“You mean I should pay less attention? Doesn’t that make me a bad citizen?” No, it makes you a better one.
Politics has become the most important standard to determine our ethical and social views, as if politics is the main guide for our material, cultural and spiritual lives.
And that’s an intrusion that topsy-turveys our humanity.
Not grace, not lessons from the Gospels about the limits of worldly political life, not Jesus’s teaching about loving your enemies — but rather a political document as the guiding light.
There’s an important lesson here, not just for evangelicals but for everyone. I’ll get back to this later.
People are distraught with this twisted reversal of priorities. As a recent Pew Research Center study put it, “They have a sense that politics is everywhere – and often in a bad way. They find themselves overwhelmed by how much information they confront in their day-to-day life.”
There are ways you can stem this tsunami. Some advice comes from health professionals. Others come from people who have lived through in other countries what the U.S. is going through now.
Finally, some of the best lessons come from the schism and turmoil among evangelicals who on the surface seem so united because they are Trump’s biggest supporters but are divided in ways that offer relevant lessons to all of us about the polarization.
What The Experts Say
Let’s begin by looking at what health practitioners say about the 2024 election hazards.
Peter Atia describes the coming year as a “vortex.” “Everybody is going to be sucked into the vortex of world news and world affairs and politics. No one is immune to the negative psychological forces of that awful vortex.”
Why pay attention to this guy? Because Dr. Atia is the author of the best-selling book: “Outlive: The Science And Art Of Longevity.”
He’s not exaggerating, and he’s not alone. There’s a lot of other evidence showing that political vortex is hazardous to your health. Stress for instance.
Polls show that significant numbers of Americans report that they are stressed out by 2024 politics. Those who pay the most attention to the political goings-on are the most angry and depressed. (...)
Really, though, one of the best ways to understand the 2024 toxicity is to look at what evangelicals are going through. They have been and continue to be the strongest Trump supporters, so it’s easy to think they are unified. They aren’t.
On one side, the one that’s become dominant, are those who believe that the barbarians are storming the gate, threatening the end of Christianity and civilizational collapse.
The other side, which has become marginalized and even driven out of churches, are those subscribing to the traditional Evangelical position about what Jesus and the Gospels teach about the limits of worldly politics.
According to this now marginalized view, the dominant position that the world can only be saved through politics and specifically through Donald Trump is a perversion.
“Jesus frames the decision in explicitly binary terms,” Tim Alberta says. “We can serve and worship God or we can serve and worship the gods of this world. Too many American evangelicals have tried to do both. And the consequences for the Church have been devastating.”
Putting it simply, one side says only political action can save Christians, while the other side says that is exactly what will corrupt and destroy them.
What are the general lessons we can learn from this battle among conservative Christians?
One is that it’s another example of how much stress today’s politics induces. Pastors caught in this conflict, as one observer put it, are crushed and broken. The stress has made their job impossible. Imagine what’s it’s like for a minister to listen to that guy I quoted earlier who said that the Constitution had replaced the Bible as his road map?
But the more important lesson is that the evangelical turmoil shows what happens when the basic beliefs, those taken for granted as transcendent notions, no longer exist. There is nothing shared that would mediate these differences. It’s all about the differences. So, hate and dehumanization develops.
And that at a bigger scale is exactly where America is right now. You can worry about the threat Trump poses to democracy if he is re-elected or the threat to democracy if he loses and tries to rally the millions of people who voted for him. I sure do. Whatever the case, the same kind of nastiness and anger the evangelicals have is still going to be there in the U.S. as a whole.
by Neil Milner, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Image: Stressed about politics? Take a hike! (Cory Lum/Civil Beat/2019)[ed. Here's an overview of Tim Alberta's book: The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism:]
"Evangelical Christians are perhaps the most polarizing—and least understood—people living in America today. In his seminal new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, journalist Tim Alberta, himself a practicing Christian and the son of an evangelical pastor, paints an expansive and profoundly troubling portrait of the American evangelical movement. Through the eyes of televangelists and small-town preachers, celebrity revivalists and everyday churchgoers, Alberta tells the story of a faith cheapened by ephemeral fear, a promise corrupted by partisan subterfuge, and a reputation stained by perpetual scandal.
