Yes, Trump Is a Christian

A review of Obery M. Hendricks' "Christians Against Christianity"

How can Christians support the party of Donald Trump—a man who has boasted about assaulting women, who uses the Bible as a prop as he tear-gassed protestors, who lies almost as often as he breathes? For many progressive Christians, the answer is obvious: white evangelical conservatives in the Trump era are desecrating the true faith.

That’s the argument of Biblical scholar and Columbia University professor Obery M. Hendricks’ recent book Christians Against Christianity: How Right-Wing Evangelicals Are Destroying Our Nation. Hendricks provides careful textual and historical evidence to show that the Christian God is not on the side of Trump, the Republican party, or conservative evangelicals. His passion is powerful, and his scholarship is compelling. But for non-Christians, his repeated insistence that there is a true authentic Christianity which is blameless for these misinterpretations can feel at times like wishful thinking. Worse, the rhetorical evocation of a pure Christianity plays into white evangelical Christian nationalism in ways that Hendricks never quite manages to repudiate.

Jesus and Social Justice

Whatever caveats one may have, there’s no question that Hendricks’ version of Christianity, rooted in the Black church, is admirable and compelling. “[T]he core message of Jesus is love,” he writes. He argues that the central Biblical passages for all Christians should be “You shall love thy neighbor as yourself” and “just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”

 Jesus for Hendricks preaches an ethic of social justice and care for the marginalized and oppressed. White evangelical Christians, in contrast, have come to embrace an ethic of supremacy, dominion, nationalism and cruelty.

This was not always the case/ Hendricks points to white evangelicals’ participation in anti-slavery and feminist movements in the late 1800s. But there was, for Hendricks, a turn in the late 1970s driven by desegregation. Evangelicals were mobilized when Jimmy Carter moved to deny tax-exempt status to segregated religious schools. The merging of Christian institutional self-interest with a racist reactionary right agenda laid the groundwork for today’s Republican party powered by a rabid white evangelical Christian base.

Hendricks goes through the items on that agenda one by one to demonstrate that they are not in line with Christ’s general principles, nor with the specific word of doctrine. Some of these arguments are very convincing. As Hendricks says, “Showing hospitality to immigrants is…an iron-clad commandment” in both Old and New Testaments; he examines passage after passage in which Christians are enjoined to welcome strangers. There is virtually no way to reconcile white Christian evangelical loathing of immigrants with the Biblical text. Which is presumably why, as Hendricks points out, evangelicals in a 2015 poll said that scripture had no impact on their immigration views.

Similarly, Hendricks shows that evangelical Christian obsession with abortion has little or no anchor in scripture. In fact, he points to one much ignored passage in the Old Testament (Numbers 5:11-31) in which the Bible actually instructs a husband to make an unfaithful wife abort.  In the New Testament, abortion is barely mentioned, and Hendricks says, there is “certainly nothing like a consensus on the moment a zygote or fetus gains a soul.”

Can Christianity Fail?

On other issues, though, it’s not quite so clear that the Bible is on Hendricks’ side. On LGBT issues, for example,Hendricks argues that in Biblical times there was no real concept of sexual orientation. As a result, Biblical proscriptions are against certain acts rather than against certain identities. Hendricks is no doubt correct—but nonetheless, whether the focus is acts or identities, it’s difficult to get around the Leviticus proscription that “If a man lies with a male as with a woman…they shall be put to death.”

Hendricks goes on to say that it’s possible to interpret the Scriptures in various ways on homosexuality, but argues that in light of Jesus’ central focus on love, the ambiguity should be resolved in favor of tolerance and acceptance. As someone with LGBT loved ones, I agree with Hendricks—queer people are awesome and tolerance and acceptance are good. But I’d think that whether the Bible said so or not. Why does an argument about LGBT rights have to be routed through this old book which clearly is not that concerned with the issue in the first place?

Hendricks talks about the Bible in this context in part because he’s trying to speak to convince other Christians that bigotry and cruelty are the way of what he calls Antichrist, and that as believers, they need to choose another path. He’s speaking in the long tradition of Black Christians like Frederick Douglass or Martin Luther King, Jr. issuing prophetic reprimands to their racist white co-religionists in the name of a Christian God they supposedly share.  Some white evangelical Christians, Hendricks says, “are sincere about their faith but have been woefully misled in its application.” He hopes that his arguments could perhaps sway some souls.

Hendricks’ book also inevitably functions, though, as a kind of Christian apology. Conservative evangelical Christians are easily the loudest voice of Christianity in America right now. More, this version of Christianity, as Hendricks acknowledges, resonates with tradition. Christian nationalism shaped the United States from its inception, and even before that.  Christian supremacism justified native genocide in the name of faith. It justified slavery.

