For many Americans, especially non-Christians, the thought that Christian morality is a useful guide to much of anything these days is risible, particularly since so many evangelicals have thrown in their lot with a relentlessly solipsistic American president who bullies, boasts and sneers. The political hero of the Christian right of 2020 has used the National Prayer Breakfast to mock the New Testament injunction to love one’s enemies, and it’s clear that leading conservative Christian voices are putting the Supreme Court ahead of the Sermon on the Mount.

And yet history suggests that religiously inspired activism may hold the best hope for those in resistance to the prevailing Trumpian order.

He goes on to talk about how Christianity inspired the Civil Rights movement, which is true. And then:

This was the vision that brought America to account in the mid-1960s — which was, historically speaking, the day before yesterday. It was a religious vision. One need not profess faith in traditional terms to share it, of course; no sect, no nation, has a monopoly on virtue. And as the fourth-century Roman writer Symmachus noted in arguing against Christians who wanted to remove an altar to the pagan deity Victory, “We cannot attain to so great a mystery by one way.”

I agree. …

Is that not the most liberal Protestant thing ever? Christianity inspired the greatest moral victory in American history: the defeat of racist white people. But if folks want to pray to pagan gods at pagan altars, hey, that’s cool too. 

Jon Meacham spoke earlier this month at a conference I attended. I had given a speech the day before, on the Benedict Option. His speech was not clearly in opposition to the Benedict Option — he hadn’t heard my talk — though it seemed to me that he was familiar with the concept, and characterized it as people who have only read about it often do: as “head for the hills” cultural nostalgia. He said in his speech, “the Enlightenment was good” — as if affirming the goodness of the Enlightenment somehow magically dispelled all the problems it has bequeathed to late modernity. And he talked at length about the Civil Rights movement, saying that he believes in “the John Lewis Option.”

After Meacham’s talk, I met him privately, and we talked for about 20 minutes. He’s a nice guy, and a smart guy with a good heart, I thought. But also, it seemed to me, deeply, profoundly liberal, and preoccupied with Trump about as much as Robert Jeffress is from the Right.

I don’t doubt the sincerity of either Jeffress or Meacham, but their politicized Christianity strikes me as wholly inadequate to the moment. For Meacham, a Gen Xer, it’s Forever Selma; for Jeffress, a Boomer, it’s always Election Night, 1980.

Jeffress once characterized the Benedict Option as “standing around in a holy huddle and hoping that nobody does you harm.” I actually met him a couple of years ago in an airport, had lunch with him, and found him to be a pretty likable guy. He had not read my book, so I explained to him that it’s really about forming Christians to live in such a way that we will be able to withstand the cultural pressures of the post-Christian world. He said that that makes sense to him. I wish Terrence Malick’s film A Hidden Life had been out then. That movie — about the true-life anti-Nazi martyr Franz Jägerstätter — explains better than I have been able to do what the Benedict Option is for. Franz and his family lived high in a remote Austrian Alpine village — but Nazism found their village anyway. There’s no escaping the evil of the world. But Franz, because of the way he lived out his faith in normal times, was able to see clearly the true nature of Nazism — this, when it had seduced all his churchgoing neighbors — and to find within himself the strength and courage to resist, even till the end.

The Benedict Option is about living today so that, if we have to, we will all know how to be Franz Jägerstätters tomorrow, instead of conformists.

I have no idea how the Trumpy Christianity of Jeffress’s church, First Baptist Dallas, prepares the faithful to live under the conditions that are rapidly coming into being. Jeffress grew up in First Baptist Dallas under Dr. W.A. Criswell, who celebrated Reaganism in all its forms. I once watched a 1980s British television documentary on the Religious Right, focused on First Baptist Dallas, under Criswell’s leadership. I saw it on YouTube years ago, but can’t find it now. My wife grew up in that church back then, and loved Dr. Criswell … but she said the documentary was accurate in what it reported about the culture in and around the church. The point is not that Criswell was, or Jeffress is, insincere in their faith. The point is that they were so politicized, and so given over to thinking that conservative, nationalistic Republicanism is the same thing as living a Christian life, that the people living that way left themselves vulnerable. If Antichrist comes as a nationalistic conservative Republican, how will they know what they are looking at? The Catholics of that Austrian village, according to the film, saw Hitler as a nationalist who was Making Germany Great Again, and didn’t understand why their fellow Christian opposed him.

