It’s All About Me
Barry Hankins September/October 2024How the culture wars are redefining evangelicals and religious liberty.
Illustrations by Jon Krause
This November, roughly 82 percent of evangelical voters are expected to cast their votes for Donald Trump. However implausible evangelical support for Trump seemed in 2015 when he first ran for the Republican nomination, evangelicals have become his most loyal supporters. So much so, in fact, that the very definition of the term evangelical has morphed over the past eight years from a religious and theological term into a cultural and political one.
For roughly 30 years there existed a consensus among historians that evangelicals were those Christians who held four things in common: (1) biblicism—the idea that the Bible was the unparalleled authority in matters of faith; (2) conversionism—the belief that one must have a born-again or saving experience of spiritual transformation; (3) crucicentrism—the centrality of the cross and the crucifixion of Christ for redemption of sin; and (4) activism—the impulse to live out one’s faith actively in the world through evangelism and social reform. These four traits were known as the Bebbington quadrilateral, after British historian David Bebbington, who articulated them in 1989.1
Recently historians have begun to question whether the Bebbington quadrilateral adequately describes a coherent group of Christians or ever did. In 2018, for example, Messiah College historian John Fea asked on his blog, “Should we retire the Bebbington quadrilateral?” Shortly thereafter, his book Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump appeared. There he argued that evangelical support for Trump was the logical outgrowth of evangelical politics based on “fear, the pursuit of worldly power, and a nostalgic longing for a national past that may have never existed in the first place.”2
Calvin University historian Kristin Du Mez took this argument further in her book Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. She tracked an increasing emphasis among evangelicals on: (1) Christian masculinity, (2) patriarchy, (3) nationalism, and (4) militarism, especially since the 1980s. I call these four elements the Du Mez patrilateral.3 Like Fea, Du Mez sees evangelical support for Trump, not as an aberration, but as the logical outgrowth of the things evangelicals have been emphasizing during the past 40 years in literature, films, training manuals, and, of course, in the politics of the Christian Right. As Du Mez puts it, support for Trump is “the culmination of evangelicals’ embrace of militant masculinity, an ideology that enshrines patriarchal authority and condones the callous display of power, at home and abroad.”4
The irony of the patrilateral is that while emphasizing the four traits above, evangelicals seem driven to Trump by a sense of fear and the perceived need for a protector.5 Nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of religious liberty. For many evangelical outlets, religious liberty is no longer a matter of principle, but instead is based on self-interest. In other words, an evangelical notion of religious liberty in the era of Trump means protection for evangelicals against their perceived secular and liberal enemies in the culture wars. Little wonder that in her 2016 book The Evangelicals, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Frances FitzGerald put scare quotes around the term religious freedom, signaling her belief that evangelicals used the term as a bogus cover for “laws that discriminate against LGBT [people].”6 FitzGerald here signaled her view that evangelicals all too often used “religious freedom” as a means of advancing their own interests against those of their perceived enemies. I was initially critical of FitzGerald’s view, but have since come to see it as substantially correct for a large swath of evangelicals, although not all. There seems to be a sliding scale that ranges from principled religious liberty at one pole to religious liberty as the defense of one’s own self-interest at the other. This spectrum can be illustrated in recent religious liberty cases.7
Hobby Lobby and Masterpiece Cakeshop
In the well-known case Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014) the Supreme Court carved out a religious liberty protection, not just for individuals, but for businesses that are “closely held.” That is, when a business exists as an extension of the owner’s values, the state cannot force the business its principles. In the case of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores, the evangelical owners believed the Obamacare mandate to provide abortiofacient birth control violated their conscience. Evangelicals were virtually unanimous in their praise of the Hobby Lobby decision, but how they articulated their support varied. Such organizations as the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) and the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission (ERLC) of the Southern Baptist Convention emphasized that the decision protected conscience for all. The NAE statement read in part, “This is a big step toward preserving and deepening America’s religious pluralism. . . . The beauty of the American system,” NAE president Leith Anderson continued, “is that it protects all Americans, not just those who adhere to the prevailing orthodoxies of the time.”8 Russell Moore, then director of the ERLC, even called Southern Baptists to prayer while the case was pending. “We need to pray because this case isn’t about politics or culture wars,” he said. “This case will set the tone for the next hundred years of church/state jurisprudence in this country.” He then added, “We support freedom of conscience not only for ourselves, but also for all.” 9
But for another Southern Baptist the case was indeed about culture war—specifically, the evangelical battle against liberals. Megachurch pastor and Fox News personality Robert Jeffress appeared on the Fox and Friends program titled “The Fight for Faith,” where he used the case to lambaste President Barack Obama, rather than praising the Supreme Court for its ruling. Jeffress said the president had launched “the single greatest attack on religious liberty in history.” Whereas Jeffress had mentioned “religious liberty for all” in passing in an essay on the Fox website, in his live appearance the host was unable to get him to talk about the principle of religious liberty as applied to everyone. Instead, he referred to the principle only in the context of conservative Christians. In a reference to the upcoming Fourth of July weekend he said, “As Christians, we’re going to have to continue to fight for that freedom,” and he predicted that in the 2016 election religious liberty would be “the single greatest political issue for evangelical Christians and conservative Catholics.”10
The difference between the NAE and ERLC on one hand and Robert Jeffress on the other was even more pronounced in the wake of the Masterpiece Cakeshop case of 2018. In that case the Supreme Court ruled that the state of Colorado could not force evangelical cakeshop owner Jack Phillips to construct a cake for a gay wedding. Both the NAE and the ERLC once again emphasized that although this case concerned an evangelical, the principle applied to people of all faiths. “This is a win for all Americans,” the ERLC press release read in part. “At stake in this debate was the question of whether or not the state can force an individual to violate his or her conscience.”11 The NAE followed with: “This decision is a win not just for Jack Phillips but for all Americans who care about freedom of conscience and religion. Government must not demonize the religion or religious beliefs of its citizens.”12
Jeffress, however, once again cast the case in terms of electoral politics and the culture wars. On Twitter he wrote, “Today #SCOTUS guaranteed reelection of Pres.@realDonaldTrump by protecting religious right of baker to not participate in a gay wedding. @POTUS promised to protect religious liberty. This is the most consequential ex. of ‘promise made, promise kept.’ Thank you, President Trump!”13 A short time later Jeffress began referring to Trump as the “most religious-liberty oriented president we’ve ever had.”14
Islamic Society v. Basking Ridge
The biggest chasm between principle and self-interest appears in cases that involve the religious liberty of non-Christians. In the New Jersey case Islamic Society v. Basking Ridge the NAE and ERLC joined in an amicus brief with Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, and Hare Krishna legal groups, along with mainline lobbies such as the Queens Federation of Churches and the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty, and secular groups such as the South Asian Bar Association of New Jersey. All opposed Basking Ridge, New Jersey’s use of zoning ordinances to thwart the building of a mosque. In this case Russell Moore and the ERLC faced opposition within the Southern Baptist Convention, as two delegates to the SBC’s annual meeting protested the ERLC position. One attempted to make a motion advocating that “all Southern Baptist officials or offices who support the rights of Muslims to build Islamic mosques in the United States be immediately removed from their position with the Southern Baptist Convention.” A second delegate attempted to put forward a motion requiring the ERLC to remove its name from the amicus brief in the Basking Ridge case. Moore and the ERLC won the day, however, and continued to stand for the religious liberty principle that applies to all faiths.
At the same time the Basking Ridge case was being debated and then tried in a New Jersey court (the case has not come before the Supreme Court), the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) issued such headlines on its website as “Islamic Indoctrination Is Happening in Public Schools All Across America.” “Incredibly,” the article claimed, “as Islam continues to be taught in schools around the nation, students are being denied the right to establish Bible clubs on campus, bring their Bibles to school, and speak about Christianity.”15 The stark, us-versus-them nature of the article could not have been more pronounced. The ACLJ was founded in 1990 as part of Pat Robertson’s media empire and has been headed by Jewish convert to Christianity Jay Sekulow since its beginning. Sekulow has been called by one scholar “arguably the most visible Christian conservative attorney in America today.”16 He became all the more famous when he served as one of the lead attorneys defending Donald Trump in the president’s first impeachment trial. While the ACLJ was founded to “protect religious and constitutional freedoms,” recently it seems to have morphed into a culture war organization. One recent headline read “Breaking: ACLJ Secures Big Win Against the Deep State in Federal Court.”17
