Two commitments helped me survive spiritually
through the scathing and acrimonious presidential campaign season this fall. One was a
commitment I made on July 10 to spend an hour each day reading the scriptures
and praying for the next 120 days, until November 8. That was inspired the week
a relative and I had a falling out over political comments she had written on
Facebook. Thirty-four members of the congregation
I serve agreed with me to pray for one another, our church, our nation, and
this election. While I fell short of the 1-hour commitment many days, I always
remembered it when I got irked by some piece of political backbiting or character
assassination I heard from each candidate against the other. When I got bent
out of shape a few times and shouted at the radio, internet, or television, I
would remember my commitment and redouble my efforts to read scripture and pray
instead. This has been a spiritually trying
campaign. I have been tested to the limit. The second source of my help to get
through the campaign season and adjust to the outcome of this election was a
commitment I made during the summer to lead a fall class at church on Wednesday
evenings titled “In the World but Not of the World: How Christians Engage
Culture.”[i]
I offer my analysis of what
happened in the 2016 presidential election using concepts and definitions the
class and I have explored weekly since August 24. Experts are baffled and trying to figure out what
happened to give Donald Trump the unexpected victory over Hillary Clinton. Prognosticators who gave Clinton the
advantage prior to the election predicted overwhelming support for her from the
increased diversity of the American electorate: Hispanics, Blacks, young
people, women, and educated white males. They calculated they would far
outnumber Donald Trump’s supporters who were largely white with no college degrees
and who live in rural communities, today aptly called “the forgotten population.” Many contributing factors to this nearly unprecedented
defeat of the “establishment candidate” by an outsider have been named, and all
of them have some relevance. For the moment, however, leave behind Hillary
Clinton’s emails doing her in or her sleeping through the Benghazi attack in
which Americans, including a U.S. ambassador, were killed. There is actually
something bigger going on in America, and the Trump movement sensed it
and rode it to victory. I am speaking of
the grassroots backlash against government supported secularization of American
political life. Secularism and the Washington establishment on both sides of the aisle failed to notice a group which seemed lost in all the new diversity of America. But this group refused to fade into the background. I am speaking of the rural white working class, “the forgotten population.”
Here is my theory as it relates to the
2016 Presidential election: The Democratic Party in general, including the
Obama Administration and the Clinton Campaign, has adopted secularization as a
leading force behind societal change. So
have many in the Republican Party, albeit to a lesser degree. Secularization
in its most extreme form is a force that seeks to eliminate religion from
society. We call that Atheism. Secularization as it has been adopted by
politicians and the large majority of those called progressives, (most of whom
have college degrees), does not seek to eliminate religion from society but to
remove religion from having influence on the social and political life of our nation. The central value of secularism is
inclusiveness, which aligns with core values of many churches, but the form of secularism
that has driven societal change in American life over the past forty years pushes
inclusiveness as a melding together of everyone without honoring and preserving
the distinctiveness of each.
Secularization has taken the First Amendment
of the U.S. Constitution,
(“Congress shall
make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”), and
turned it into a dragon at the gate of government that keeps religious groups
from exerting influence in American political life. Thomas Jefferson in a personal letter to a
Baptist group that supported his election to the White House coined the phrase “wall
of separation between church and state.”[ii] Supreme Court Justice
Hugo Black in a 1947 ruling used Jefferson’s phrase “wall of separation” as if
it were a part of the Constitution itself.
He said, “That wall must be kept high and impregnable. We could not
approve the slightest breach.”[iii]
This impregnable
wall between church and state notion has since allowed room for the force of
secularization, which in effect is a religion of its own, to prevent Christian
views from influencing Supreme Court rulings from Rowe vs. Wade which legalized
abortions in 1973 to the legalization of gay marriage in 2015. The latter ruling followed by the death of the
most vocal conservative Justice on the Supreme Court Antonin Scalia
in February, 2016 set fire to the grassroots backlash against the force of
secularization in American political life. The deciding votes in the 2016
presidential election came from rural America in states like Wisconsin which
had voted Democratic in every election since 1980. And much of the vote came from rural white
Christians who do not hold college degrees. What they do hold is a strong
conviction that their faith should have a say in how we are governed in
America and in the shape and character of our society.
For many of us who were
repulsed by Donald Trump’s demeanor, his irresponsible statements about women,
Hispanics, the handicapped, and released recordings of his boasting about
taking sexual advantage of women because of his celebrity status, the
evangelical church’s support of Donald Trump was an outright
contradiction. His personal moral conduct
has been reprehensible and his apology for any of it disingenuous. How could a
Christian of any denomination ever support him?
The grassroots backlash against secularization explains this aberration in the Christian vote as well. Secularization seeks to prevent the majority Christian religion from influencing American political life and to drive Christian faith into the private realm of personal moral behavior. Citizens who make up the grass roots of America refuse to have their faith defined by or their voices confined to personal moral behaviors, their own or Donald Trump’s. They have spoken loudly, sometimes angrily, and now with their votes powerfully and effectively with a resounding NO MORE to secularization as the force driving progress in America. The grassroots Christians who voted Donald Trump into the Whitehouse have successfully rushed the impregnable wall of separation between church and state and defeated the forces of secularization in American political life.
