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Of This World is a podcast dedicated to discussing religion and politics. Co-hosts Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, a historian at Wesleyan University, and Nick Tabor, a journalist and author, talk with scholars, writers, and theologians working at the seam between faith and the secular. Across each episode they return to one question: can there be an effective religious left in the United States? A joint production with Commonweal magazine.
This is Nick Tabor. I'm a journalist and author living in New York.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:And my name is Daniel Steinmetz Jenkins. I'm an assistant professor of history in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University, and this is Of This World. So it's very clear to many that Donald Trump isn't a godly man. And so people are often puzzled as to why evangelicals support him. And this question goes all the way back to the first Trump administration when there was a real debate amongst evangelicals whether they should throw their support behind him.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:And we use this term evangelicalism very loosely, I think. It's almost a floating signifier. But when you kind of peel back the layers, it's much more complicated than it appears because the different religious evangelicals who support Trump, there are substantive differences between them. And to get at these differences and to try to even determine whether some of these people who are supporting Trump or associated with evangelicalism are actually even evangelicals. It's our pleasure to have on the show today Joseph Slaughter, who's my colleague at Wesleyan and who has immense knowledge of US religious history.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:And so just to ask kind of a a general framing question, Joe. I mean, there are numerous different, I guess, could describe them as denominational representations that support Trump that get grouped with this term evangelicalism. Why is that maybe distorting, or is that clarifying, or how do you what's the lay of the land in terms of these different Christian groups associated with evangelicalism that support Trump and maybe why that might be maybe not the most helpful way of understanding them?
Joseph Slaughter:Thanks for having me on, Danny and Nick. I really appreciate the chance to come and have a conversation with you all. I'm probably with you in the sense that I feel like the evangelical term is almost becoming unhelpful at this point at best and maybe even a a huge obstacle quite possibly. And it's because it just sort of flattens the whole group out as you're sort of getting to. And and it's started to take on different definitions to different people so that we're not even necessarily even talking about the same terms or meanings when we're using that phrase.
Joseph Slaughter:So just as an example of that, a couple weeks ago before our semester ended with one of my courses that was somewhat unrelated, I got a question about who evangelicals are and what they believe and how to understand them. And so I basically gave sort of a rudimentary three different definitions that one could use and maybe has been used in the past as a way of trying to think about the different ways of how different people could be self identifying themselves. The first one would be the one that I'm sure you're familiar with. Lots of more academic people are familiar with, and that's more a belief based definition. You know, this technical Bevington's quadrilateral sometimes gets used.
Joseph Slaughter:And for those that aren't as familiar, it's typically four main beliefs. The first would be this idea that you have to be converted to salvation and then that salvation is based on Christ's death and resurrection and atonement for sin and that this reality is based on the ultimate truth and authority of the bible and that alone. And that once somebody is converted to this, there's a reality for activism and that you have to have a very active engaged faith, and that can have all kinds of different implications, of course. And I think that now very proof of persuasively, there's been lots of great scholarship and opinion pieces arguing that there's a second way of thinking about it, and I would sort of loosely consider that to be cultural, that you could be defined by, for instance, your consumerist habits. So stereotypically, if you drive, you know, a minivan and it has a bumper sticker of the local k love radio station and maybe in another era, Jesus fish on the back and somebody is pulling into a Chick fil A drive in or something, you could say that and they're and they're, you know, maybe they're playing, you know, Christian music on their radio at the same time.
Joseph Slaughter:Either that that starts to help you see the membership in Evangelical as more of a as a a community, maybe sometimes shaped by their consumer habits, but that it's maybe less rooted to a specific set of beliefs and more of participation in a larger community of people that are doing, buying, and participating in the same kind of things. And then I think more recently, even than that, some of the research by good sociologists like Ryan Birge are demonstrating, and I heard you refer to this on another podcast. I think it might have been the one with Dan Silman. I can't remember. About this, you know, phenomenon where people that may not even be Christian, I e, like a Muslim conservative might identify as an evangelical.
Joseph Slaughter:And so there, it's taking on now more of a political meaning, and it's defined by a certain kind of conservative politics perhaps and less about even participating in a church community or a specific set of beliefs. Now, obviously, you could have people that are bleeding into these different groups. It's not saying that these are mutually exclusive, but it becomes much harder to figure out who we're talking about if these different meanings are not even stable. Now I, you know, I can then go into from there the different groups, but, you know, we could we'll probably get into that in the follow on conversation.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:Absolutely. Yeah. That's that's very fascinating. Yeah. The the first category that you mentioned I'm very familiar with, but it is quite academic when you're looking at these kinds of doctoral distinctives, evangelicals believe in terms of the Bible being authoritative for knowledge of the world, faith practice.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:But those other two are are are quite fascinating, but it does kind of move in a direction that as you mentioned in the last point, they're almost anyone of that, at least in the of the political category. It's not even a religious identifier anymore. It can be considered something of an evangelical. And I guess that relates that's a good way of maybe explaining why Trump might be appealing or how an evangelical can, at least in that third category, seamlessly almost, I suppose, could say, support Trump if it's viewed just kind of as a political identifier. Is that is that how it's kinda connected maybe to support to Trump?
