Commentators on religious affairs are giving a lot of thought as to the ways that churches will be having to change after covid-19. Here is not the place to rehearse all these potential disruptions but to bring to attention another major historical shift, one that is soon likely to affect many Christians groups in the USA. In January 2021, after what is expected to be a massive defeat of Donald Trump in the November elections, a new US President is due to take over at the White House. Assuming that the prediction of a Democratic landslide defeat is correct (by no means certain), the subsequent political upheavals will change the whole atmosphere of American life in numerous positive ways. We trust that there will be a collective sigh of relief as people welcome back a period of honesty, truth telling and an end to the criminal self-serving behaviour in the White House. The task of being the new 2021 leader of the free world in a post-covid, economically battered country, will be indeed an enormous responsibility. The task that is laid on this new American president’s shoulders will be every bit as demanding as that given to Franklin D Roosevelt when he came to power in 1933. He had to sort out the appalling aftermath of the stock market bloodbath of 1929 and the depression that followed it. The decisions of a new president of the United States will be of importance to all of us as economics and the effects of the virus are international in their scope.
The one social entity in the States that has supported President Trump fairly consistently over the four years of his presidency, are the group described as ‘white evangelicals’. This expression does not really correspond to any group that we have in the UK. The commentators in the States who try and convey the significance of the term, sometimes describe them as people whose self-definition is contained as knowing who they are not. White evangelicals will typically be working class and have cultural and political assumptions about the superiority of the white race over Latinos and blacks. Those of them who attend churches will naturally gravitate towards congregations that are, by UK standards, extremely conservative/fundamentalist in style. The word ‘fundamentalist’ does not have the same negative connotation in the States as it does here. There are many Americans who regard themselves as ‘belonging’ to such churches, even if they do not physically attend them. Extremely conservative religious beliefs, with shades of racist and ultra-right political assumptions, are those that are paraded when these ‘religious’ Trump supporting Americans need an identifying label to give themselves a secure sense of who they are.
According to a recent video on Youtube, the white evangelical ‘tribe’ is one that has given its soul to the cause of President Trump. The minister speaking on this video to make this comment, described this relationship between Trump and this large tribe of white evangelicals, as a kind of Faustian pact. On the one side the group have given, through their leaders, a kind of sanctification or blessing on the reign of Donald Trump. In return he has promised to give them access to the White House and some influence in shaping some of the priorities of government. The most important goal for these evangelical leaders and their followers is the chance to see favoured candidates nominated for the Supreme Court. These appointments have a long-term effect on the whole of society, since the appointees serve for the whole of their lives. In the Supreme Court some of the most significant struggles for the soul of America are being fought. Much is said about culture wars in the States and the battles over abortion and the status of same-sex relationships. These battles are of vital importance to conservative Christians in the struggles against ‘liberal-humanism’. So far President Trump has successfully placed two new conservative judges in the Court. In theory this should have quickly led to the repeal of laws not favoured by the conservative religious Right. This expected outcome has yet to materialise as the appointed judges have not voted entirely as expected. This part of the story must be put to one side for another time.
So far, the exchange of favours negotiated between Trump and his white evangelical supporters has worked mainly in Trump’s favour. They remain a solid block of voting support which does not shift, whatever examples of incompetence or scandal are revealed. But many of the more aware of the Christian leaders among the white evangelical tribe have started to notice the considerable cost involved. It is an assault on their Christian value systems to support a thrice married racist who shows little loyalty, even to those who support him. There is also a recognition that the unwritten agreement that exists currently could be overturned at a moment’s notice, once the individual or group no longer serves Trump’s purposes. The lying and hypocrisy that emerge from the White House have also not impressed the young people within the tribe, and there has been a noticeable collapse of support for conservative churches from this cohort.
The commentator on the Youtube video gave me two particularly fresh insights into the culture of white evangelicals in the States. The first insight concerned the drifting apart that is taking place between some leaders and their flocks. Leaders of evangelical congregations, like himself, were starting to have active doubts about the wisdom of supporting Trump. He said that the problem was that their congregations would never support them if they tried to suggest that Trump was in any way flawed. So, it was fear that kept leaders on board within the Trump camp. The alternative was to be voted out of their posts. Power in many independent congregations does not belong to the nominated leader.