The grassroots backlash against secularization explains this aberration in the Christian vote as well. Secularization seeks to prevent the majority Christian religion from influencing American political life and to drive Christian faith into the private realm of personal moral behavior. Citizens who make up the grass roots of America refuse to have their faith defined by or their voices confined to personal moral behaviors, their own or Donald Trump’s. They have spoken loudly, sometimes angrily, and now with their votes powerfully and effectively with a resounding NO MORE to secularization as the force driving progress in America. The grassroots Christians who voted Donald Trump into the Whitehouse have successfully rushed the impregnable wall of separation between church and state and defeated the forces of secularization in American political life.
The grassroots voters who catapulted
Donald Trump into the White House expect in return for their votes the reversal
of serval policies and rulings of the current and previous Administrations and the Supreme Court that have been driven by the tide of secularization
over the past 40 years. Whether these
changes will be effected is yet to be seen. President Elect Trump will work
with Republican majorities in both the Senate and the House of Representatives,
but the question of whether he and the Republican Party are compatible or misfits
is yet to be answered. The assumption and hope of the grassroots voters who put Donald Trump in the White House is that the new president and Congress will work
together enough to reverse decisions secularization drove over them and their
religious values. The values of the
grassroots which they still hold as part of their Biblical faith have passed
through some swamps and sewers of politics and they have arrived to help shape
the future of American political life.
They came to be players. They got into the game. And this year they won.
Hughey Reynolds
[i] *My primary resource for the class
is the book Christ and Culture Revisited
by D. A. Carson. Carson is research
professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield,
Illinois. I chose the book intentionally knowing the author represented a more Biblically
conservative viewpoint than I hold. This school where he teaches holds the
statement of the faith of the Evangelical Free Church of America, which views
the Bible as inerrant in its original writings, the complete revelation of His
will for our salvation and “the ultimate authority by which every realm of
human knowledge and endeavor should be judged” (https://divinity.tiu.edu/who-we-are/statement-of-faith/).
As a United Methodist elder, I recognize our denomination holds scripture as
the primary source of knowledge for salvation but stops short of stating or
suggesting that the scriptures are without error in the original writings.
Rather, The United Methodist Book of
Discipline states, “We are convinced that Jesus Christ is the living World
of God in our midst whom we trust in life and death. The biblical authors,
illumined by the Holy Spirit, bear witness that in Christ the world is
reconciled to God” (The 2012 Book of Discipline of the United Methodist Church,
paragraph 105, p. 81). While those claiming belief in the inerrancy of
Scripture also rely on Tradition, Experience, and Reason for interpreting the
Scriptures, United Methodists sometimes elevate these extra-biblical sources to
be on par with Scripture. D. A. Carson would reject this practice.
The book is a summary and critique of the classic work on the
relationship of the sacred and the secular titled Christ and Culture, which was written by the theologian H. Richard
Niebuhr in 1952. During the class we
reviewed the typology H. Richard Niebuhr developed to categorize distinct
approaches various Christians have toward the culture in which they are
situated. His 5 types are Christ against
culture, Christ of culture, Christ above culture, Christ and culture in
paradox, and Christ the transformer of culture. While all but the second
approach (Christ of culture) finds grounding in some parts of scripture, no one
of them stands up against the major turning points of Biblical theology--God’s mighty
acts of salvation from creation, the fall, the call of Abraham, the giving of
the law, the sending of the prophets, the exile, and the acts of redemption God
initiated through Biblical history culminating in the incarnation of God in
Jesus Christ, his life, death, resurrection, ascension, and promised return to
earth to gather the elect and establish God’s Kingdom where he reigns in justice,
mercy, and love. Niebuhr’s classic work
is not rejected but honored as an astute analysis of the primary views churches
that existed in the 1950s held about the relationship between the church and
culture. Christian denominations across the theological spectrum aligned
themselves accordingly primarily with one or the other of Niebuhr’s types.
D.A. Carson concludes that in light of the whole of Biblical
theology and in light of the developments in the church and in society,
adhering to one or the other of Niebuhr’s philosophies about the relationship
of the church and culture is an act of reductionism. We have to ignore much of
Biblical theology and many developments in society to hold to one of these
perspectives as our stance about how the church should relate to society. The whole of Biblical theology rather than one
of Niebuhr’s types is the standard for determining the church’s role in a given
culture and assessing whether the church should stand over against cultural
entities or work in cooperation with them.
[ii]
Thomas Jefferson’s letter responding to congratulations from the Baptist
Association of Danbury, Connecticut on his election to the presidency in which
they applauded him for his defense of religious liberty. Jefferson himself was
in France in 1789 when the First Amendment was ratified.
[iii] James Hitchcock, The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life, vol. 1: The Odyssey of the Religion Clauses; vol. 2: From “Higher Law” to “Sectarian Scruples (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004)
[iii] James Hitchcock, The Supreme Court and Religion in American Life, vol. 1: The Odyssey of the Religion Clauses; vol. 2: From “Higher Law” to “Sectarian Scruples (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004)