Joseph Slaughter:Yeah. And I think that's a I think that's a good way of thinking about it in the sense that for the coalition of if we call them evangelical political leaders, and leaders is probably doing a lot of work there from people that have influential online followings to people that pastor megachurches to people that are, like, traveling worship leaders, almost in a sort of a traveling roadshow kind of way. What's pulling those people together are not their set of common beliefs. They're not even their membership in common communities, but it's a commitment to a politics. And that that that third commitment has become so strong that it's allowed people that once would have thought of each other as complete heretics and not wanting to have anything to do with them, minimize those oftentimes tightly held doctrinal beliefs in favor of collaborating for political purposes.
Joseph Slaughter:And I think that there's no clearer example of that than the alliance that you see between somebody like Apollo White Cain, who's a sort of a classic prosperity gospel preaching televangelist type of sometimes almost an extreme degree with, say, a more conservative traditional Southern Baptist fundamentalist like Richard Jeffress, who would normally, in prior eras, considered the teaching of Paula White to be completely, you know, heretical and wouldn't wanna have anything to do with each other. But they can stand in the same room laying their hands on the president and claiming him he's the he's God's vessel to save America because of the urgency of the political moment for them.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:Yeah. I I I wonder when this I mean, in terms of the historical roots of this, where does that story begin? Because I grew up Pentecostal, and I just remember as growing up, you know, in the late eighties, early nineties, the Baptists not being our friends. Just because Pentecostals believe in revelatory gifts, they believe that the kinds of things that were experienced in the Christian scriptures in terms of miracles, prophecy, dreams, all these kinds of things are just as applicable now as they were back then. And these Baptists were, I think, what academics describe as cessationists.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:They believe this was just for a certain dispensation. And and there was all these disparaging ways of describing these Pentecostals as holy rollers. There's a class element as well. But then there was like a lot of ecumenism that was occurring at the same time. You had Catholics and evangelicals together.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:I think that goes back to the seventies, early eighties, you know, the rise of the religious right even included conservative Jews along with Catholics and evangelicals. And then I can even remember by the time I got into divinity school, I went to a Baptist seminary, they were letting people like me and the people that once they once viewed as kinda odd and strange. There were now a lot of Pentecostal charismatic types who are kind of seen as okay now. So is this a longer story? And and and that is this really just maybe a kind of cultura comp, culture war that goes back to the seventies reaction to the women's movement in the sixties or Roe v Wade or, you know, whatever kinds of new left movements were creating right, you know, religious responses, bringing people normally who would never be together together on cultural grounds?
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:Or do you see this as something that's really unique with Trump himself that somehow Trump created in some weird way a new form of political ecumenism on on the right? I guess maybe that's way to describe it.
Joseph Slaughter:That's that's a good thought. I hadn't I hadn't quite thought about it framed in that way. I definitely think that there's a longer story, and part of it as you described does go back to the original moral majority and religious right where you do have a fundamentalist like Jerry Falwell senior partnering with sometimes, oftentimes, you know, Paul Ryrick or others who are coming from, you know, a very different even Catholic background. And so getting a fundamentalist tradition that oftentimes regarded the Roman church as the antichrist to partner together politically is no is it was no small sort of thing to accomplish. And so, yeah, I do think there's a larger history there.
Joseph Slaughter:I think, though, that part of the longer history also isn't just a political story, but it's also a religious one, and it's a I would call it the mainstreaming of Pentecostalism. So that today, you could go into a very conservative, say, Presbyterian Church of America worship service that is oftentimes maybe very traditional and liturgical, but they will be singing possibly a Hillsong worship number. And to have Hillsong for those that aren't as well aware, that's a Pentecostal tradition, and you could name others. You can name, like, Bethel, the Bethel music label out in Redding, California, Bill Johnson's group. I mean, so much of that music and that style of music, which has influenced other artists of Christian worship and even Christian sort of contemporary music is, like, the dominant mode of how oftentimes people, I would say, engage with their Christianity, whether it's on the radio, whether it's in the church space, or whether it's in youth groups or college groups or in other other sorts of arenas.
