OXFORD — Back in the 1990s, some evangelical Christians wore bracelets or lapel buttons with the inscription “WWJD” which stood for “What would Jesus do?” The symbol represented a commitment by wearers to apply the principles of Christ’s teachings to life decisions.
Ever wonder how Jesus would vote in the presidential campaign?
One of the most perplexing things about Donald Trump’s success in the Republican primaries is his support from many who may have displayed those “WWJD” symbols two decades ago.
Longing for what they perceive as a strong leader, they apparently forget that “hitting back” and punching people in the face, as Trump has advocated, is antithesis to Christ’s teaching in the Sermon on the Mount.
Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, a fellow at the Ethics and Policy Center whose column appears in several publications, offers a convincing explanation for this.
First, according to Gobry, “Christians who attend church regularly are overwhelmingly anti-Trump.” He wrote, “by its nature, evangelicalism is a decentralized phenomenon, and evangelicals proudly don’t have an institutional church, let alone a pope or a magisterium. Someone who ‘gave his life to Jesus’ at a summer camp when he was 15 but doesn’t go to church and doesn’t read the Bible can still call himself ‘evangelical’ to a pollster.”
Maybe so, but there are some, including the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Dallas, Dr. Robert Jeffress, who do attend church regularly and are supporting Trump.
Gobry, in a recent column, draws on the book “Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics”, by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat.
Two heresies that Douthat identifies sound tailor-made for Trump, Gobry wrote. The first is Christian nationalism. “It’s easy to see how the heresy of Christian nationalism could power the rise of Trump. If you’re a Christian who believes so deeply in American exceptionalism that you forget that, actually, God judges all nations, and that all fall short of the glory of God, you might see in Trump’s overt nationalism a quite natural thing, and be ready to brush off his other departures from what is usually considered good Christian conduct, such as his bigotry, his cruelty, or his misogyny.”
The other major heresy, Gobry notes, is the prosperity gospel. “The prosperity gospel is one of the most vibrant heresies in America today, one that is frequently overlooked by the commentariat, given that it preys mostly on the poor and the uneducated. But one of America’s most powerful religious leaders is undoubtedly Joel Osteen, who is a prosperity preacher. It’s obvious why someone taken in by the prosperity gospel would see no glaring contradiction between Trump’s assertion that he’s a ‘very strong Christian’ and his gaudy lifestyle and ostentatious wealth.”
Gobry concludes that “if you’re aware of the profound hold that such heresies have on many people, Trump looks less like an aberration than the incarnation of those heresies” — a presidential candidate for a culture that sometimes likes to think of itself as Christian, but worships money and power instead of Jesus.
Dunagin, who lives in Oxford, is a retired longtime Mississippi newspaperman.