(No, for pity’s sake, Trump is not Hitler. I’m making a point about a particular kind of blindness that conservatives, including conservative Christians, tend to have.)

I read Meacham’s kind of Christianity as a more sophisticated, liberal version of the same worldly thing. Again, I emphasize: this is not a judgment on his conscience or the sincerity of his faith, but only on its claims, in the face of the mounting cultural crisis for Christians. Meacham understandably cherishes the faithful witness of the black church during the Civil Rights movement, but like many liberals, wants to take that historical experience and use it as a template through which to interpret the entire world. It’s like trying to understand the Vietnam War through the experience of World War II. In the liberal imagination, we must always be on a Grand March towards justice. Progress! Progress toward peace, justice, and equality! Toward diversity, inclusion, and equity!

Listening to Meacham’s talk in Nashville, I wondered what he would think about the fact that the Civil Rights movement wouldn’t be possible today, in this sense: it was a thoroughly Christianized movement, led by pastors and articulated publicly in Biblical language. It worked in part because America in the 1960s was still a country that understood that language. We no longer are.

Having read Meacham this morning, I have my answer: this doesn’t bother a liberal Christian, for whom the point is Progress, as defined by secular liberalism, no matter how we get there — even if we have to pray at a pagan altar to do it. This is how the spirit of Antichrist will win over liberals.

I think Jeffress and Meacham, and Christians like them, long for the days when the line between Good and Evil was clear and simple. If only we throw out the Bad People, we’ll solve our problems. But what if the Bad People include us, and our tribe? Actually, they do. The most famous words Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn ever wrote were these, from The Gulag Archipelago:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

I’m not a relativist. We live in a time of great confusion, and are trying to figure out how to walk through the fog without falling off the cliff. I don’t trust the counsel of those who talk like the way forward is with Fox News At Prayer, or The New York Times At Prayer. Both sides, it seems to me, are guilty of false nostalgia — conservative Christians for the 1980s, liberal Christians for the 1960s. The world in 2020 is a very different place, with very different challenges for the faithful.  A Christianity that doesn’t grapple with the world as it is, not as it once was, or that we wish it were, is not one that is going to produce Franz Jägerstätters.

Meacham writes today:

People of faith are called — again and again and again — to return to the foot of the cross. It’s a terrifying place to stand.

Yes, and the most terrifying thing about it is the realization that you yourself crucified Him. Not them — or not only them — but also you, with your crooked heart.

Believe me, I’m not standing on my soapbox lecturing. On the way to and from Dallas this past weekend, I listened to Tom Holland’s wonderful popular history of Christianity, Dominion: How The Christian Revolution Made The World. I’m going to write more about it later. Holland is a bestselling British historian who has heretofore focused on the world of antiquity. Though he’s not a religious believer, he came to understand that nearly everything he believes is morally good about today came into the world through the Christian revolution. His book talks about the utter cruelty of the Greco-Roman world, and how Christianity overturned it. He’s a fantastic storyteller, and as I heard him talk of the early church, I kept thinking about myself, and how I live, and how I see, and treat, the poor. Holland is not a Christian, but to me, his words were a call to introspection, and conversion.

As I see it, the problem with the Jeffress and the Meacham views of the world, as Christians, is that they are fundamentally political. Jeffress doesn’t seem to understand that we are living in a post-Christian world, and that conservative Evangelicalism, as it is now constituted, is not being passed on to the next generation — and cannot be voted into existence. Meacham, who is an adherent to a dying religious tradition, liberal Protestantism, doesn’t really seem to care if the world is post-Christian or not, as long as we have Progress.

Neither of these two forms of faith is going to survive what’s coming.

UPDATE: I just thought about the incredible final scene in Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. Most of the movie has been about Mayan headhunters chasing Jaguar Paw, a fellow Mayan, through the jungle; they want to capture him to sacrifice him to their gods. If you haven’t seen the movie, and want to see it, don’t click the link. It made me think of conservative Christians, liberal Christians, and global plague as the black swan that renders their conflict meaningless.