Joseph Slaughter:So that's just one example of how I think that's been mainstreamed. I think there are others that are very applicable to our political moment more specifically, and that would be things like more of an emphasis and a comfort with discussing and referencing the unseen spiritual world of of angels and demons, for instance. You know, I think this starts you can look at it maybe in the satanic panic of the eighties. You know, CT just did a good podcast on that if people, you know, are interested in that. But, you know, related to that are things like I don't know if you ever read the Frank Peretti novels, this present darkness, piercing the darkness.
Joseph Slaughter:I read those when I was, like, in middle school or something, and they, like, scared me half to death. I couldn't even, like, sleep at night after I read those. And for those that are not aware of what I'm talking about, the these are novels that were set in, like, contemporary times, but they reference this unseen, very scary, spooky world of demons and angels that are contesting not only for the fate of, like, my soul as a, you know, middle school kid in Indiana, but also for, like, nations. And that some of them have domain over entire territories of the globe. And that this this sort of thing is the kind of thing that people are a partnership with too, potentially, for good or for bad.
Joseph Slaughter:And so that kind of rhetoric, which had been so common in the tradition of Pentecostalism, was much less common outside of that tradition in what we might call mainstream evangelicalism, let alone fundamentalist, you know, circles. And now it's ubiquitous and particularly in terms of the political rhetoric to label certain things as demonic or politicians as demonic policies or these sorts of things to label them demonic. That's, you know, that to me, that's a that's a different iteration than the way the rhetoric function in the earlier Christian right. And I I I would argue that this is part of a larger Pentecostal influence of, you know, as I was using this term, sort of mainstream evangelicalism.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:Excellent. So let me let's get into that a little bit. I mean, Pentecostalism, I mean, it's just in terms of what you're addressing, it's it's it's it's influence is global. I mean, I've read a lot about just how substantial Pentecostalism has has grown in Brazil in particular and then throughout Africa. And I think this language you can find, you know, represented just all around the world now.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:But in terms of The United States, you mentioned white earlier. Like, who are the groups that are really and I'm kinda thinking of some of the very, like I don't know what you would describe it as, like, warrior god language that Hagsef uses. Who represents that? Is is there a particular sect scene leaders within the religious coalition supporting Trump that really embodies this the most? And is that you know, just to go back to the beginning, do you see this as, like, kind an outlier to evangelicalism that and I know it goes back to this three pronged approach that you you started off with, but is there a case to be made that this is not really evangelicalism?
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:This is something this is something else.
Joseph Slaughter:That's a really good question. It you know, I I'm thinking I'm just bouncing around different arguments of prominent people because you're gonna get somebody like Tristan Dumas is gonna say this has just always been written into the code of evangelicalism. And then you get somebody like John Fia who will say, no. Absolutely not. So the the the first name, for those not familiar, wrote Jesus and John Wayne, well known history professor at Calvin.
Joseph Slaughter:And then John Fia, well known history professor of early US history who just actually retired from Messiah and is now a senior fellow at the Lumen Center. I I certainly think that, you know, you can do and I I'm working on some of this with my current research. You can certainly see combative kind of rhetoric in evangelical fundamentalist communities in the early twentieth century and the early nineteenth century. Oftentimes, it's couched in a sword of the spirit, you know, putting on the armor of God and not and it's not transferring as often into the into the political arena in the same way. But there's certainly a a sort of a long tradition of the onward Christian soldiers, you know, our a mighty fortress is our god, you know, going back to the early days of the reformation of that kind of that kind of rhetoric.
Joseph Slaughter:So I guess I'm not comfortable saying it's a complete departure. I do think that some of the comfort publicly with the discourse in the political realm, like you're mentioning somebody like a Hag Seth, does seem to be a little bit different from it's been in the past in a harsher, more self confident, our way or no way kind of no compromise mentality. It's interesting you mentioned Hag Seth because that's a whole another rabbit hole we could go down for a whole another probably podcast since he's coming from the Doug Wilson c r e c, Union of Reformed Evangelical Churches or confession. I can't remember what the last c stands for exactly. But for those not familiar, Doug Wilson's a very, very conservative Presbyterian loosely defined who bases his theology on the work of RJ Rashtuni, who's what we call Christian reconstructionist, somebody who teaches theonomy or that the, you know, the the country or all countries should be Christian.
Joseph Slaughter:But theonomists like Doug Wilson and others aren't preaching the kind of top down control that maybe Apollo White or other Pentecostals have preached more recently in terms of their seven mountains dominion. And so when you brought up those two, it's an interesting connection because you might say, how would somebody who's from this very hyper Calvinist to an extreme degree that wants to see a Levitical code enacted in The US legal system, how does that map on to these prosperity people that are fainting in services, speaking in tongues, preaching about diamonds falling out of the ceiling, you know, taking donations for prayer towels on their on their TV programs. How in the world could those people like, how could how could they marry up? And this is, I think, another area in which the the Pentecostal ideas of the last forty years, particularly coming out of some of the less denominationally overseen parts of Pentecostalism. So sort of, like, nondenominational Pentecostalism or what some people call in independent network charismatics, free from denomination oversight and and discipline and constraints have embraced this dominion philosophy about taking charge of they'll usually talk about seven mountains, things like the government, education, culture in terms of media, a whole a whole a whole realm of ways in which you can exert power, which they ironically got originally as best as we can trace from Rush Dooney who talked about dominion.