A second point that was mentioned in the video also related to fear. The interviewee commentator mentioned attending conferences where they were taught to ‘encourage’ generous giving. The professional trainers in this area had a simple message. This was to tell the ministers that the more the congregations were frightened and angry, the more money they would donate to the church. To summarise, the message was ‘give us more fear and more anger’.
It is hard to know exactly how the cohort of white evangelicals in the States will respond if their ‘hero’ is defeated in November. There is something very volatile about this group and one can see that some members of this Christian tribe could easily be provoked to violence if their leaders were to suggest such an action. But whatever else is true, a culture of fear, potential violence, anger and extremist thinking is never going to be a healthy mix. As we have already suggested, it is not a version of Christianity likely to go down well with the more liberal young. It will also have even less pulling power, if the figurehead of the movement is thoroughly defeated in November and required publicly to face up to his numerous crimes.
How will evangelicals in this country fare in this potential cataclysm to the brand name that may happen in the States in the autumn? As we have already suggested, there are significant differences in the meaning of the term in the two countries. But for all the differences, the two groups still share a descriptive name. For that reason alone, evangelicals here should be concerned about the events taking place in the States. The damage on American society caused by Trump and his supporters is so massive that there may be a huge political and theological backlash against those groups who have supported him. The term evangelical may become a toxic description for decades to come across the world. If evangelicals here or anywhere in the world want to avoid that guilt by association that is inevitably on its way, they need to start to plan now. They have to examine the word and allow it to be defined in ways that have not been corrupted and made unclean by association with the criminal reign of Donald J Trump.
Hmm. It might not happen, you know. People do vote for their own interests, and deny what is obvious to us. That’s how Boris got in. Keep praying!
Interesting Stephen. I was especially taken by the pressure of evangelicals to encourage money giving. Anger at the rest of society for their sinfulness and fear of the powerful God’s revenge on feeble sinners like Jonah who knowingly turned away from His will. That was my experience in an evangelical church.
“Evangelical” is one of those words. It get misused, abused, overused and disused to the point where it becomes almost meaningless.
I think I know what it means, but you may think it’s something different.
Here in the U.K., I know many people who are evangelical, but who probably wouldn’t recognise that description of themselves. So when we lecture them with the type we’ve diagnosed them as, it can fall on deaf ears simply because they don’t identify as such.
At the same time a growing number will gently but deliberately ease themselves away from the label. There is general abhorrence this side of the Pond from any support for Trump, Christian or otherwise.
I do agree that in Christian circles we should look very closely at the speakers we’ve imported and the doctrines we’ve adopted willy nilly from churches over there who trumpeted Trump last time round, assuming that is that we are not in favour of him.
In the matter of assumptions, experience shows that we make these at our peril. Politically, for example many of us alienate our congregations by assuming we know what’s best for them. It’s becoming regularly counterproductive. If we’re not listening, most of them won’t tell us, they’ll just privately vote for the other guy.
Culturally I’m fascinated by America, but know enough to know that I really don’t understand what’s going on there. In the public mind, what constitutes a “crime” that leads to a man not being re-elected, I’m not sure either. We’ve had a steady stream of misdeeds of one sort or another. None of the blows has so far proved fatal to Trump’s political career. Indeed, may I suggest, some have actually endeared him to his electorate.
One thing we do need to do is provide something better in whichever field we are evangelical. And that’s something both politically and in spiritual terms we have singularly failed to do.
Everything in the US needs to be seen through the prism of race relations. The visceral nature of US politics (which is as much the norm as the exception – a fact all too frequently forgotten) is fundamentally about whether or not lower class or median income whites are prepared to yield economic status to other races, and not merely African-Americans.
These were questions being posed by the versatile economist Gunnar Myrdal (‘An American Dilemma; The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy’ (1944)) and in Denis Brogan’s riposte: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0289.1945.tb00710.x
In other words, what will happen when the US decides it will no longer be a north-west European society? As TR noted famously, ‘demography is destiny’ and since the Hart-Celler Act (1965) the European element has been in retreat. Myrdal was optimistic; Brogan less so.
