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CHAPTER 1
THE EVANGELICAL POLITICS OF FEAR
Fear’s a dangerous thing. It can turn your heart black, you can trust. It’ll take your God-filled soul and fill it with devils and dust.
— Bruce Springsteen
When Donald Trump rode down the escalator at Trump Tower on June 16, 2015, to announce his candidacy for president of the United States, few thought the real-estate-magnate-turned-reality-television-star had a chance. Even fewer could have predicted the support he would win among white evangelical Christians. The last half-century has taught us that evangelical voters prefer elected officials who at least try to present themselves as men and women of character. Trump’s moral indiscretions and playboy lifestyle should have disqualified him among these guardians of evangelical morality. Yet, just over thirteen months later, Trump was at the Republican National Convention in Cleveland accepting the GOP nomination. What happened?
Trump’s appeal to evangelical voters during the 2016 Republican primaries continues to baffle political commentators. How did a crude-talking, thrice-married, self-proclaimed philanderer and ultra-materialistic businessman who showed virtually no evidence of a Spirit-filled life win over evangelicals in a field of qualified GOP candidates who self-identified—in one way or another—with this form of conservative Christianity?
Why, for example, did evangelical voters shun Mike Huckabee, a Southern Baptist pastor, or Rick Santorum, a self-described “evangelical Catholic,” whom Time magazine once included on its list of the “25 Most Influential Evangelicals in America”? Both men won large numbers of evangelical votes after impressive showings in the Iowa caucuses of 2008 and 2012, respectively, and both had proven that they could carry a significant portion of Southern states. Or why not retired brain surgeon Ben Carson? The popular author of best-selling Christian memoirs had become a viable presidential candidate following a 2013 speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in which he criticized the policies of Barack Obama (with Obama seated a few feet to his right) and defended the idea of “tithing” as a model for the nation’s tax policy.
As the primary season of 2016 progressed, the evangelical candidates with the best chance to win the GOP nomination were Florida senator Marco Rubio, a Catholic who attended a large Southern Baptist church, and a Cuban-born preacher’s son, Ted Cruz, who rode evangelical support to a Senate seat from Texas. Nor did the evangelical parade of presidential candidates stop there. Ohio governor John Kasich, Wisconsin governor Scott Walker, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, and businesswoman Carly Fiorina—all seemed to be men and women of character, and they all had positions on social issues that made them appealing to evangelical voters.1
Furthermore, these candidates understood the political commitments of conservative evangelicals. Some of them would even feel comfortable preaching a sermon in an evangelical church or comforting people using the words of Scripture. But what gave them a legitimate shot at the GOP nomination was their ability to engage in the politics of fear. To win the evangelical vote, these political candidates knew that they would have to convince the faithful that the Christian fabric of the country was unraveling, the nation’s evangelical moorings were loosening, and the barbarians were amassing at the borders—ready for a violent takeover. Fear is the political language conservative evangelicals know best.
The Politics of Fear
Fear has been a staple of American politics since the founding of the republic. In 1800, the Connecticut Courant, a Federalist newspaper that supported President John Adams in his reelection campaign against Thomas Jefferson, suggested that, if the Electoral College chose Jefferson, the founding father and religious skeptic from Virginia, the country would have to deal with a wave of murder, atheism, rape, adultery, and robbery.2 In the 1850s, the anti-Catholic and anti-immigration American Party, commonly known as the “Know-Nothing Party,” was infamous for its American-flag banner emblazoned with the words “Native Americans: Beware of Foreign Influence.”
In modern America, campaign ads keep us in a constant state of fear—and not always from right-wing sources either. I still get a shiver up my spine when I watch “Daisy Girl,” the 1964 Lyndon Johnson campaign advertisement that opens with a little girl standing in a quiet meadow picking the petals off a daisy. Midway through the ad, an ominous countdown begins, and the camera zooms into the girl’s eye, where we the viewers see the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. As the ad closes, we hear the voice of sportscaster Chris Schenkel reading the following words on the screen: “Vote for President Johnson on November 3rd. . . . The stakes are too high for you to stay home.” This ad played an important role in Johnson’s landslide victory over his Republican opponent, Barry Goldwater, the conservative Arizona senator who had made reckless statements about the use of nuclear weapons.3 Fear is a powerful political tool.