For millions of conservative Christians, America is their kingdom—a land set apart, a nation uniquely blessed, a people in special covenant with God. This love of country, however, has given way to right-wing nationalist fervor, a reckless blood-and-soil idolatry that trivializes the kingdom of Jesus Christ. Alberta retraces the arc of the modern evangelical movement, placing political and cultural inflection points in the context of church teachings and traditions, explaining how Donald Trump's presidency and the COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated historical trends that long pointed toward disaster. Reporting from half-empty sanctuaries and standing-room-only convention halls across the country, the author documents a growing fracture inside American Christianity and journeys with readers through this strange new environment in which loving your enemies is "woke" and owning the libs is the answer to WWJD.
Accessing the highest echelons of the American evangelical movement, Alberta investigates the ways in which conservative Christians have pursued, exercised, and often abused power in the name of securing this earthly kingdom. He highlights the battles evangelicals are fighting—and the weapons of their warfare—to demonstrate the disconnect from scripture: Contra the dictates of the New Testament, today's believers are struggling mightily against flesh and blood, eyes fixed on the here and now, desperate for a power that is frivolous and fleeting. Lingering at the intersection of real cultural displacement and perceived religious persecution, Alberta portrays a rapidly secularizing America that has come to distrust the evangelical church, and weaves together present-day narratives of individual pastors and their churches as they confront the twin challenges of lost status and diminished standing.
Sifting through the wreckage—pastors broken, congregations battered, believers losing their religion because of sex scandals and political schemes—Alberta asks: If the American evangelical movement has ceased to glorify God, what is its purpose?"
"Evangelical Christians are perhaps the most polarizing—and least understood—people living in America today. In his seminal new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, journalist Tim Alberta, himself a practicing Christian and the son of an evangelical pastor, paints an expansive and profoundly troubling portrait of the American evangelical movement. Through the eyes of televangelists and small-town preachers, celebrity revivalists and everyday churchgoers, Alberta tells the story of a faith cheapened by ephemeral fear, a promise corrupted by partisan subterfuge, and a reputation stained by perpetual scandal.
For millions of conservative Christians, America is their kingdom—a land set apart, a nation uniquely blessed, a people in special covenant with God. This love of country, however, has given way to right-wing nationalist fervor, a reckless blood-and-soil idolatry that trivializes the kingdom of Jesus Christ. Alberta retraces the arc of the modern evangelical movement, placing political and cultural inflection points in the context of church teachings and traditions, explaining how Donald Trump's presidency and the COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated historical trends that long pointed toward disaster. Reporting from half-empty sanctuaries and standing-room-only convention halls across the country, the author documents a growing fracture inside American Christianity and journeys with readers through this strange new environment in which loving your enemies is "woke" and owning the libs is the answer to WWJD.
Accessing the highest echelons of the American evangelical movement, Alberta investigates the ways in which conservative Christians have pursued, exercised, and often abused power in the name of securing this earthly kingdom. He highlights the battles evangelicals are fighting—and the weapons of their warfare—to demonstrate the disconnect from scripture: Contra the dictates of the New Testament, today's believers are struggling mightily against flesh and blood, eyes fixed on the here and now, desperate for a power that is frivolous and fleeting. Lingering at the intersection of real cultural displacement and perceived religious persecution, Alberta portrays a rapidly secularizing America that has come to distrust the evangelical church, and weaves together present-day narratives of individual pastors and their churches as they confront the twin challenges of lost status and diminished standing.
Sifting through the wreckage—pastors broken, congregations battered, believers losing their religion because of sex scandals and political schemes—Alberta asks: If the American evangelical movement has ceased to glorify God, what is its purpose?"
