Aiah Foday-Khabenje is general secretary of the Association of Evangelicals in Africa. The organization is comprised of national evangelical associations functioning in forty countries throughout the continent and is completing its new eight-story headquarters, the Africa Evangelical Centre, in Nairobi. Its work is committed to the âtotal transformation of Africa through evangelization and effective discipleship,â and it is one of the globeâs seven regional bodies belonging to the World Evangelical Alliance.
A Presbyterian minister originally from Sierra Leonne, Foday-Khabenje travels throughout the continent promoting the work of the association, which serves as an umbrella organization for groups representing about 180 million evangelical Christians in Africa. He also is engaged internationally with other organizations working in cooperative efforts of ministry and Christian unity. For several years, he and I have served together on the steering committee for the Global Christian Forum.
Thatâs what brought us both to Havana, Cuba, in 2017. We were talking together at the Casa Sacerdotal, a charming Catholic guest house not far from Havanaâs famous Plaza of the Revolution. In our nationâs own political revolution, Donald Trump had been elected president of the United States, and he was in the first few tumultuous months of his presidency when Foday-Khabenje and I met in Havana. I had written an article just published for Sojourners titled âAn Anchor in the Stormâ where I tried to state the grave dangers posed by the Trump presidency and then underscore the spiritual disciplines and practices that would be essential to sustain Christian witness in the long term.
Just before leaving home in Santa Fe for Havana, I threw some extra copies of Sojourners into my suitcase to share with friends, and I had given one to Foday-Khabenje to read. Thatâs what he wanted to talk about. âWell, Iâm glad to know one white evangelical who didnât vote for Donald Trump,â he said. Foday-Khabenje was astonished and perplexed at the news of the overwhelming support among white evangelicals for Trumpâ81 percent of them. They represented views virtually unknown to the community of black evangelical Christians in Africa, as well as those in the wider, vibrant, and growing Christian community in that continent.
My discussion with Aiah Foday-Khabenje in Cuba that day was like countless others Iâve had since the 2016 election whenever I have left the United States and met with Christians from various parts of the world. While always polite and respectful, Christian leaders from Latin America, Asia, Africa, and Europe shared an incredulity about Trumpâs election and their grave alarm about the dangers it posed. But most of all, they could not understand the widespread support Trump was reported to have received, especially among white American evangelical Christians.
Even before the election, my global Christian friends were expressing their dismay. In June of 2016, shortly before the Republican National Convention in Cleveland that nominated Donald Trump, I was in Trondheim, Norway, for meetings associated with the Central Committee of the World Council of Churches. Over the endless breakfast buffet at the Scandic Nidelven Hotel and during coffee breaks, much of my conversation was spent reassuring worried ecumenical friendsâmostly historic Protestants and Orthodoxâthat Donald Trump could never be elected president. The numbers just werenât there, I told them, and it was all an embarrassing aberration in US politics.
Nicta Lubaale, general secretary of the Organization of African Instituted Churches, wasnât convinced. We had served together for years as ecumenical colleagues, and the churches in his organization are among the most fascinating in the African continent. All have been started in Africa by Africans, rather than through Western missionary efforts, and often in historic opposition to the colonialism that sheltered foreign missionaries. Lubaale underscored his worry about Trump; he had seen many times in Africa how authoritarian leaders manipulated peopleâs fears and came to power. The church had to be alert to those dangers, even in America, he warned.
In Havana, where Lubaale was also present as a faithful member of the Global Christian Forum committee, we remembered our previous conversation. He was humble, but I told him he had been a prophet, with more insight into the dynamics of the election than most Americans. Like Foday-Khabenje and others, he saw the grave dangers not only of an authoritarian, narcissistic demagogue coming to power but of the complicity and silence of the church in that process. Such sentiments reflect the consensus of Christians around the world. Voices like Aiah Foday-Khabenje and Nicta Lubaale are not those of liberal activists but of well-respected Christian leaders with conservative theologies, known for the testimony of their sincere witness.
Consider this. Originally inspired by the Lausanne Movement, a global evangelical initiative to promote a âholisticâ gospel and strengthen missionary outreach, an international group of evangelical theologians formed INFEMIT in 1987âthe International Fellowship of Mission as Transformation. They identify themselves as âa Gospel-centered fellowship of mission theologiansâpractitioners that serve local churches and other Christian communities so we together embody the Kingdom of God.â Mostly they are respected evangelical theologians from the Global South.
On January 20, 2017, when Donald Trump was being inaugurated as the forty-fifth president of the United States, evangelical theologians and mission leaders from around the world belonging to INFEMIT released a statement titled, âA Call for Biblical Faithfulness Amid the New Fascism.â It minced no words. While noting troubling trends toward nationalist and racist policies around the world threatening the poor and the marginalized, their call focused particularly on Donald Trumpâs forthcoming presidency:
We grieve the part that evangelicals played in electing a person whose character, values, and actions are antithetical to the Gospel. Furthermore, we find it inadmissible that some high profile evangelical leaders have hailed the President-elect as a Christian and a prophet. It does not surprise us that many people, especially from the younger generation, are abandoning the evangelical world altogether.