Joseph Slaughter:But for him, it was a more loosely defined concept of a long game that you would play over thousands of years perhaps. And then sometime in the seventies, it's not clear exactly how this happens, but Francis Schafer and Bill Bright who starts Campus Crusade for Christ, they come into they come into intersection with some of these ideas, and they flesh them out into more of these specific arenas in which people are supposed to take power. And this catches the attention of some of these independent nondenominational Pentecostal people like Lance Wallnow and some of the other names that I've mentioned. Bill Johnson, Mike Bickel, who started this international house of prayer out in Kansas City. He's had a a scandal lately, and now they've distanced themselves from him.
Joseph Slaughter:Cindy Jacobs, who started this generals in interset international, sort of prayer type political ministry of sorts. They come under sway of this idea of dominionism with these seven mountains that Christians need to retake. And they start writing books and preaching about this, and it's interesting that now you see the union of somebody like Hegseth who's coming out of this original Rushduni tradition and articulating this kind of taking control kind of rhetoric with Paula White Cain and these others that are in this sort of faith coalition around the president in his most close religious circle, kind of united by this idea of dominionism. And I think a lot of other maybe more mainstream evangelicals and formerly fundamentalists have kind of coalesced around that same idea as well of and maybe they're not always articulating the methods in the same way, but this this idea of, you know, taking back America, taking power for the Christians, reasserting its Christian roots, all these sorts of things kind of flowing from this popularized, you know, idea of how Christians are supposed to function in society properly.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:This is fascinating, and I can only imagine listeners who have never heard of any of this being quite bewildered just because, you know, when you think of, you know, just some of the things that you were saying, dominion as represented by the seven mountains, I guess, you have to conquer, and it just sounds it sounds like science fiction in some ways. Right? But I guess the my question is how many people adhere to this? Is is this widespread amongst millions of people in the country that kind of adhere whether know, to what degree, you know, they they know the theology in and out is is another matter. But, like, you know, essentially adhere to this theology, or is it just a lot of these leaders are on television, Trinity Broadcast Network, these kinds of outlets that give them immense influence?
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:I mean, is this something that is widespread amongst a significant amount of of of evangelicals or people that we might loosely identify in using that terminology.
Joseph Slaughter:Yeah. That's that's interesting to ponder and think about and try to quantify. I haven't seen great research. Maybe it's out there, and maybe some of our listeners can point us to it. I'm not sure.
Joseph Slaughter:But I haven't seen a lot of great data on, hey. How many people subscribe to this particular ideology? How many people subscribe to that? And and how does it inform the way they think about their political voting and participation more broadly? What I will say is that I think that these ideas have become more salient and influential and widely accessible because of the social media era and the way it allows different communities to cross boundaries and to spread ideas in ways that just never could happen in the past.
Joseph Slaughter:I mean, one example of this would be, you know, you talked about growing up, you know, in Florida, maybe in in a Pentecostal community. There was an era where if you were somebody like me who grew up in Northern Indiana and the evangelicalism you knew was more of an evangelicalism that revolved around institutions like Wheaton College in Illinois and Christianity Today and things like that, I didn't even know that this whole Pentecostal world existed. If I didn't travel to parts of the country or get invited to some, you know, congregation that was doing its Pentecostal thing in maybe a rural part of Indiana or something, these communities were able to be separate from one another in ways that probably were unfortunate because we don't recognize maybe the diversity of our experience just even as Christians in America. But in other ways too, they, you know, they afforded people to be definitely, you know, sort of blissfully naive at the same time. And I think that to I think to your point, I think the social media's ability to galvanize and spread ideas is is hugely important.
Joseph Slaughter:And I think that in terms of the current political moment, I'm not sure a lot of people get too bent around the axle discerning the difference of which community somebody comes from as long as they're willing to say Jesus Christ in the White House or strum a guitar and sing a worship song. I think a lot of, you know, conservative Christians are just, like, ready to stand up and applaud that. And they they're not gonna bother too much with, well, this person's kind of actually a prosperity gospeler, and I think that that's, like, heretical. Or, oh, this person's, you know, advocating for dominionism, and that's really actually this animating thing behind, you know, why they wanna go to, you know, Patrick Henry College and then get a job on Capitol Hill or something like that. But I I think that there's a comfort with seeing kinship with anybody that seems to be saying the things that represent, you know, sort of your tribal identity in a in a broadly kinda construed way, I guess.