The evangelical movement derived its chief impetus from the reaction against civil rights. The civil rights movement was thought to imperil the status of poor whites and to threaten the economic security of lower middle class whites. In the South and middle west evangelicalism was the Nixon/Atwater ‘Southern Strategy’ at prayer: a theological return to Jeffersonian republicanism, to states rights and a racial hierarchy. It was the theological mobilisation of bigotry on a scale to rival the civil rights movement, but it was one that was attuned to the economic, cultural and topographical shifts of the US during the boom years: mega-churches were made possible by rapid suburbanisation (itself a function of the military-industrial appropriations afforded by southern legislators enjoying ‘seniority’) in the wake of the inter-state highway system.
I do not mean to suggest that all US evangelicals are racists, but a great many are. Trump is no fool. To win he had to harness the evangelical vote, and the racist horse was the willing accomplice of the racist rider.
Moreover, the US is at a critical demographic inflection point. The white evangelical vote is in serious decline; it can no longer guarantee victories in elections; many ‘red’ states are turning mauve as other races disperse or predominate. If anything this induces further paranoia on the part of white recidivists. They know how much they have to lose; bigotry is often affianced with insight. That the loss is a relative one – of status – is neither here nor there. A perennial theme of US history is that poor white allow themselves to be manipulated by wealthy whites against their own interests provided they retain their *relative* status against the black ‘other’. The affirmative action programmes advanced by the Democrats sustain that pattern. It is rare indeed for politicians to seek to raise all boats: an unusual instance of this was Huey Long in (and later Earl and Russell Long).
Unfortunately, a Biden victory may represent a return to the unsatisfactory ‘normalcy’ which made Trump possible.
I should add that it was Myrdal who, arguably, lit the torch for what subsequently became affirmative action.
The other key component in the success of the evangelical movement in the US was that LBJ’s Great Society also endeavoured to lift all boats, but it was wrecked by the guns-and-butter strategy of his administration and the slow disintegration of the Bretton Woods gold exchange system (he spent as much time agitating about the dollar as he did Vietnam). This coincided with a fall in the profit margins of business at the end of the 1960s, and the attempts by management to rein in labour brought the all-boats moment to an end. Political emotions were already running high, but the growing perception that the cake was no longer growing – or shrinking – was a gift to the Right; the emergence of inflation owing to errors by LBJ, Nixon, Fowler, Connolly and Burns accentuated the move to reaction.
So the mega-church was perhaps the result of deep societal changes in the structure of the economy, the radical alteration of its topography and the reaction against the consensus politics of the mid-1960s (in the brief halcyon moment following JFK’s assassination when the Democrats broke with their past and ‘moved north’). Reagan’s patronage of Goldwater’s Cable Act in 1984 was perhaps also significant.
The development of an Americanised evangelicalism in the UK was a function of Britain having been ‘colonised by its former colony’ (as de Gaulle would have put it), at least mentally. The UK variant imitated certain of the tropes of its US parent: it was a suburban and middle class phenomenon; it emerged from the crucible of the inflation and industrial strife of the 1970s; it encouraged informality in dress even as it promoted doctrinal rigidity; it profited from a turn against the increasing incoherence and diversity of British culture. I am not suggesting that the UK variant was imitative of the US version(s) in every respect, but there are significant echoes. British evangelicalism has become increasingly political as societal attitudes towards sex and gender identity have changed quickly and out of recognition, but the extreme marginalisation of all forms of Christianity has meant that it will never be a force in British politics. This might work to its temporary advantage as cults tend to draw strength from their hermetic properties.
Whether British evangelicalism will crash and burn like its US equivalent remains to be seen, but there are already significant signs that R&R has been largely ineffectual and that the Alpha movement has reached the limits of its proselytising possibilities: the small target market being largely saturated and that diminishing returns have set in.
Perhaps the Trump Administration, and the surprise ‘victory’ of 2016, represented the last dying twitch of that hydra which once stalked the land, and whose heads were Nixon, Wallace, Reagan – and Graham, Haggard, Falwell, etc.
‘The evangelical movement derived its chief impetus from the reaction against civil rights.’ Froghole, perhaps you mean the rise of the religious right in the USA, rather than of evangelicalism per se?
