Rejecting Mercy: Why I No Longer Understand American Evangelicals

My father pastored a small non-denominational church in northern Wisconsin. As a non-denominational entity, the church largely owed its identity to my father’s theological proclivities. These were formed by my parents’ conversion from Missouri Synod Lutheranism into the Charismatic movement of the 1970s, my father’s Vietnam military service, and his admiration for Reagan-era politics.

Because non-denominational churches often exist as a kind of institutional mutt, they lack the privileges of denominational affiliation and support. My father occasionally shopped for that identity. 

The closest he came to committing to anything was when he discovered Ted Haggard’s Association of Life-Giving Churches. Haggard’s New Life Church in Colorado Springs enjoyed a large constituency of active-duty soldiers from nearby Fort Carson. As president of the National Association of Evangelicals, Haggard was credited for rallying evangelical support for George W. Bush in 2004. 

Though I rarely remember my father using the term “Evangelical,” self-descriptively or otherwise, Haggard’s unique cultural pedigree fortified my father’s ecclesiological existence. He was, we were, Evangelicals.

I packed that faith experience in my bags as I left for college in Minnesota. There, my commitment to Evangelicalism began to unravel. Theology classes exposed me to the father of liberal Protestant theology, Frederich Schleiermacher, Albert Schwietzer’s quest for the historical Jesus, and the cognitive assault religion experienced from the Enlightenment. 

While my mind was reckoning with those critiques, my heart was being formed by Mennonite Pastor Greg Boyd, who, one year into America’s war with Iraq, preached a six-week series on non-violence that prompted the exodus of a thousand members from his congregation.

After graduating with a business degree and many questions, I took my curiosity to seminary. There, I made my home in orthodoxy, a set of theological suppositions defined by the classic creeds of Christianity without the cultural commitments of Evangelicalism. 

After seminary, I took a job as a Baptist pastor. The church I pastored most closely aligned with the Emergent Church movement before that dissolved. It then maintained an identity with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, a national organization of moderate to left-leaning Christians.

While my own theological identity continued to evolve, it became further estranged from Evangelicalism. 

I inherited the view that women could lead in every facet of ministry from my dad, who regularly welcomed women to preach, but I became a student of feminism because it became clear the church at large hadn’t. 

I was a pro-lifer who acknowledged the complexity of abortion before I learned to prioritize a woman’s right to choose. In 2019, the church I pastored underwent a discernment process that concluded with the decision to affirm LGBTQ persons and welcome them into all aspects of congregational life.

If my exodus from Evangelicalism began while George W. Bush was governing as a compassionate conservative who took us to war with Afghanistan and Iraq, it became complete when a third of President Trump’s vote came from Evangelicals in 2016. 

I couldn’t understand how a man who covered up affairs, mocked a reporter with a disability and made the now-infamous comments bragging about sexual assault continued to get full-throated support from a base that defined itself by its concern for what the Bible says. That’s not to say I didn’t and still do find pieces of the Democratic platform in conflict with Christian ethics, but they also weren’t getting any vocalized support from major religious groups.

Part of the challenge of discerning one’s relationship to Evangelicalism is deciding how to define Evangelicalism. The most serious attempt has been made by historian David Bebbington and his fourfold description of Evangelicalism’s core identities: activism, biblicism, conversionism, and the centrality of atonement to Christian theology.

To understand Evangelicalism’s origin, one must begin with 20th-century fundamentalism, which was partly defined by the Scopes Monkey Trial. As more American theologians came to accept higher criticisms, Darwinism, and liberal theology, fundamentalists became argumentative and dogmatic. 

Looking to mediate that growing divide, figures like Carl F. H. Henry, probably best known as the founding editor of Christianity Today, began articulating a faith marked by conservative tenets of Christian theology but with a generous spirit. If Evangelical theology had stayed faithful to that original intention, the world might look different today. 

However, that potential disappeared in 1979 when Jerry Falwell founded the Moral Majority. This wedded conservative cultural Christian values with the power of the Republican party. 

Slowly, Bebbington’s theological distinctives of evangelicalism yielded to a generic identity that has become synonymous with conservative political fidelity, regardless of the party’s platform.

For the past twenty-five years, I have watched this slow erosion of Evangelical identity, wondering when it lost its meaning. That ambiguity was clarified two weeks ago as Evangelicals began posting public responses to Reverend Mariann Budde’s homily at the National Cathedral’s inaugural prayer service. 

Kristin Du Mez has documented a robust list of the usual players, so I’ll only highlight two:

Franklin Graham said President Trump is a truth-teller and Episcopal Bishop Mariann Budde is a liar.

Speaker Mike Johnson, who I consider to be the most vivid expression of Evangelicalism’s religious-political amalgamation, tweeted that Bishop Budde’s homily was “shameful” and that she “hijacked the national prayer service to promote her radical ideology.” 

These reactions might have been considered part of the typical left-right squabbles if the Bishop had not used one word in particular: Mercy.

Note what the bishop did not ask of President Trump in naming both the immigrant and LGBTQ communities. She didn’t ask him to consider that his political positions were wrong.  She didn’t ask him to change his policies. She didn’t even condemn his policies. She asked him to have mercy. 

One might even note the word “mercy” allows for the presupposition that the groups she identified are in the wrong, a position that neither I nor Bishop Budde hold, but a lexical possibility that exists.

However, I am not concerned about President Trump’s response to the word “mercy.” I don’t expect him to know any better. But as for Franklin Graham and the like, this is a damning historical moment.

Since Saint Augustine codified the mechanics of Christian anthropology in the fifth century, Christian theology has maintained that all humans have inherited a sinful nature and need God’s grace. The way this grace is extended to humans is through God’s mercy. 

This is also why David Bebbington includes conversionism in his list of distinctives. To be Christian is to recognize their need for mercy, which makes transformation possible. This formulation is also the impetus behind the late Billy Graham’s crusades.

Saint Paul’s letter to the Romans addresses the contentious relationship between Jews and Gentiles. To allay the fears of his Jewish audience, who suspect that Paul’s message vanquished the fidelity of God’s covenantal relationship with them, Paul addresses the issue of mercy. In Exodus 33, he quotes God speaking to Moses: “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” 

Paul’s point is that a primary characteristic of mercy is its indiscriminate nature. For a Christian, then, to advocate a position that regrets the extension of mercy to anyone, whether or not one agrees with the nature of the clemency that that mercy brings, is so profoundly unchristian that I dare say it is heretical.

I no longer understand American Evangelicalism.