Nick Tabor:You know, I guess I'm curious about how this current state of affairs differs from what we've seen in the past. Thinking back to the Bush years, you know, George W. Bush, like, think he he went to, a Methodist church or something, but he had an evangelical bent at least. And I certainly remember evangelicals in my life being all in on him. I remember that his profession of being a born again Christian was a big part of why they were so excited about him, even though I'm sure they didn't share a lot of elements of his presumably Wesleyan theology.
Nick Tabor:And so if I'm just thinking about within my lifetime what I can remember, before that it was Quentin who again, Christians of many stripes united against because of the Winsky affair. Then going back farther, I guess my sense was always that the moral majority and the rise of the Christian right in general, though each of those pastors, like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, came from their own. They retreated in a specific tradition of their own, that they were trying to create a big tent for Christians who disagreed about certain theological ideas to at least agree on a policy agenda. And maybe also to agree that, you know, as they used to say in the nineties, like, the character matters. That, you know, it's important to have a godly man in the White House even if you don't go to the same church he goes to.
Nick Tabor:So so what's changed since then, and how is our current state of affairs different?
Joseph Slaughter:Well, one thing that I think has changed is the comfort in this particular administration with platforming outspokenly Christian characters. So I just can't ever imagine either of the Bushes platforming some of the people that have been platformed by this administration in terms of bringing them right into the the White House and even, you know, staging different kinds of rallies and, you know, different sorts of things with folks. And it's a different group of people. So this, you know, whereas in a prior iteration, you probably would have had more of the, so to speak, mainstream evangelical types. Even in an Obama era, whether it's somebody like Rick Warren or I'm trying to remember who he was gonna have give his inaugural speech and then got shot down.
Joseph Slaughter:Louis Palau. Oh, no. No. That's not right. Not Louis Palau.
Joseph Slaughter:The guy that did the passion worship, who was big on the anti trafficking and all of that. I'm I'm I'm blanking on his name, but he was supposed to give the inaugural prayer. And then people dragged up sermons that said, you know, he was against LGBTQ communities or or something to that effect, if I remember correctly. So that, you know, there's been a consistent platforming of people, not to the degree maybe right now, but a different kind of people. So, you know, Trump is much more comfortable with people that have TV salience and TV brands, and so that fits perfectly with Pentecostal televangelists.
Joseph Slaughter:So so so I think, you know, so that that side of it is different. You know, this president doesn't wanna have anything to do with you if you don't have a viable, like, social media platform and audience and things like that. So, you know, those are the sort of things that give you credentials now, whereas maybe in prior in administrations, they were different kinds of of credentials. The other thing is I do think something snapped for a lot of conservative Christians in the Obama era. Whether this is reality or not, there and whether it was racial, whether it was socialism, whether it was whether it was LGBT, you know, movements, whatever it was, something really seemed to snap.
Joseph Slaughter:I've heard too many people that are very intelligent and otherwise, like, I respect them, say incredibly, in my mind, sometimes unhinge things about the Obama era. Mhmm. And and they label it with this just extreme demonic left turn that the country took in that era that was so radicalized, so so beyond the pale. Nice. And and, you know, we've we've you know, you heard some of these kind of things, of course, and, you know, in the Clinton era where you've got people.
Joseph Slaughter:But Mhmm. There's there's there's a different quality to it. And may maybe it is racial. And the people that argue that there's a racial component to it, may maybe maybe that is true. It might have been true for some people.
Joseph Slaughter:I think there's some that are not. I think there's some that honestly think, like, really bad demonic stuff was happening in that era. And some of it was ancillary to Obama. So, like, for instance, the, you know, the Supreme Court decision in 2014 legalizing same sex marriage, you know, that's that's not directly traceable necessarily to him and his administration necessarily since that's a supreme court decision. But it kinda gets lumped in with that era, I think.
Joseph Slaughter:And then him changing his mind about it.
Nick Tabor:Like, I
Joseph Slaughter:I've heard conservative Christians say, well, we thought he was this, and then he was a fraud because, you know, he endorsed, you know, gay marriage and, you know, he took a more in his second term, more radical leftist, you know, sort of thing. So there there does seem to be something that then cause people to say, like Tony Perkins, I wanna bully out there punching the other guy, and I don't care if he's whatever he is, Access Hollywood tapes or whatever it might be when he was asked about that in 2018 in a I think it was, like, a Politico or Axio, like, sort of interview. Mhmm. Yeah. I ask myself all that all the time.