My father was a leading evangelical in the US during the 1950s and 1960s and many evangelicals, other than in the Deep South, supported the civil rights movement. InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, for which he worked, had a black senior staff worker in the late 1940s/early 50s. Arthur Glasser, another leading evangelical who later helped pioneer the Church Growth Movement, joined in the March on Washington led by Martin Luther King. (He and my father were on a business trip to Washington when they come across the demo; my father felt that as a British citizen he shouldn’t participate.)
Growing up in Chicago among church-going evangelicals I never encountered racial prejudice until we visited the South. It was a terrible shock when we stopped at a gas station somewhere in Georgia or Alabama and saw that it had 4 toilets: White Gentlemen, White Ladies, Coloured Men and Coloured Women. I saw red and headed immediately for ‘Coloured Women’, but my father stopped me, saying, ‘The man in the office has a shotgun.’
There were fundamentalists, especially among Southern Baptists (a separate union from Northern Baptists and much more conservative) but they were distinct from evangelicals. We came back to England in 1974 (I read the Watergate Transcripts in the boat on the way over), coincidentally in the early days of the rise of the religious right as a movement. Frankie Schaeffer’s book Crazy for God gives a fascinating account of how his father Frank Schaeffer and himself were instrumental in popularising the movement. Frankie later disowned evangelicalism and joined the Orthodox Church.
Billy Graham, himself southern and a Baptist, made a firm stand against racial segregation and refused to preach anywhere black people were not allowed into the congregation.
Janet: I was indeed using the phrase ‘white evangelicals’ as a shorthand for the religious right, and apologise for the crude and unfair conflation of the two. However, it seems to me (and from my reading) that there was a progressive coalescence of white evangelicalism and the right over the course of the 1970s. A respectable number of professing white evangelicals voted for Carter in 1976; comparatively few did so in 1980, despite Carter being fairly right-wing and avowedly evangelical (as opposed to the pseudo-religious divorcee, Reagan).
I would attribute this shift to the gradual success of the Southern Strategy; most southern states were ‘in play’ between the parties during the 1970s, and even extremists like Wallace, Thurmond and Maddox made plays for the African-American vote. However, this had largely ceased to be the case by the late 1980s, and definitively so by 2000.
Also, I was not intending to tar Graham with the segregationist brush, but he was in the van of the culture wars of the 1970s and 1980s, which were often inextricably bound up with the racial politics of the time.
As to Chicago, Richard Daly Sr., was very keen to preserve de facto segregation, not least as part of his ‘management’ of the electoral process. He artfully appeared to compromise with Dr King about fair housing in 1966, whilst actually giving him precious little. Of course, Daly’s promotion of the hard-hat law-and-order tendency was all part of the very ambiguous relationship that the right wing of the Democratic party had with the civil rights movement.
Of course, your experience of all this has been first hand; mine is merely through books.
James
Sorry, Daley, or course. Not Daly.
I have no first-hand knowledge whatsoever of American Evangelicalism (but I suspect it may not be quite as homogeneous or monolithic as it sometimes appears to us in Britain). I think the description of it as a “people whose self-definition is contained as knowing who they are not” is very apt. Indeed I remember writing an essay on “Fundamentalisms” many years ago which drew heavily on the writings of Martin Marty and his assessment was that they always arise when a group feels its identity threatened by outward forces which it cannot control and then defines itself over and against those forces. Marty believes that this started to happen back in late-50s America as consumerism took hold and family values changed. Of course the link between evangelicalism and politics was strongly encouraged by Ronald Reagan and also ministers such as Jerry Falwell who (I suspect) enjoyed the power and status that such links gave them. Billy Graham – unlike his son Franklin – tended to distance himself a bit more, especially (as I recall) after getting his fingers burned by being a bit too matey with “tricky Dicky” Nixon.
It’s interesting that the authors of the original series of “Fundamentals” were serious, if conservative, scholars seeking to stand up against the theological liberalism sweeping through academic institutions such as Princeton. As far as I know they had no political agenda. Tracing how this morphed into a more strident and simplistic stance and how it allied itself with right-wing politics would be an interesting study! Of course in Britain many Evangelicals have traditionally come from Nonconformist backgrounds which have tended to be more supportive of a left-wing (or, at least, Liberal) political agenda. Having said that, I think that it tended to lose touch which its societal roots and retreat into a sort of bibliocentric personal pietism – I vividly remember my university Christian Union of the early 70s being dead against anything that smacked of the dreaded “social gospel”! since then of course things have very much changed for the better.
