On Evangelical Attempts to Delegitimize Their Critics
New wrinkles in the national election coverage cycles surrounding evangelicals
During every presidential election cycle—without fail—there is an increased interest in “how will evangelicals vote?” analysis & commentary in the mainstream media. In the past two cycles, it’s gotten easier to predict because white evangelicals themselves have become easier to predict: they’re Trump’s most loyal and dedicated base.1 Yet their established alliance and preference for Trump is something they have felt compelled to justify via high-profile op-eds.
This cycle, they have embarked another media campaign: discrediting legitimate criticisms of evangelical culture, politics, and belief. This is more important to evangelicals than in prior cycles because the exvangelical counterpublic is more robust than ever, and the rhetoric surrounding Christian nationalism in political discourse has solidified since the J6 insurrection.
I’ve written before (and it’s something I also explore in my book, that will be published this fall) about how the concept of counterpublics applies to the exvangelical/deconstruction discourse that is now an established aspect of online conversation about religion & society. Counterpublics have many facets, but one key thing they offer is a response to the dominant public.
Whether they wish to acknowledge it or not, evangelicals still hold a place of dominance in the public sphere—both in mass media and in other spheres such as governance. But given their predilection to see themselves as persecuted,2 they are compelled to provide a defense. Given their access, they can do so in major outlets.
The most recent example of this attempt to discredit evangelical criticisms is the confounding piece by John Fea in The Atlantic, which I wrote about in this piece below:
Another attempt to discredit critics can be seen in the book The Deconstruction of Christianity: What It Is, Why It’s Destructive, and How to Respond co-written by Alisa Childers and Tim Barnett. The book has an entire chapter dedicated to a blog post I published in 2019, that I re-published here in 2022:
I am still reading through the entire book, and hope to write a longer response to it later. In the meantime, I want to highlight how Childers & Barnett have framed people like me, whom they call “deconstructionists.”
In the first chapter, they open with a quote from John Cooper, the Skillet3 frontman-turned-antiwoke-influencer, who earned headlines a few years ago when he said “It’s time for us and your generation to declare war on this idolatrous deconstruction Christian movement!” The authors try to make Cooper’s statement less extreme by stipulating that:
“When Cooper declared “war” on deconstruction, he was speaking of spiritual warfare. Many Christians misunderstand spiritual warfare as referring only to power encounters with demonic spirits. Of course, there is some of that. But the fundamental nature of spiritual warfare is not power encounters; it’s truth encounters. It’s a battle of ideas.”
However, in the next paragraph, they justify the warfare framing:
“We need to be vigilant to resist, oppose, and refute false ideas while remaining loving and compassionate toward the people who are being taken “captive” by them (Colossians 2:8). Therefore, if deconstruction really is a movement that seeks to lead Christians away from truth and encourages them to deconvert from the faith, declaring spiritual war on it would be prudent, wise, and biblical.”
While they claim to “remain loving4 and compassionate,” they go to great lengths to say that “deconstruction” should be a dirty word for evangelicals:
“Although we certainly understand why some Christian thought leaders and influencers are using the word to encourage discernment, reformation, and healthy questioning, there are a number of reasons why the word deconstruction should not be baptized, redeemed, or Christianized to mean something healthy or positive.”
Later they say plainly that they believe “the practice of deconstruction is fundamentally at odds with Christianity.”
Beyond declaring that people who are deconstructing are practicing something that is “fundamentally at odds with Christianity,” in Chapter 3 they take this as far as they can when they write:
Deconstruction is as old as humanity itself. It began with Satan—the father of faith deconstruction—and continues today.
That’s right. The devil started deconstruction in the Garden of Eden.
So those that disagree with them—who, for however long, use terms like exvangelical or deconstruction to describe their experience within evangelicalism or Christianity—are following in the footsteps of Satan, and as such they should be opposed and seen as enemies in a spiritual war.
These are stark terms that seek to discredit the hard-fought and deeply-felt insights of those who are brave enough to share a part of their story with the public, either online or elsewhere. And it’s deeply dehumanizing to boot.
If you know Christianese or evangelical logic (because if you were evangelical, you used to believe these same things) you can see where they’re coming from. But I’m at a point where I’m less angry than I am just sad and discouraged that they still refuse to listen.
But despite these attempts, the criticisms still stand. White evangelicalism has demonstrated time and again that it does not want to be reformed, and so people leave.
You may not always read that story in places like The Atlantic, but you can find it being told elsewhere.
I am not about to derail this opinion piece by trying to define what an evangelical is or isn’t. Evangelicalism’s favorite pastime is moving goalposts boundaries around to exclude an embarrassing theological or sociological cousin. Trump is the preferred candidate for the majority of white evangelicals. This has been made clear in two presidential elections and even the most recent South Carolina primary. Let’s speak plainly about this.
Melani McAlister calls this outlook “victim identification” in her book The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals:
The other lens through which evangelicals saw the world was “victim identification.” Over the past fifty years, American evangelicals became galvanized by a vision of their own (global) persecution. They spoke of Christians being martyred all over the world, prevented from spreading the gospel and persecuted for their faith. These victims were sometimes American missionaries but more often were local Christian believers in Africa, Asia, or elsewhere who faced government oppression, conflict with other religious groups (often Muslims), or political marginalization. Evangelicals depicted these victims as facing persecution bravely, and consequently they became role models. Believers in the United States were invited to see themselves as part of the global Christian family, and thus to identify with the victimization they saw elsewhere.36 By the turn of the twenty-first century, “persecution” had become a primary lens through which evangelicals viewed the world.
McAlister, Melani. The Kingdom of God Has No Borders: A Global History of American Evangelicals (p. 11). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Fun(?) fact: I spent my 18th birthday watching Skillet perform in either a parking lot or a field at a festival near Aurora, Illinois.
For a good exploration on what evangelicals often mean by “love,” read this piece from Chrissy Stroop: