A feature of the evangelical world since Trump was nominated and elected has been the inability of many of Trump’s evangelical supporters to see Trump’s flaws. John Fea (who will be one of my guests in a future interview) coined the term “court evangelical” to describe these evangelical leaders. Robert Jeffress, Franklin Graham, Jerry Falwell are often named among these court evangelicals. Another evangelical figure which has puzzled many observers due to the strength of his dedication to Trump is Eric Metaxas.
I have written several articles about Metaxas’ historical claims, notably his book If You Can Keep It. His errors are similar to David Barton’s which is understandable once you learn that Metaxas thinks Barton is a credible historian. Perhaps the most popular blog posts about Metaxas’ approach to history are the ones where I attempt to track down the source of this quote:
Silence in the face of evil is itself evil. God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.
Metaxas once attributed the quote to Dietrich Bonhoeffer but it doesn’t appear in any of his works or speeches. Instead of acknowledging this and making a public correction, Metaxas has just stopped attributing the quote to Bonhoeffer. Consequently, hundreds, if not thousands of people continue to cite Metaxas as the source of a bogus Bonhoeffer quote.
In our interview, Thornbury analyzes Metaxas, but that is not the most riveting part to me. When Greg describes his journey from evangelical college president to where he is now, I believe many evangelicals will relate. There has been pressure to adopt Trumpism as an evangelical and those who don’t go along lose social capital in that world. Students of American religious and political history will be interested in hearing about Greg’s experience. Greg was in the inner circle and describes what it was like to see conservative Christians first tolerate then venerate an unworthy President.
Trumpism is the newest theme in my 15 years of blogging but in a way it is an extension of many themes I am familiar with. The narcissism of celebrity pastors, the false history of Christian nationalism, the anti-science dogmatism of many evangelical leaders, and the single-mindedness and bias of culture warring all come together in Trumpism.
So as a new friend in this struggle, I thank Greg for his time and talents.
Gregory Alan Thornbury, Ph.D., has been a college philosophy and theology professor, dean, and president of The King’s College in New York City. In addition to several books on theology and culture, he is the author of Why Should The Devil Have All the Good Music: Larry Norman and the Perils of Christian Rock (Random House, 2018) – a critically acclaimed biography that has been reviewed by The New York Times, The New Yorker, National Public Radio, and was awarded as the most influential book in arts and culture by Christianity Today for 2019. A popular writer and speaker on philosophy, religion, and the arts, he currently serves as Senior Vice President at the New York Academy of Art in Tribeca, founded by Andy Warhol. He is also a consultant for Good Country Pictures, who is currently working on film adaptations of the short stories and novels of Willa Cather, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor for film and television.
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Would you consider putting these interviews out as podcasts or simply audio only versions? I find it much easier to listen to long form interviews while walking, driving, washing dishes etc…
they are on youtube and can listen to those videos from a portable device. Audio only might save a bit of bandwidth but not that much.
True, but doesn’t work offline and keeps the screen on, draining battery.
I am considering that and these would be the first podcasts.
Maybe it’s because I’ve aged onto the threshold of COVID High Risk, but Prof Thornbury just looks so… YOUNG…
Slight aside — interview mentions very old prosperity evangelist Morris Cerullo as one of the scary people he saw at a big Trump meeting.
Cerullo died a few days ago at age 88.
Question. What would it take for people like Metaxas, Al Mohler, Jerry Falwell Jr… etc to see the light? To turn away from their current trajectory? I’m not asking for what someone or someones should do, I’m asking what would need to happen in their lives/lived existence?
It would require their followers to wake up and see them for the idolators that they are. Unfortunately that isn’t likely to happen in the numbers needed to move the needle.
Sunk Cost Fallacy, the con man’s greatest friend.
Get the suckers so EMOTIONALLY invested in the scam (as well as financially) to the point where they CAN’T back out. Because if they back out, they will have to admit to themselves and theirs that they got conned. So they instead double down and fanatically defend the con man even as he’s taking them to the cleaners.
There are undoubtedly a few who are basically grifting for their own gain, and they would probably shift gears if they no longer saw any personal gain to be had. For many, however, I’m not sure that anything would change their minds this side of eternity. (I will make one exception, that being a movement and stirring and conviction by the Holy Spirit.) I think one starts down their path by consciously realizing that you are trading allegiance for personal/political gain, and justifying it because “it will advance the kingdom,” and/or “the other side is just so horrible that we have to do anything possible to stop them.” But over time you become so steeped in that environment, and justify your actions and commitments over and over again, and repeatedly and defensively strike back against anyone who criticizes your choices, until you get to the point where you are so invested in the worldview that you can see no other. You become a “true believer” whose faith in their tribe cannot be shaken. I believe most of the “court evangelicals” mentioned in Warren’s discussion with Greg Thornbury no longer see any distinction between the (American) kingdom of Caesar and the kingdom of Heaven. To them, these have become one and the same.