You mention the influence on American evangelicals on the British scene; this was of course particularly true at the more charismatic end of the spectrum when the “Fort Lauderdale Five” and then John Wimber and his team had a huge influence. I wonder if British evangelicals were attracted to them because they seemed to be exotic and “different” or because they dangled the promise of “success” in the faces of declining churches? I don’t know; but it does seem possibly that they, coupled with it being the disastrous (and often militantly atheistic) “loony Left” era of the Labour party drove many of them Rightwards? There is also of course the influence of HTB – itself touched by Wimber – which had and has a social demographic very different to (say) traditional Yorkshire or South Wales Methodism!
I fear that the biggest problem won’t come in the churches but from secular commentators who, given…
We lost the last few words there:
I fear that the biggest problem won’t come in the churches but from secular commentators who, given the E-word, immediately associate it with the American model. But of course the British version, increasingly diverse and definitely multiethnic, is a very different creature.
The US has a peculiar religious history in that it emerged as a powerful western nation with no dominant denomination or past Christian history. This marks it out from France, or Britain, as David Martin noted and for that matter Russia; the German national identity emerged through two competing denominations, but not a “free-for-all”. The US does however have a “new world” / “promised land” myth which is very strong.
Callum Brown (Death of Christian Britain) suggests that the US has a very different “Christian discourse” from England – that is how people speak about their faith. Encapsulated maybe in the discussions between George Bush and Tony Blair about faith and leadership. Brown suggests that the US has a “salvation economy” where it is normal to not just know but to say if you are saved or not.
When personal salvation is linked with a sense of divine destiny in a nation, it is a potent force, ripe for ideological take-overs.
A third and still emerging force in shaping the religious map is the fast growing “immigrant” churches and the emergence of a new paradigm – here Philip Jenkins is a key scholar. Will the critical mass of these churches start to shape the culture and language and in what way?They are often evangelical / pentecostal – will they vote conservatively in order to feel they fit in?
There is an alternative evangelical voice in the US led not least by Jim Wallis and Sojourners. There are though vested business interests in keeping the religious right together as a unit: I don’t think it is coincidence that mega churches emerged (with big money) in the 1980s almost as a brand. Their marketing and comms are slick and professional, because they were and are competing for custom.
If the C of E’s finances are ever more parlous, then we may move to a more market-led competition for customers, and some would say we are already moving that way. I don’t think “evangelical” is a word much in use in the big new independent churches in this country (I may well be wrong): I suspect it is a word precious to a particular constituency, predominantly in the C of E – if so it is not going to be a good word for wider marketing. If it defines people by what they are not it will be a word that is used to try and hold a group rather than expand it. ??It’s not just our weather that comes from the direction of America!
Some of you may have come across the Stark-Bainbridge theory of religion, first published in 1987, which look at religions and spiritual movements as if they were business organisations, referring to their adherents as customers or clients. This theory, which aims to explain religious involvement in terms of rewards and compensators, is seen as a precursor of later analyses of religions in terms of economic principles (I am not familiar with these). While Stark and Bainbridge profess to be offering a theory of religion which is applicable to all cultures, theirs in fact seems to be peculiarly American and I think goes a long way to explain the tie-up between right-wing economics and evangelical Christianity – the one purporting to offer rewards in this life and the other offering them in the hereafter. It is a particularly individualistic and – dare I say? – self-centred approach to religion.
The Church of England, for example, is now testing the well known economic principle described by Mr Micawber.
Are there areas of religion that are selfless? I hope so. But it would be hard to be part of a religious community without at some level asking the question “what’s in it for me?” Perhaps, at base, the question is “what’s keeping me/us here?”
There is a well known biblical principle of “the beam and the mote”. If we’re to point out the faults of the other, we cannot avoid examination of the often greater weaknesses in ourselves.
Perhaps the “what’s in it me” attitude – which I think is pretty central in Evangelicalism – is rising more and more to the surface in churches because it is more and more prevalent in society as a whole?
