism, White supremacy, and anti-egalitarianism. White Evangelicals are the demographic most likely to have voted for Donald Trump. So what happened?

Obery M. Hendricks, an ordained elder and sometime seminary professor, wondered exactly this. How could people calling themselves Christians believe principles so clearly unaligned with Christ’s message? His answers will cause discomfort among many Christians, including those like me, who don’t support today’s Evangelical message. He ties political Evangelicalism with Christian Nationalism, a philosophy that supports American aims, right or wrong, and believes in the saving person of Jesus, but not in Jesus’ recorded teachings.

To begin, Hendricks creates meaningful definitions of Christianity and Evangelicalism. Both share common roots, and sometimes represent conflicting visions. Christianity begins with Jesus Christ, but not every Christian reads Jesus’ message equally. Likewise, Evangelicalism has historically been tied to progressive values, including abolition and women’s suffrage. During the Twentieth Century, though, Evangelicalism has drifted politically rightward, and is frequently associated with retrogressive, even repressive values.

With his scholarly foundation in Biblical history, Hendricks emphasizes that our Christian message derives from not only what Christ, the Apostles, and the Prophets said, but what they meant to their original audiences. Conservative Evangelicals love quoting orphaned Bible verses, like Mark 14:7 or 2 Thessalonians 3:10. Hendricks puts these and other verses in their Judaean context, demonstrating with evidence that withholding food, clothing, asylum, and other support is never in accord with Christian principles.

The Evangelicals whom Hendricks describes share one important trait: they’re White. Hendricks, and several religious scholars he quotes, agree that Black Evangelicals believe oppression and injustice happen in America, and exercise their liberties to challenge the forces of repression. White Evangelicals, by contrast, believe oppression happens elsewhere, or inflate insignificant incidents (cake) to the level of Herodian tyranny. Though America’s racial delineations aren’t as ironclad as in the past, this racial distinction still matters significantly.

Obery M. Hendricks, Jr.

Different narratives have emphasized different origins for right-wing American Evangelicalism. Historian Kevin M. Kruse, whom Hendricks quotes, connects Evangelicalism with pro-business libertarian economics. Hendricks finds much compelling about this hypothesis, and spends an entire chapter on Evangelical economics. Meanwhile, Evangelicals claim the Roe v. Wade decision galvanized their movement, but Hendricks uses documentary evidence that it actually took fifteen years to push that to prominence.

Instead, Hendricks associates Evangelicalism with Green v. Connally, the case that stripped tax-exempt protections from private schools, and other church-owned operations, that practiced racial discrimination. A slurry of right-wing religious and political leaders, like Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich, and Pat Robertson, organized behind opposition to this change. In other words, issues like libertarian economics or anti-abortion politics are latecomers to the Evangelical story. This movement first gelled around White Supremacy.

Many Christians, including both clergy and congregants, reject this Christian Nationalist violence. Hendricks contrasts Christians who still believe loving our neighbor, and protecting “the least of these” are foundational values, with Christians who support guns and borders, and seek an earthly King. (Hendricks quotes generously from the Parable of the Sheep and Goats; parables loom large in his theology.) Not all American Christians support the Trumpist wing, Hendricks emphasizes, though anti-Trumpists often haven’t been media-savvy.

Throughout his work, Hendricks has frequently emphasized Christianity as a community, and Christian action as cooperative solidarity. He contrasts this with right-wing Evangelicalism, which is individualist and egocentric. In Hendricks’ reading, Christianity focuses on how we live this God-given life, not whether we get to Heaven after death. This means always remaining conscious of how we treat our neighbors and how we greet strangers, something right-wing Christianity has completely abandoned.

Throughout this book, Hendricks attempts to reawaken the Evangelical Christian conscience. This isn’t easy, since he describes demagogues who haven’t always shown they have a conscience. In his final pages, Hendricks describes himself finishing his manuscript in December 2020, believing he’d seen the lowest depths of American Christendom. We can only imagine how he received the following weeks and months.

Christianity has served diverse purposes for diverse people; some purposes have been, sadly, harmful. Hendricks encourages Christians to remember not only the person of Jesus Christ, but also His message, of comforting the bereaved and finding the lost. Hopefully Christians still have time to remember.