Joseph Slaughter:Like, is is this because I'm a historian, so I I'm oftentimes skeptical that things are that different. You know, are there continuities, or or are there things that are different? So, you know, I probably gave a a hedging answer there, but that's a lot of times what historians do. I do think that there are some continuity and some similarities and then there are some things that represent something different.
Nick Tabor:Sure I can see that. Curious about what you see as the effects of of strange couplings and these strange bedfellows. Like you have Robert Jeffress making friends with somebody like Paula White, which is an unusual thing that we haven't often seen before. How does that ripple out beyond the White House? What effects do you think it has on, I guess, either on politics or maybe on faith communities?
Nick Tabor:You know, how does it affect the landscape of of American Christianity?
Joseph Slaughter:Well, I, you know, I don't that's a that's a good question. I don't know that their friendship or whatever their association I don't I don't even know if they consider themselves to be friends necessarily, but I don't know about their association as much as there I think it does help people probably conceptualize themselves as part of a greater group that is defined less by those first two categories that we talked about at the beginning and more by the third one of a politics.
Nick Tabor:Uh-huh.
Joseph Slaughter:And so I do think that has powerful implications for people's Christian identities. I think that it causes people to form their Christian ideas and actions less by things that they might say are forming them, such as, say, the bible or the sermons that their pastor preaches on on Sundays or the small group bible study that they're a part of and more through their identification with this kind of politics. And so anybody who is aligned with that is what's more forming for them in a in a religious sense. So I'm thinking of somebody like like an Ali Beth Stuckey who, for many women, is you know, because she's aligned with those two in their politics perfectly in sync no matter what, even if it's, like, you know, pictures of immigrants in distress, She's preaching to women who follow her about the dangers of toxic empathy and that they shouldn't fall for this this ruse that some evangelicals who are sympathetic to immigrants' plights are trying to pedal to them and trying to use scripture to say, hey. You know, god wants us to be concerned with the least of these.
Joseph Slaughter:And the reason why ancient Israel actually was judged was less about sexual immorality and more about how it treated widows and orphans and foreigners
Nick Tabor:Mhmm.
Joseph Slaughter:That's those sort of theological arguments fall on deaf ears because of the power of the political formation. And, you know, Ali Bucksucky claims to be a very biblically grounded conservative Christian woman and would argue that her positions are coming from biblical places. But I think that sort of, you know, serious examination of that suggests that that is much, much less significant than the political orientation aspect of it. And so I think, you know, that kind of way in which that then forms people, I think that's part of the message of Tim Alberta's book, the kingdom, power, and the glory. People haven't read that.
Joseph Slaughter:I think it's just a tremendous book where he's trying to ask he's trying to answer these exact same questions that you're asking and how churches that he grew up with don't resemble anything like they did before and that he and other pastors that he's talking with, you know, feel like they're struggling against a formation that they have very little influence comparatively coming from this sort of political arena.
Nick Tabor:Makes sense. You know, one thing I want to make sure we get in here is talking about Catholics and not just because we're on common wheel but because I think in a way it's kind of unavoidable. I mean, we're looking at potentially the two front runners in the next Republican primary in 2028, both being Catholics, both of whom have high positions in this administration. And so the question of how all these figures think about Catholics and relate to them becomes a pretty important one. I remember seeing that there was like a Good Friday service a couple months ago where I think it was, it might not have been quite like no Catholics allowed, but there was not much ecumenism there if I understood right.
Nick Tabor:It was framed very deliberately as a Protestant service. But at the same time, remember the funeral for Charlie Kirk, there were Catholic figures, Mitt Vanson was one of them, who went up and spoke. I felt like some people of talked in a Catholic idiom, some talked in a whatever version of a Protestant idiom, but there was a kind of a sense of harmony as they all agreed on the importance of hating your enemies and carrying out vengeance or whatever. So what do those relationships look like and how do you think what do you see this looking like in a couple of years?
Joseph Slaughter:Well, I I mean, I think that's a great observation. Be and I think that's a good example of us being able to say change over time and drawing a distinction with, say, the JFK era. My parents talk about growing up in that era and their parents who were staunch protestants saying there's no way they were voting for this Catholic Mhmm.
Nick Tabor:You know Uh-huh.
Joseph Slaughter:Candidate for the presidency. Whereas to your point, I just had a conversation with a family member about the next election and what kind of, you know, people did we think were good candidates. And, you know, the this this individual was supportive of Rubio, not supportive of Vance, but what variety of Christian they were never came up. And the fact that, you know, you you didn't dismiss either of them because of Catholicism. If anything, the fact that they were just, you know, generically Christian is probably a plus in their favor.