Where I do agree is in the area of “choice Christianity”. I noticed over many years in others as well as myself, the desire for a good experience each visit. You could lose a substantial chunk of people with a weak choice of songs for example. One place where I worshipped, the music pastor noted that 70% of the congregation were new each week. And each week it was a different 70%.
The idea of serving, giving and committing was less prevalent. That said, and this is obviously my own anecdotal experience, the more conservative evangelical the place, the more commitment. More liberal and more Charismatic places seemed to have more floating voters. Most of these places were evangelical. But I noticed a similar consumerist tendency in a high Anglican parish I attended too. It was known for exquisite music and the whole ritual bells and smells done to perfection.
Grace Davie uses the phrase “From obligation to consumption” to chart this movement. My father and father-in-law go to church because it is an obligation for them as Christians (that is how they were brought up). i suspect those born after WW2 are more inclined to go if it is worth something / good enough / you get something from it. The fact that the older are also often the more generous givers is also I think linked to this.
I suspect that those with a more Catholic theology or practice are somewhat less susceptible, but still affected by this overarching consumer culture, hence the slightly later drop in attendance figures for the RC Church in this country.
If consumerism is the mark of the beast, then making churches attractive is probably sowing seed into rocks and thorns. But ignoring where people actually are is like sowing seed inside the bag you bought it in, or under a bushel, or maybe not even bothering to try and sow at all. Ecclesiastes would say it is all worthless, but Jesus sent disciples out with instructions to make disciples and proclaim Good News; which preacher do we follow?
Just a reminder that the word in the Greek is ‘Eu’ which means good plus ‘angelium’ which means message. (Angels are ones who bring messages). Good news. An evangelical ought to be somebody who coveys the good news about Jesus.
Yup! But if most people associate it with Trump supporters?
Sadly, what some evangelicals seem eager to convey is bad news about what God is against, rather than good news about the freedom we have in Christ. I used to preach a pretty ‘good’ hellfire and brimstone sermon myself, but I realised years ago that convincing people of their sin is the Holy Spirit’s job, not mine. My job is to tell people about the amazing love of God, who cherishes each one of us and made us all different.God doesn’t expect any of us to conform to someone else’s idea of who pr what we should be. As Yehudi Menhin once said, ‘When I meet God he won’t say “Why weren’t you more like Jascha Heifetz?” He’ll say, “Why weren’t you more like Yehudi Menuhin?”‘
Thanks Both. I need to reflect on this and look at John the Baptist and the prophets before replying. I want to get it right.
There are many good evangelicals who do credit to our faith. The problem is when people calling themselves Christians, or evangelical, follow someone like Trump, or act hatefully towards others.
Janet, here goes.
The Holy Spirit convicts us of sin, yes, but also of righteousness and judgement (John 16:8), so I think we should give people the bad news as well as the good news, and warn people of judgement to come. John the Baptist did not hold back from telling Herod what he had done wrong, and lost his life as a result. The prophets specified the sins of the people. Paul spoke to Felix about righteousness, self-control and the judgement to come (Acts 24:25).
I think we need both promise and warning. In Isaiah 1:18 – 20 the Lord says “though your sins are scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool. If you are willing and obedient, you will eat of the best from the land, but if you resist and rebel, you will be devoured by the sword.” The first half of this is widely quoted, but not the second half. I think this is not right. People should be warned.
All our lifetime, the churches in the UK have been mute rather than denouncing sin. The result is that people think that we are on the right path and there is no need to change. People should be hearing from us that we are experiencing the pandemic because of our wicked ways, in my opinion. See the website I created http://www.turntojesus.co.uk to try to help with this.
If I may, I’m going to disagree, David. I don’t believe Jesus taught that bad things happen to punish us for being bad. I think life is just like that. As an Archdeacon of my acquaintance said, “It’s all part of the quididity of life”. Which is Latin for “stuff happens”! I suspect that God invented chaos theory so that we could have free will. If we believe in God, we must do so while accepting that bad things happen randomly to everyone, and not necessarily for a particular reason. Novel coronavirus may very well have developed partly because we abuse our environment. But lots of mutations just happen.