Political scientist Daniel Bennett groups the ACLJ with nine other agencies he calls conservative Christian legal organizations (CCLOs). In a 2017 interview he said that most of these organizations “speak broadly of religious liberty, [but] in practice this has mostly meant defending Christian clients.”18 The Thomas More Law Center (TMLC), for example, filed a suit challenging the Basking Ridge mosque even after it had won in court. Part of TMLC’s stated purpose is to “preserve America’s Judeo-Christian heritage; [and] defend the religious freedom of Christians.” Like the ACLJ, the TMLC also claims that Islam is infiltrating America’s public schools. A recent teaser for an article on its website read “School Teachers—Islam’s Secret Agents?” touting “A Special Investigative Report” titled “TMLC Uncovers Tax-Payer Funded Islamic Propaganda Forced on Teachers.” With a few exceptions, the organizations Bennett calls CCLOs define “religious liberty” as a matter of self-interest for Christians against secularists and people of other faiths.19
Legal scholar and historian Sarah Barringer Gordon once wrote, “Religiously motivated actors have always been more attuned to their own constitutional claims than to the niceties of legal doctrine.” While this may be true for most, it is far more the case for CCLOs like the ACLJ and the TMLC than it is for evangelical agencies such as the NAE and the ERLC. Just as there is now a sliding scale as to what defines evangelicals, running from the religious and theological definition known as the Bebbington quadrilateral to the cultural and political definition I call the Du Mez patrilateral, there is also a sliding scale among evangelical religious liberty lobbies. Some have come to see “religious liberty” as a matter of self-interest in the culture wars, while the others tout religious liberty as a principle that protects everyone no matter their beliefs. Those who see “religious liberty” in self-interested, culture war terms are likely to look to Donald Trump as the protector of their self-interest. As he likes to tell evangelicals: “When they come after me, they’re really coming after you.”
1 David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History From the 1730s to the 1980s (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989), pp. 2, 3.
2 “Should We Retire the ‘Bebbington Quadrilateral’?” January 4, 2018, The Way of Improvement Leads Home website; John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2018), p. 7.
3 I spell this out in more detail in Barry Hankins, “Baptists and American Evangelical Identity,” in Thomas S. Kidd, Paul D. Miller, and Andrew Walker, eds., Baptist Political Theology (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2023).
4 Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (New York: Liveright, 2020), p. 3.
5 See, for example, Tim Alberta’s recent book The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism (New York: Harper, 2023).
6 Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017). My review can be found at Barry Hankins, “Why an Award-winning Writer Turned Her Attention to Evangelicals,” April 11, 2017, The Gospel Coalition website.
7 See “Principled Position or Interest Group Politics? Evangelicals and Religious Liberty in the Trump Era,” in David W. Bebbington, ed., The Gospel and Religious Freedom: Historical Studies in Evangelicalism and Political Engagement (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2023).
8 “Supreme Court Upholds Religious Freedom,” June 30, 2014, National Evangelical Association website.
9 Russell Moore, “Hobby Lobby and the Supreme Court: A Call to Prayer,” March 23, 2014, Russell Moore website.
10 Robert Jeffress, Fox and Friends, July 1, 2014, www.youtube.com/watch?v=d88eeZui7tU.
11 Elizabeth Bristow, “Russell Moore Calls Masterpiece Supreme Court Ruling ‘A Win for All Americans,’ ” June 4, 2018, Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission website.
12 “NAE Welcomes Masterpiece Decision,” June 5, 2018, National Association of Evangelicals website.
13 Jeffress’s tweet is listed in: Ariel Sobel, “The Antigay Right Wing Rejoices Over Supreme Court Ruling Against Gay Couple,” The Advocate, June 4, 2018.
14 “Recorded Revelation: Pastor Jeffress on Impact of Reported Payoff,” Fox News Live, July 20, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OsnxBXOh6tg.
15 CeCe Heil, “One Nation Under Allah?” October 8, 2015, ACLJ website.
16 Daniel Bennett, Defending Faith: The Politics of the Christian Conservative Legal Movement (Lawrence, Kans.: University Press of Kansas, 2017), p. 22.
17 “About ACLJ,” ACLJ website; see Jordon Sekulow, “Breaking: ACLJ Secures Big Win Against the Deep State in Federal Court,” April 26, 2021, ACLJ website.
18 Henry Farrell, “These Are the Conservative Legal Groups Behind the Masterpiece Cakeshop Case,” The Washington Post (online), December 5, 2017.
19 One exception was the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), one of Bennett’s CCLOs, joining an amicus brief in the Supreme Court case Holt v. Hobbs (2015), in which Muslim Gregory Holt sued the Arkansas prison system for disallowing his wearing of a beard for religious reasons. Holt won his case.