Political fear is so dangerous because it usually stems from legitimate concerns shared by a significant portion of the voting population. Thomas Jefferson did oppose government-sponsored religion, and he did question many supernatural elements in the Bible. Barry Goldwater did support the use of atomic weapons in Vietnam. Today the growing number of Muslims living in the United States does raise important questions about how religious identity intersects with American values, or how we should defend the religious liberty of the millions of peaceful Muslims while still protecting Americans from the threat of murderous Islamic terror groups. The United States does have a problem with undocumented immigrants entering the country illegally. And it is clear that television and social media make it easier for politicians to define our fears for us. They take these legitimate concerns, as political theorist Corey Robin puts it, and transform them “into imminent threats.”
Jason Bivins has noted, in his study of religious fear, that “moral panics” tend to “rely on presumptions more than facts; they dramatize and sensationalize so as to keep audiences in a state of continual alertness.” For example, studies have shown that during the 1990s, two-thirds of Americans believed that the national crime rate was rising, even though it was actually dropping. Donald Trump himself, during his 2016 campaign, exploited this fear by claiming that crime was rising when it was actually falling. He attempted to portray refugees and undocumented immigrants as threats to the American public even though the chance that an American will die at the hands of a refugee terrorist is about one in 3.6 million; the chance of being murdered by an undocumented immigrant is one in 10.9 million per year. One is more likely to die from walking across a railroad track or having one’s clothes spontaneously catch fire. Yet Trump has managed to convince Americans that immigrants are “imminent threats” to their safety. He rode this wave of fear all the way to the White House, and it continues to serve as the foundation for an immigration policy that revolves around the construction of a massive border wall between the United States and Mexico.4
The “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory during the 2016 presidential election is another example of fear-mongering. When Wikileaks released the hacked emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, anti-Clinton social-media sites claimed that certain words in the emails were code for a child-sex ring sponsored by the Democratic Party and operated out of Comet Ping-Pong, a Washington DC pizzeria. A North Carolina man who claimed he was “investigating Pizzagate” came to Washington with an assault rifle and fired three shots into the restaurant. Thankfully, no one was killed or injured in the shooting. The event became an example of how a sense of fear built on false information and innuendo could place human lives in jeopardy.5
Barack Hussein Obama
Barack Obama became the perfect foil for the evangelical purveyors of the politics of fear. Obama was an exotic figure to many white conservative Christians, and he represented nearly everything that made white evangelicals afraid: he grew up in Hawaii and spent time as a child in a predominantly Muslim country; he was the son of a white woman and a black man; he not only had a strange name, but he had the same middle name as a well-known Muslim dictator whom the United States had waged war against. Obama’s embrace of Christianity took place in a liberal African American congregation with a pastor who was not shy about calling America to task for its past sins. But most importantly, Obama embraced policies on a host of social issues that alienated him almost immediately from most American evangelicals.
Obama’s biracialism, single-parent upbringing, and global experiences made him a poster child for the demographic changes taking place in the country. He represented an American future that most white evangelicals were not yet willing to accept. The conservative evangelical assault on Obama began with the so-called birther controversy. In 2008, Roy Moore, the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court and a candidate, in December 2017, for an Alabama Senate seat (which he lost by only a narrow margin), was one of the first prominent Americans to claim that Obama was unqualified for the presidency because he was not born in the United States. Donald Trump brought the claims of Moore and others into the national spotlight.6 As he contemplated a presidential run in 2012, Trump stoked fears that Obama was not an American citizen; he even claimed that he had hired private investigators to prove the claim he and Moore had made.