Joseph Slaughter:But the more important thing is, like, what what were their what were their relationships to the Trump administration, and how did they execute the jobs that they've been given and how do they speak publicly? Do they you know, none of it none of it was in terms of evaluating, you know, how Catholic, whether they're the right kind of Catholic, the wrong kind of Catholic, or whether they're Catholic at all. And so that's where I think, again, that third category is just increasingly mattering more for people.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:Mhmm.
Joseph Slaughter:I think I think what would be a great one would be to see and if we had if we had a viable contender who was Mormon and what folks thought of, you know, what folks thought about that. Because I definitely remember during the Romney era that being a a real concern amongst a lot of evangelicals that, okay. So this guy supports a lot of our policies and things like that, but he's a Mormon. We just that's a bridge too far for some. Mhmm.
Joseph Slaughter:You know? Mhmm. I would be skeptical that that would be even much of a point of conversation as long as the person was perceived to be, you know, staunchly MAGA and, you know, Trump supporting and vigorously executing his agenda, whatever their particular role was, in the administration.
Nick Tabor:Well, yeah, maybe the biggest theme here is kind of this third definition that we talked about increasingly overriding the other definitions, the other ways that people define themselves as evangelicals.
Joseph Slaughter:Yeah. And I think that increasingly too, a lot of, you know, the the rise in there's been lots of data to show this, the rise in nondenominational Christianity. And, you know, to reference them again, I know Ryan Burge has written some pieces about that that I've assigned to my students in the past. If people are less you know, if they're less sectarian in terms of my denomination and these, you know, these beliefs in this community, I do think that that makes people less dogmatic in some ways and probably lowers the resistance to people that might not be exactly my cup of tea when it comes to my sort of conservative Christian beliefs. But, you know, they've already sort of rejected the denominational distinctives anyways.
Joseph Slaughter:And so it's, I think, easier to comprehend and support and ally with people in sort of that post denominational landscape.
Nick Tabor:Mhmm. Mhmm. Makes sense.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:We're getting close to the end of our time here, but maybe a few more questions. One, just an observation based on the last thing you mentioned about nondenomination. Many denominations, as far as I remember, have requirements for clergy to receive certain kinds of education. Usually, have to have a bachelor's degree and then do a master's of divinities. And I do wonder if the turn of this more nondenominational approach does tend to be, for that very reason, not as doctrinal, not as theological, and in turn, not as intellectual and suspicious perhaps of education for that reason.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:Because there's just skepticism about the need for ideas, knowledge, learning to to to, you know, to to have for faith or for to to to minister or to have real understanding, which is all centered on faith or what or you know? So I guess that's an observation, but also a question. But the second thing I just wanna ask you is, you know, where is the evangelical resistance now stand? Because I think as a part of the response to Trump in 2016, you had a number of evangelicals speak out. I think a lot of people associated with Christianity today were kind of the evangelical equivalent of the never Trump crowd.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:So there are people, think, like Martin Knoll, a number of notable academics who basically said this is this is problematic. Right? And I wonder just where their fate is at now given just the fate of the resistance in general, especially after Trump won in '24. It seems as though they've kind of, you know, the the passion or the or the the sense of urgency died down a little bit. Is there still this kind of group that exists that's, you know, resisting within evangelicalism?
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:I think Ronald Balmer was another person I can remember speaking out against some of the the evangelical support of Trump from a kind of Christian perspective. I only mentioned that because there is another side of the story. Right? Not every evangelical supports Trump. There are people, many people, in fact, who are evangelical and and and and quite critical, and they often get lost in these types of discussions.
Joseph Slaughter:Yeah. So just I mean, two things. One, your first point was a really great and helpful observation, and I think is very important to this story and is, again, another part of the change over time. So just and then and then I'll speak briefly the second as related to this. You know?
Joseph Slaughter:And then when I grew up, really, the locus of evangelical authority was in this more Northern Midwestern sort of evangelicalism, places like, you know, Wheaton and Calvin and Gordon College and, you know, and it revolved more around an intellectual sort of tradition of sorts and that these were educational centers of that authority. And now as you sort of suggest, and part of this is the southernization of evangelicalism where the Southern Baptist Convention, which in another era in the twentieth century was not really technically part of mainstream evangelicalism. Now, you know, sort of, you know, that tradition combined with this nondenominational sort of Pentecostal tradition has transformed that. And to your point, whether we're talking about the Calvary chapels, we didn't even really even get into, discuss, started by Chuck Smith that in the seventies, out of the Jesus People movement that's sort of located in between the Pentecostal and mainstream evangelical communities where they, you know, they have their own sort of in house sort of college training that's not a full blown seminary. It's not, you know, accredited.
