This is a topic that greatly unsettles me, almost on a daily basis
@adrian
It's galling to witness the spectacle of so many self-confessed Christians lauding a man whose lifestyle and policy decisions evidently conflict in a major way with the character of the Jesus of the gospels. When these same Christians subsequently hail him as their new '
Cyrus the Great' or a latter-day Constantine,
well that just about stretches the frontiers of my tolerance levels!
A kind of religious supremacism appears to be at the epicentre of it. These people fear the creeping advance of secularity and long for some great '
defender' of the faith, who will literally legislate their agenda and keep the hegemony of their worldview in place. Apparently, many of these people think Trump is '
that guy'.
Responding to a question about Evangelical churches that recommend their faith to Africans as a way to become rich, Pope Francis once said in an interview:
… We must distinguish carefully between the different groups who are identified as ‘Protestants.’ There are many with whom we can work very well, and who care about serious, open and positive ecumenism. But there are others who only try to proselytize and use a theological vision of prosperity ….
Two important articles in Civiltà Cattolica have been published in this regard. I recommend them to you. They were written by Father Spadaro and the Argentinean Presbyterian pastor, Marcelo Figueroa. The first article spoke of the “ecumenism of hatred.”
"Appealing to the values of fundamentalism, a strange form of surprising ecumenism is developing between Evangelical fundamentalists and Catholic Integralists brought together by the same desire for religious influence in the political sphere.
Some who profess themselves to be Catholic express themselves in ways that until recently were unknown in their tradition and using tones much closer to Evangelicals. Both Evangelical and Catholic Integralists condemn traditional ecumenism and yet promote an ecumenism of conflict that unites them in the nostalgic dream of a theocratic type of state.
However, the most dangerous prospect for this strange ecumenism is attributable to its xenophobic and Islamophobic vision that wants walls and purifying deportations. The word “ecumenism” transforms into a paradox, into an “ecumenism of hate.” Intolerance is a celestial mark of purism. Reductionism is the exegetical methodology. Ultra-literalism is its hermeneutical key."
There are more strictly theological reasons too, particularly a 'dimunition' - or in some cases total denial - of the
social dimensions of the New Testament message. I have come across what seems to be a rather prevalent interpretation in contemporary North American Evangelical theology, which seeks to understand "
sin" as an exclusively 'personal' issue between an individual believer and God, with no corresponding implications for structures, institutions and the social order. The theology in question thus discounts, entirely, the possibility of there being '
social sin' or that personal sin has inherently social consequences, as the unfortunate corollary of this privatised conception of 'sin'.
Were that an accurate reading of the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, then it would surely render the entire social doctrine of my church 'superfluous' at best and utterly void at worst:
along with the roughly 3,600 biblical verses concerned solely with poverty and social injustice, as highlighted in bright orange in the Bible Society's "
Poverty and Justice Bible":
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Poverty-Ju...BHADB1XJBMT&psc=1&refRID=M67TF9JGJBHADB1XJBMT
To this equation, you could then add in the last ingredient of this theology (so far as I understand it): a Calvinist interpretation (in my opinion
misinterpretation) of 'original sin' to mean what John Calvin rather indecorously termed "
the total depravity of man" - the notion that human nature is so enslaved to sin by the fall that we are "
utterly unable to choose to do good" apart from divine grace; in other words that we are an incurably wicked
massa damnata (a corrupt mass subject to condemnation) —both by the constitution of our nature and by eternal divine decree—and doomed to perish in any good which we attempt in the world (indeed we are totally incapable of doing any good at all -
of any kind!), unless exempted by special grace (
the 'elect', the predestined) which we cannot merit, or by any effort of our own obtain while we remain on earth.
The implication of this concept would seem - if brought to its logical conclusion - to lead to extreme pessimism about humanity's capability for social improvement and development (especially in the reform of human institutions), paired with a fundamental inertia and resignation to the injustices of society, as being just the inevitable consequence of original sin (so why bother trying to changing it? We'll just fail anyway! Its divinely ordained!).
It has occurred to me that certain applications of this "theology" (although possibly not all, I don't know) must be an eminently useful ideological tool in the armoury of those most chiefly responsible for many of the grave injustices we find in 21st century 'free-market' capitalism. Let's call it the "
theology of social indifference" for that reason.
Evangelicalism in America wasn't always this way - which is to say, regressive and revaunchist. Far from it:
Social Gospel - Wikipedia
The Social Gospel was a movement in Protestantism that applied Christian ethics to social problems, especially issues of social justice such as economic inequality, poverty, alcoholism, crime, racial tensions, slums, unclean environment, child labor, lack of unionization, poor schools, and the dangers of war. It was most prominent in the early-20th-century United States and Canada.
Another of the defining theologians for the Social Gospel movement was Walter Rauschenbusch, a Baptist pastor of the Second German Baptist Church in “Hell's Kitchen”, New York.[11]
In 1907, he published the book Christianity and the Social Crisis which would influence the actions of several actors of the social gospel. [14] His work may be "the finest distillation of social gospel thought."[15] Rauschenbusch railed against what he regarded as the selfishness of capitalism and promoted instead a form of Christian socialism that supported the creation of labor unions and cooperative economics.[16]
Social Gospel | The Canadian Encyclopedia
The Social Gospel is an attempt to apply Christianity to the collective ills of an industrializing society, and was a major force in Canadian religious, social and political life from the 1890s through the 1930s. It drew its unusual strength from the remarkable expansion of Protestant, especially EVANGELICAL, churches in the latter part of the 19th century. For several decades the prevalent expression of evangelical nationalism, the Social Gospel was equally a secularizing force in its readiness to adopt such contemporary ideas as liberal progressivism, reform Darwinism, biblical criticism and philosophical idealism as vehicles for its message of social salvation.
It developed, however, a distinctive spirituality elevating social involvement to a religious significance expressed in prayers, hymns, poems and novels of "social awakening." Its central belief was that God was at work in social change, creating moral order and social justice. It held an optimistic view of human nature and entertained high prospects for social reform. Leaders reworked such traditional Christian doctrines as sin, atonement, salvation and the Kingdom of God to emphasize a social content relevant to an increasingly collective society. The Social Gospel at large gave birth to the new academic discipline of social ethics and in Canada contributed most of the impetus to the first sociology programs.
For whatever reason, this 'social conscience Christian' ethos was, at somepoint in the mid-20th century, overtaken by a radical religious 'right' ideology focused around fractious culture wars. Social Gospel theology was replaced by a perverse '
Prosperity Gospel'.
See:
The Social Gospel
The emergence of the Religious Right in the 1970s reframed Protestant involvement in social issues from a traditionalist perspective. Most mainline Protestant denominations, however, as well as many lay Catholics, remained committed to social justice
In my judgement, this was likely one of the worst 'paradigm shifts' in American and Christian history. In our time, now, by aligning themselves so closely to Trump - I would say quite plainly thay they have lost their 'soul' as a movement:
"
What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world, yet loses or forfeits his very self?" (
Luke 9:25)