As representative members of the global evangelical community, we stand with all who oppose violence, racism, misogyny, and religious, sexual and political discrimination by resisting the leadership of a person whose life, deeds and words have normalized and even glorified these postures.
The statement was signed by noted evangelical theologians and mission leaders in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and elsewhere. Certainly, it did not speak for âallâ such leaders and made no such claim. If one looks hard enough, one can find a diversity of opinions about Trump in the global Christian community. But listening to evangelical global voices, to say nothing of more historic Protestant and Catholic leaders in the global church, the overwhelming perception was that Donald Trumpâs election posed dangers that are antithetical to the gospel. Moreover, support for Trump among US Christians was seen, generally, as depressing and incomprehensible.
White Christianity in the United States, and particularly its evangelical and Pentecostal expressions, lives in a bubble. It is insulated by a worldview that believes God has a special relationship to the United States that automatically commingles nationalistic pride with spiritual righteousness. Nostalgia for an âAmerican way of life,â rooted in traditional âfamily valuesâ and implicitly underscored by whiteness, is equated with Christian public virtue. Making America âgreat again,â and putting American military power and economic interests âfirstâ in world affairs is accompanied with the assurance of Godâs special blessing.
White Christianity in the United States, and particularly its evangelical and Pentecostal expressions, lives in a bubble.
These attitudes are reinforced by the parochial nature of American culture, whose citizens are self-absorbed in expressions of news, entertainment, art, and sports that all place US experience at the worldâs center. Religion is no exception. A self-contained Christian faith living largely in a confined space of nation and race, mostly immune from the influences of world Christianity and racial diversity, seems comfortable and secure enough to endure in this confined isolation. The reality of how Christianityâs vitality, growth, and future is being decisively shaped by those living outside of this bubble is neither seen nor imagined.
What amazed so many, including myself, is how politically significant this cohort proved to be in the past presidential election. For decades, important voices had labored hard to wean the evangelical world away from versions of the gospel that were thoroughly captivated and compromised by narrowly nationalistic and racially exclusive attitudes within American culture. A widely heralded watershed moment came when forty prominent evangelicals, young and old, gathered at the YMCA Hotel to draft the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern in 1973. Dick Ostling, then religion correspondent for Time, said that this was probably the first time in the twentieth century that forty evangelical leaders had spent a weekend together discussing social action.
The Chicago Declaration had a long shelf life in American church history. Sojourners, Evangelicals for Social Action, the Evangelical Womenâs Caucus, and similar initiatives gained prominence in its wake as emerging voices championing the gospelâs imperative of social engagement for justice and peace. But by 1979, conservative evangelicals with a right-wing political agenda took up the call to political engagement, with leaders such as Jerry Falwell forming the Moral Majority, James Dobson sharpening a similar political agenda in Focus on the Family, and Pat Robertson building a television broadcasting base supporting the movement.
Beginning in 1980, that movement wedded itself to the Republican Party as an organized voting bloc. Its influence persisted for years until growing numbers of evangelicals began to be weary of marrying the gospel to a narrow, right-wing political agenda. Moderate, mainline evangelicals and institutions kept their distance, and the political impact of this movement seemed to congeal as a predictable but circumscribed portion of the conservative movement in the Republican Party. It continued to exert influence, surfacing every presidential election cycle, but appeared to be losing its organizational political clout. Francis FitzGerald, in her comprehensive history The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, maintains that the religious Right reached is pinnacle in 2005 and then began to wane. The 2006 midterm elections proved disappointing for their fortunes.
On Memorial Day in 2008, I sat at a coffee shop in Chicago with Joshua DuBois, a young African American Pentecostal, before going together to Wrigley Field to see a Cubs game. DuBois had served on Senator Barack Obamaâs staff and now was coordinating religious outreach for Obamaâs presidential campaign. Paul Monteiro, DuBoisâs assistant, joined us. They wanted my advice for a list of diverse Christian leaders Obama could invite to a private conversation where he could share his faith and reflect on how it related to the political life of the nation. My work with Christian Churches Together and the National Council of Churches provided a wide range of potential contacts.
That meeting took place in Chicago a week after Obama clinched the Democratic nomination for president. Later at the 2008 convention in Denver, more panels on religion and faith-related gatherings were held than at the four previous Democratic conventions combined. Obamaâs campaign, sensing the discontent of many Christians with the public equating of their faith with the religious Right during the Bush presidency, made intentional outreach to religious voters, including evangelicals, part of their strategy. While the gains were modest, differences in non-Southern swing states such as Michigan, Ohio, Florida, and Indiana were important, and even decisive.
More important, the fracturing of the evangelical world was becoming clear. Earlier, established groups like the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) had joined a strong coalition pressing for action on climate change. Once Obama became president, the NAE and other evangelical organizations joined Catholics and mainline Protestants in pressing for comprehensive immigration reform. When the Tea Party movement emerged, some in the religious Right made common cause, and polls showed political sympathy toward the movement from grassroots evangelicals. Yet, right-wing politics, in whatever garb, now seemed to capture only a discrete political faction of the evangelical world.
By the 2012 election, the racial divide reflected in the nationâs changing demographics was starkly evident in the patterns of voting by religious groups. Mitt Romney won 79 percent of the evangelical vote, and overall white C...