Thanks Janet. Yes, Jesus brought a message of repentance and good news, and did not get distracted from that, to my mind. He also said that the rain falls on the just and the unjust. Also, I recall a Sunday evening in a church where God did some remarkable healings. I knew the situation behind the scenes there, and was surprised that God would pour out good things on such a gathering. Then the words “God, who is kind to the ungrateful and wicked” came into my mind (Luke 6:31). A memorable moment. So I am with you.
But having said that, there are swathes of the Old Testament where warnings are given, and God is the author of crises and disasters. We ignore the prophets to our loss. And yesterday, I was reading the Joseph story in Genesis, where it clearly states that God is the author of both the seven good years of bumper crops and the seven years of famine (Ch 41).
No reason for the latter is given, but as the story unfolds we see that God was working though it all the time. It cost Joseph thirteen years of pain, from the age of 17 to 30, but it saved the family and countless others. A prophetic story if ever there was one!
So my instinct is that God is behind the pandemic rather than just being a spectator.
“God is behind the pandemic” writes Mr Pennant. And tsunamis? Quakes? Tectonic plate movements? Eruptions? Climate cycles? God is the laws of nature? Natural things (like tectonic plates and viruses) doing the what comes naturally? Gaia.
Stanley, thanks. I believe God has everything under control. This to me is the theme of the book of Revelation. He has also made us in his image, with free will. How these two things intermesh is beyond me to explain, but I believe them both. On climate crisis, see the seven trumpets in Revelation 8 and following. Interesting.
In which case why should we seek cures for God given conditions that we regard self-centredly as disasters? We should accept what is thrown at us, Job like? This is not a ropicmfor Stephen’s blog, so I shan’t persist.
Stanley and Janet, a further thought. You mention quakes. Jesus talked of earthquakes as being a sign of the end times in Matthew 24, and in Revelation 11:13 and 16:18 we read of severe earthquakes that are attributed to God. Worth reflecting on.
As regards disease, God promised the people that if they obeyed him, he would remove the horrible diseases of Egypt from them, but if they disobeyed, he would do the opposite (Deuteronomy 7:15, 28:60). So he has a hand in disease.
Now I take Janet’s thought that we today are not in the same position as the people of God in those days were, but only up to a point. It seems to me, that by choosing to follow Christ and aiming to be a Christian country in past times, we have put ourselves during our lifetime in the position of those that disobey. Take Sunday observance for example. I was struck to learn from a 93 year old recently that in his youth, swings in public swing parks were tied up to prevent their use on Sunday, so that everybody would take a day of rest. How far we have moved from that attitude!
Our Sunday trading bill in 1994 has turned out nasty: most of us still put our feet up at the weekend, but the poor and marginalised who do back-breaking work for low wages have been forced to work on Sundays.
This is just one example of where we have gone wrong. It may not be popular to connect the pandemic with the evils of our day and our country turning away from God, but I do. It is time to humble ourselves and repent.
David, there are multiple Bible verses blaming illnesses on evil spirits and demons. How can you be sure the pandemic is not caused by demonic forces, rather than God?
Many thanks, as ever, David.
Let us look at it this way: the virus is a form of payback by nature. Over the last century and a half we have been consuming more and more, as luxuries have metamorphosed into necessities under the baleful eyes of the advertising industry and our corporate masters. Prudential behaviour has given way to visceral behaviour. This, along with our reproductive incontinence, has led us to steal from our only means of subsistence – a very beautiful but fragile biosphere – in the manner of a compulsive gambler. We are fast devouring that ecological credit with which God has endowed us; to paraphrase Hemingway’s ‘Sun Also Rises’ we seem intent on going bankrupt in two ways: gradually, then suddenly.
The liberalisation of Sunday trading in 1993 was symptomatic of that turn from prudential to visceral behaviour.
In this and other ways we have thrown off our Christian patrimony (viz. 2 Timothy 4: 3-4).
Thus, our remorseless desire to consume endlessly and often pointlessly has led nature to unleash upon us a virus which seems almost specially designed to disrupt the predicates of our contemporary political economy and the visceral behaviour on which it has thrived (viz. Romans 6:23).