Joseph Slaughter:It's basically more of just to make sure you know how we wanna do church, but less about, you know, ordination and passing rigorous academic programs and that sort of thing to the nondenominational where, you know, all you need is a group of people to say, we want you to be our pastor, and there's no other bar to entry is very different from, as you suggested, prior eras where whether it's Methodism or whether which it was you know, starts out as sort of anti intellectualism, but in its more mature forms or Presbyterian on one you know, more extreme that have these very rigorous processes of, you know, study and ordination is is a very different sort of mindset. And and I do think that the other one does feed into some of those kind of maybe anti intellectual trends that that you suggested. And it's another, I think, example of the influence of Pentecostalism. And and I think it's wrong and unfair to say Pentecostalism is anti intellectual, but what it does do is it privileges not the study and the digestion and the and the dissection of the word as the highest authority, but the the spirit, you know, being blessed with the spirit and exhibiting those gifts of the spirit individually is is is really the basis of one's authority.
Joseph Slaughter:And so, you know, the whole basis of authority for somebody like Apollo White Cain isn't her doctrinal understanding of things in study and in her educational achievement, but it's her association with other apostles who have mentored her as well. And so it's a more relational experiential sort of basis of authority that's that's a very different different kind of thing. And I think because of that, the the implication is for that more Northern Midwestern evangelicalism is that there's been some real blowback. So schools like Wheaton, who when I was growing up was like the Harvard that if you were an evangelical kid, you wanted to go to Christian college, that that was, like, where you went. And they never you know, Wheaton, Messiah, they never had trouble getting huge excess in applications and being able to just pick the best, you know, students that they wanted.
Joseph Slaughter:But because those schools have now been tarred with this sort of anti Trump, sort of their woke places that, you know, they are now struggle you know, they're struggling for the first time financially as far you know? And they're, you know, for instance, they're cutting programs or they have hiring freezes or these sorts of things that they, you know, were not things that you would have ever thought in the past. And there's other, of course, economic, you know, pressures on those kind of schools too. But the landscape is now that you send your kids to Liberty University. And Liberty, I would say, is on the bottom end of you know, I I, again, I I I hesitate to slander.
Joseph Slaughter:But with the one year kind of contracts that those faculty have, they don't have the ability to pursue academic freedom the way, you know, tenured professors at Wheaton do. Yeah. Of course. The professors there, do they have to keep signing communities, you know, stand you know, that I affirm these community standards? Of course, they do.
Joseph Slaughter:But the you just can't even compare. I don't ever Danny, we don't ever see historians from Liberty showing up at conferences. You know? I will run into historians from places like Wheaton or Westmont or Gordon or Messiah routinely at my conferences because those schools are doing serious academic work and they support that. But, you know, the cost of that now is that they have a brand that amongst a lot of Christians is toxic.
Joseph Slaughter:And so I think I think there has been a cost. I think that for groups like Christianity Today that have kind of rebranded and coalesced around that another Trump world. I think, you know, they've been able to sort of pivot and and be okay to an extent. They've had to lean a lot more on donations and probably had to sort of emphasize, you know, that kind of side rather than a subscription based model. But I think that, you know, there are communities where I think people gravitate to.
Joseph Slaughter:So, like, the holy post that Phil Fisher, the VeggieTales creator, and Skye Jitani, who's sort of a pastor writer from the Christian Missionary Alliance tradition that they started. You know, I think that that's like a community, you know, that's sort of adjacent to the David French, and they have him on a lot, you know, kind of world of still very doctrinally conservative by that original definition that we talked about, but very much rejecting everything about sort of the Trump era politics, especially as it relates to racial issues, immigration issues, anti intellectualism type stuff, you know, the environmental stuff, all those kind of things. And and that's to say nothing of the Randall Baumers or the Shane Claiborne's, which are more of the evangelical left. You know, they they, of course, are always gonna be skeptical of republican politics, but the people that I'm describing are diehard. I've always voted republican, come from republican, you know, sort of lineage people who have basically left republicanism.
Joseph Slaughter:Maybe they've become independents and see themselves as pretty homeless. And that's where I feel like the democrats, if they were smarter, would figure out a way to build better bridges with with those folks and bring them into the fold. You know, I think that there's probably room for for them to, you know, be brought in if they were if if they were reached out to in the right way.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:Fascinating. Excellent. This has been a really rich discussion. I think our listeners will really have really profited from this. And thank you so much, Joe, for coming on and giving us the lay of the land of, you know, these different groups and their associations with Trump.
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins:And it was very, very refreshing and helpful and very, very well conceptualized. Thank you so much.
Joseph Slaughter:Alright. Thanks. You appreciate it.
Nick Tabor:That's all the time we have for this episode. We wanna thank Commonweal for sponsoring the show, and we'll see you next time. Thanks for joining us.