Hendricks doesn’t shy away from that past. “It is true that throughout history much suffering, oppression, exploitation, and unspeakable horrors have been committed in the name of Jesus Christ,” he acknowledges. But he insists that all those horrors were perpetrated despite, not because of Christ. “[N]o justification or sanction for such abominations can be found in the words or actions of Jesus in the four gospels.” Christians who do evil have turned against Christianity. Individuals go astray, but the word remains pure.  Christianity cannot fail; it can only be failed.

If you’re a Christian who believes Christianity is true, this almost goes without saying. For a Jewish atheist like me, though, it’s less persuasive. Not that I think the violent xenophobic Christianity of the Inquisition and the NRA is the one true Christianity. Rather, as a nonbeliever, I don’t think there is one true Christianity.

Christianity (like Judasim or atheism) is a centuries long tradition which includes millions of interpretations of its texts, and more millions of actions by Christian governments and individuals. As ex-evangelical writer Chrissy Stroop says, “From an empirical, outside perspective–one informed by such fields as history, anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, etc.–we must accept that there are a wide variety of Christian communities with competing theological claims.” There’s no absolute court to appeal to in order to decide which of these communities and claims are gospel, so, Stroop concludes, “we must accept these varied groups as Christian, as representing varieties of Christianity.”

I am absolutely convinced that Hendricks’ Christianity of love and justice is one legitimate variety of Christian witness. But I also am persuaded by Yale sociologist Philip Gorski when he reports that white evangelicals love Trump not despite his crudity, but precisely because his “racialized, apocalyptic, and blood-drenched rhetoric” spoke to their own understanding of their own faith. The Christian nationalists and supremacists who love Trump love him because they recognize his xenophobia, his hatred, and his bigotry, as true Christianity. Their faith is hate. Like Hendricks, I’d say that that faith is evil. But, unlike him,  I’m reluctant to say it’s not Christian.

Fighting Christian Supremacism

That reluctance is in part intellectual. But it’s also ethical and tactical. Christian supremacism is based on the bedrock idea that Christianity is true and good. Hendricks challenges most claims of Christian supremacists. But he doesn’t really challenge that one. For him, as for them, true Christianity is spotless.

But if Christianity is in fact perfect in love and wisdom, then where does that leave those of us who are Jews, or atheists, or followers of any other religious or nonreligious tradition? Hendricks argues that evangelical conservatives have embraced iniquity by turning their backs on true Christianity. My back is towards Christianity too, though—and Christians have in the past used that as an excuse to label people like me iniquitous, with extremely unpleasant results.

Hendricks steps around many of the worst implications here in his discussion of evangelical Islamophobia. He references John 10:16, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold.” Hendricks suggests that Jesus is saying here that some who serve him are nonbelievers.  The passage he says could refer to “anyone who would accept the ethical demands of his message and strive to live lovingly and justly, no matter their origin or religion.” True, ethical, unstained Christianity is available to anyone of any religion. Goodness and Christianity are so synonymous that wherever the first is—even in the hearts of Jewish atheists—the second is also.

I appreciate that Hendricks wants to include Muslims (and me) in the fold. And perhaps that’s as far as a Christian witness can go and still remain Christian. But people who have been persecuted by Christians aren’t necessarily going to want to see themselves as belonging to Jesus, even if some versions of him would have them. It seems condescending—and condescension is certainly a thing Christianity has been known for, from time to time.

If Christianity is ever going to rid itself of white evangelical conservative Christians, it may have to paradoxically admit that Donald Trump is, in fact, one ugly version of what Christianity is, or can be. Hendricks calls for Christianity to triumph over small-hearted Christians. But, at least from the perspective of a nonbeliever, the real battle is not between individuals and true religion, but between Christianities and Christianities. May Hendricks and his better faith win.

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This first ran in the LA Review of Books in 2022. It still is unfortunately relevant, so I thought I would reprint it for readers here.

Given current events, I think I should also reiterate that the analysis here applies to other belief systems, not just to Christianity. You will occasionally see Jewish people who oppose Zionism arguing that Zionism as it is currently practiced in Israel, with all the war crimes, is out of step with Jewish ethics, Jewish scriptual beliefs, or Jewish traditions.

There are some powerful arguments there, and certainly, as a Jewish atheist, I don’t see Israel’s current horrific actions as part of a tradition I want to claim.

Nonetheless, I think it’s important to acknowledge that on some basic level, Judaism is just what Jewish people do in the name of Judaism. And currently an awful lot of Jewish people, in Israel and outside it, believe that Jewishness justifies and requires a genocidal slaughter of tens of thousands of people and counting.

I don’t think that this orgy of war crimes is the sole meaning of Judaism. But unfortunately, at the moment, it does appear to be one thing that Judaism means, and I think it would be an insult to the people suffering in Gaza right now to insist that true Judaism can only be good.