My understanding of prophecy in the Bible is a little different to yours, David. Firstly, in the Old Testament we see prophets speaking to the people of God, children of the Covenant. This is different from the approach some Christians take today, of denouncing the sins of those who aren’t members of the Church and don’t claim to be Christians. I think the traditional evangelical approach of ‘dangling people over hell’ as a means of evangelism is not only misconceived but damaging.
Second, prophets usually spoke primarily to those in power. We are told that Nathan reproached David for his sin against Bathsheba and Uriel, but we aren’t told that he condemned every adulterer in the country. David’s responsibility, and the consequences when he went astray, were much greater.
Third, there is considerable development over the course of the whole Bible in concepts of God’s agency in disasters and tragedies. As you say, in Genesis God is seen to be directly responsible, and there was a widespread belief that people’s sin brought disaster on them. The latter was refuted in Job, and again by Jesus when discussing the tragedy at the tower of Siloam. There is also considerably less clarity in the NT about whether God is directly the author of evil events, or whether they are part of the processes of the world which God set in motion.
To sum up: I agree with you that prophecy is indeed vitally important, but I don’t think that generalised denunciations of other people’s ‘sins’ is what the Bible considers to be prophecy.
Janet, I imagine the globe being in the grip of the devil (1 John 5:19), but then outside that, the world plus the devil are all in the grip of the Almighty – rendered the pantokrator in Greek, the all-gripper. The devil can only act with God’s permission (Job chapters 1-2).
Any good? It’s a big subject!
Ooh, I don’t believe God is ever just a spectator! You know that awful song? God is watching us from a distance? Makes me want to throw something. Such as the radio. It’s not a simple relationship, perhaps that’s what I mean, the relationship between actions and consequences.
I put that badly. I don’t think God is just looking on ‘from a distance’, but neither do I think he decided to initiate a pandemic and then decided who lives and who dies. As you say, Athena, it’s much more complicated than that.
As Stanley said, God created a moral universe where actions have consequences, and if we trash the world we can expect more extreme weather and natural disasters like fires and hurricanes. We bring some of this on ourselves. But the universe is also a place where tragedies happen randomly, or appear to. The Bible explains this as being due to the consequences of sin, but in the sense that a principle of destruction and futility (as Paul put it) entered our cosmos. The multiple tragedies that befell Job’s family were not due to his sin. The tower of Siloam may have been badly constructed, but the people it fell on probably weren’t responsible for the shoddy building, or more sinful than anyone else in the area.
And whatever happens, God is with us in it. S/he weeps with us for the waste and the pain, and gives us strength to go on.
Totally agree Janet. I was replying to David saying about God’s being a spectator or not. That wasn’t clear.
Actions have consequences. We do bad things, we can’t avoid the consequences. If we repent, that is acknowledge our actions, attempt restitution and readjust our vision, the consequences are still with us but we can move on to life abundant without being weighed down by them. This, to me, is what Jesus taught. It is exemplified by the story of the woman caught in adultery. This is salvation, redemption, justification, call it what you will – all words for the same phenomenon. It’s about life here and now. Life eternal is a quality of life here and now (everlasting is a poor translation). We repent in order to lighten our burdens NOW, not to buy nectar points for a club class after-life.
Stephen,
I note you’ve touched on Trump a couple of times recently.
Here are a couple of forthcoming OUP books which I think are on point if you wish to revisit this topic in the near future:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-radio-right-9780190073220?prevNumResPerPage=100&prevSortField=1&resultsPerPage=100&sortField=1&facet_narrowbypubdate_facet=Next%203%20months&start=100&lang=en&cc=gb#
(i.e., the radical right has been pioneered by professed Christian reactionaries even before the 1970s, though this study does not go back to the 1930s, Fr. Coghlan, and all that).
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-end-of-empathy-9780190069186?q=empathy&lang=en&cc=gb#
(This relates to my first post on this thread; however, please note this: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/divided-by-faith-9780195147070?q=white%20evangelicals&lang=en&cc=gb# and this: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/republican-theology-9780199363568?q=white%20evangelicals&lang=en&cc=gb#).
Thomas Edsall was suggesting in the NYT yesterday that Trump is trying to stoke up a backlash in the remaining months before the general election, so as to mobilise his base (of course, he will spend the rest of his life in litigation – and perhaps even in exile – so will want to be returned so as to save on claims for at least another four years…).
James