Do think then that only a worst case scenario, ie the complete/utter collapse of their pseudo “kingdom of god”, ie america might do it? Or, like the South, would that cause them to re-calibrate into a “lost cause” mode and dig in even harder in maintaining their allegiance to this “kingdom”
The “lost cause” analogy is an interesting one, I hadn’t thought of that, but I think that it makes sense. I just can’t envision any scenario (at least in human terms) in which most of the “court evangelicals” could encounter any new or different information or evidence that would lead them to conclude that they were mistaken. Even if the way they have so strongly identified evangelicalism with Trumpist populist/nationalist politics ends up turning generations away from Christianity (which I think is the path we are heading down, as I believe they are propagating a distorted view of Christian faith that is nothing more than sociopolitical culture war), they’ll just say those generations were deluded and led astray by the “evil Left,” which shows all the more that they were correct to have aligned unequivocally and unconditionally with the “righteous Right.”
“THE DWARFS ARE FOR THE DWARFS! WE WON’T BE TAKEN IN!”
— Chronicles of Narnia: The Last Battle
Nothing short of a trip down the Damascus Road, IMO.
Wondering Eagle & I have a working hypothesis called “If you liked Mark Driscoll, you’ll LOVE Donald Trump”.
The idea is that Trump acts more like a celebrity pastor than a celebrity pastor, and celebrity pastors have “groomed” their people like a sexual predator to see this behavior as Godly. (“TOUCH NOT MINE ANOINTED!”) Then Trump comes along hitting these metrics of Godliness more than the celebrity pastor, so he must be more Godly. And only God Himself can be more Godly/Holy/Anointed than Pastor Superapostle…
And let’s face it. Remember John Piper’s God? Omipotent, Egostistical, casting thunderbolts of destruction at whim, an All-Powerful toddler on a hair trigger, only concerned about Glorifying HImself no matter who gets hurt? Who you praise and worship to get out of the crosshairs of the next Divine temper tantrum? And survive by out-flattering all the others? In short, God as a Cosmic Donald Trump? In which case, conditioned to see that as Godly…
“the inability of many of Trump’s evangelical supporters to see Trump’s flaws”
I disagree that they “don’t see” Trump’s flaws, I believe they are actively ignoring them. That is why whenever someone brings up one of Trump’s flaws the immediate reaction is “whataboutism”, i.e. “Obama did it too”, “Clinton did it” etc. They see it is a flaw, for which they have no real response, so they try to shift the conversation to someone/thing else.
And I know quite a few (christians! no less) that actually think the flaws are virtues! They Like the trolling, lying, slandering viciousness of it. They think it’s how God wants them to fight the good fight. At least on social media, they often acted like Trump years before he even went down that elevator… (During the Obama years, had a FB friend, now-uber-trump-worshipper, who, after being called out and kind of admitting the slanderous meme he was posting was untrue, justified his lying…saying it was ok to lie about Obama because “he was so bad”… and he still is, a very devout, church going Bible quoting evangelical to this day… in fact the other day he’s quoting some verse from Proverbs at me… “something about not walking in the way of the wicked” He does this without irony.
Loved the interview btw… hadn’t heard of Thornbury, but his insider stories are pretty riveting… I don’t think I’ve heard such first-hand accounts of the falling away like this before (because it seems most everyone fell away and are now true believers who, at least at the moment, are loathe to admit they’ve made one of the biggest moral/religious mistakes of their lives) I find it both sobering but hopeful that a few stood up and did not turn towards the shiny one… people like Thornbury, etc will be regarded as heroes someday and glad to hear that he knows of young people who haven’t followed their elders in the turning either. I’m hopeful that continues to swell.
There was one point where I would have pressed Thornbury a bit, and that was when he said something like, “only psychology has the answers for this…”sell-out and that’s what he’d want to hear Warren speak about someday after this nightmare. I’d love to hear that too, but I still think I’d want a theologian or two (non-evangelical btw) dissect these white evangelicals and their power-lust too, along with the psychology: – I think there are strong theological points to make in that regard…
Then perhaps you should mention Trump selling out the Kurdish Christians for his Islamist buddy Turkish president Erdogan. Mention sarcastically that the Trump hotel in Istanbul had nothing to do with it.
Which I have heard spun as Another Sign of Trump’s GENIUS, forcing ISIS out into the open where Our Drones can destroy them. “DONALD TRUMP, SUPER. GENIUS.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIPr23xyoZg
I guess the fact that the ISIS bad guys would use the defenseless Kurds as shields and concealment from the drone strikes didn’t cross their minds…
Since GODLY Christians like them acted like that,
Acting Like That must be THE sign of God’s Anointing!
And since Trump Acts More Like That than GODLY Christians do,
HE MUST BE MORE ANOINTED!
The psychology …
I think there is a tendency for some Christians / theists to want a god that is essentially an overgrown human being with some extra arbitrariness, caprice and cruelty thrown in. Such a god can ‘validate’ their own arbitrariness, caprice and cruelty, and make it somehow acceptable – a ‘comfortable’ but controlling (and, perversely, at same time controllable) god who tells them that they are right and those they don’t like are damned. Or maybe even a tribal god of the kind believed in by some of the earliest characters in scripture before the realization of what God is really like began to dawn?
And perhaps we are all tempted to some extent to believe in such a god? Maybe the real challenge is to resist such all-too-human temptation and seek the truth rather than try to control reality by seeking to craft God ‘in our own image’.
For all you Christians out there… Pay attention:
https://twitter.com/Timodc/status/1283024321263198208
“B-but he was holding up a BIBLE!”
Thanks. An excellent discussion, and it ended on a hopeful note.
“If you are part of the system, you can’t admit to anything systemic.”
So true – enjoying the disussion.