The place of Obama’s birth—and the question of whether he was a United States citizen—became a major political talking point for Republicans, a party in which 45 percent of registered voters identified as “born again” or “evangelical.” Politicians such as Mike Huckabee, Michelle Bachman, and Sarah Palin raised the birther issue in public interviews. The strategy seems to have worked on a long-term basis: in July 2017, eight months after the election of Donald Trump, an NBC News poll found that 72 percent of registered Republican voters still doubted Obama’s citizenship.7
Others went even further in their criticism of Obama. Dinesh D’Souza, a conservative pundit who attended an evangelical megachurch and served as president of an evangelical Christian college, suggested that Obama was channeling his father’s “socialist” and “anticolonial ambitions” in an effort to undermine the American way of life. Former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, a favorite among many conservative evangelicals and a politician who had his own presidential ambitions in 2012, said that D’Souza had had a “stunning insight.” Gingrich claimed that the best way to understand the Obama presidency was through a study of his father’s “Kenyan anti-colonial behavior.”8
Many evangelical voters also believed that Obama was a Muslim, and American evangelicals have always feared Muslims. Jonathan Edwards, the patron saint of many modern-day evangelicals, believed Islam was one of “two great kingdoms which the devil . . . erected in opposition to the kingdom of Christ” (Catholicism was the other one). And the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks exacerbated those fears. During Obama’s political rise, and in his first term as president, anonymous chain emails circulated throughout the United States claiming that he attended a radical Islamic school in Indonesia, was the Antichrist prophesied in the New Testament book of Revelation, and swore upon a copy of the Koran when he took his oath of office for the United States Senate. A 2015 CNN poll found that nearly 30 percent of Americans and 43 percent of Republicans believed that the forty-fourth president was a Muslim.9 Several prominent evangelicals suggested that Obama’s family connection to Islam was one of the reasons he did not fight the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) as strongly as many Americans hoped he would. Franklin Graham, the son of evangelist Billy Graham, said that Obama had “given a pass to Islam” in the war on terror because his father was a Muslim and his mother was “married to a Muslim.” Richard Land, the retired president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Church, said that Obama had “his head in the ground” and was living in an “alternative universe” in the battle against “radical Islamic jihadism.”10
It is ludicrous to assume that Barack Obama is a Muslim. He is a Christian. During his campaign in 2008 and his ensuing presidency, he described himself—and was described by others—as a man of prayer who seeks the wisdom of the Christian God. He even has a story of personal conversion. On numerous occasions Obama said that his Christian faith provided strength in times of personal and national struggle and motivated him as a leader. During his presidency he repeatedly urged his fellow Americans, using New Testament language, to love one another as neighbors and, on at least one occasion, said that he wanted to work with his fellow believers to build “the kingdom of God here on earth.” Obama regularly alluded to the words of Jesus Christ in his speeches, and once he told a National Prayer Breakfast audience that he relies on the Holy Spirit for spiritual guidance. His eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the minister killed in the deadly June 2015 shooting in an African American church in Charleston, South Carolina, may be the greatest pastor-in-chief moment since Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address in March 1865. In that speech Obama talked about the Christian concept of grace with remarkable nuance, even ending with an unaccompanied singing of the first verse of “Amazing Grace” before a delighted audience. Americans can debate whether Obama delivered on his faith-based promises, or whether he is the best model of a Christian statesman, but it is hard to deny, based on any verifiable information, that he is a follower of Jesus Christ.11
Other evangelicals were concerned about the form of Christianity that Barack Obama and his family embraced. In 1992, during his years as a community organizer in Chicago, Obama joined Trinity United Church of Christ, where the pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, officiated at his wedding and the baptism of his two daughters. Trinity Church is a member of the United Church of Christ, a liberal denomination of the Protestant mainline that most evangelicals believe to be insufficiently orthodox and to be connected to a social Christianity that privileges acts of social justice over evangelism or the pursuit of personal piety. (For example, Trinity’s doctrinal statement does not even mention the Bible).12 Obama’s commitment to Christianity would thus never satisfy most conservative evangelicals despite his willingness to freely talk about his faith at gatherings sponsored by the evangelical social-justice ministry Sojourners, the evangelical Messiah College, and Saddleback Church, the California megachurch whose pastor is the best-selling author Rick Warren.
During Obama’s presidential run in 2007–2008, journalists uncovered several Wright sermons, preached in the wake of the September 11 attacks, that were critical of America’s past treatment of Native Americans and African Americans, and that railed against the nation’s imperialist foreign policy. When Wright quoted Malcolm X as saying “the chickens are coming home to roost” (a phrase Malcolm uttered to explain the “culture of hate” that led to the assassination of John F. Kennedy), many white Americans thought Wright was saying that the country deserved the September 11 attacks as punishment for its morally questionable past. By calling attention to the darker moments in American history, Wright was preaching a prophetic Christianity that was deeply rooted in the African American experience, which made clear the distinctions between the kingdom of God and the kingdom of the United States. For evangelicals who believe that the United States is a Christian country—an exceptional nation blessed by God above all others—these sermons went too far. Patriotic Christians condemned Wright and, by extension, his most famous parishioner. Obama did his best to disassociate himself from the remarks of his longtime pastor; after all, his presidential hopes were on the line. He tried to calm fears with a speech on race at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, but many evangelicals could not forget his connection to Rev. Wright. To most evangelicals, Barack Obama simply was not one of them.
By the time Obama took office, many white evangelicals believed he was not an American citizen, was a theological liberal at best and more likely a Muslim, and was affiliated with a radical African American community that hated the United States. But it was his social policies that they feared the most. Obama would win 24 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2008 and only 21 percent in 2012. His views on social issues would make it impossible to win more.13
Though he did not make it an important part of his presidential campaigns in either 2008 or 2012, Obama was decidedly in favor of legalized abortion, and he pledged his support to the Democratic Party’s pro-choice platform. When evangelical pro-lifer...
