Those who seek to live obediently with humility-humility that, in discerning how to live as faithful Christians, we will inevitably get things wrong, but that we can nevertheless remain secure in the knowledge that God’s truth is not dependent on our perception of that truth. Those who remind fellow Christians that the Bible tells us not to fear. The greatest challenge to this system are those who threaten to expose it for what it is. In the absence of a real threat, a new threat must be manufactured. This is how we can make sense of not just the positions but also the posture and tactics of the Christian Right. This is how we can make sense of the combativeness of Mark Driscoll and Jerry Falwells (father and son). This is how we can make sense of the strange phenomenon of the fake “ex-Muslim terrorists” who were all the rage on the post-9/11 evangelical speaking circuit, long after they had been exposed as utter frauds. I saw how militancy required the continual stoking of fear: fear of outsiders, of secular humanists, feminists, Muslims, Democrats, immigrants, the list goes on and on. A key moment in my research came when it dawned on me that the militancy of conservative white evangelicalism wasn’t primarily a response to fear, but rather a precondition for fear.
them.Īs I chronicle in Jesus and John Wayne, this has been a throughline of conservative evangelicalism for more than half a century. And why I am routinely mocked for saying things like “it’s complicated.” Because their power depends on a stark binary, on a simplistic division of us vs. I think that is one of the reasons why I have become a target, not just for Dreher, but for others-particularly among the Christian nationalist wing of the evangelical world. We see this around the issue of LGBTQ rights and inclusion, and, especially this week, around the issue of abortion. It is in the interest of people like Dreher to erase the existence of any reasoned, nuanced, and principled middle ground.
I described the pro-LGBT Calvin professor as part of a group of “post-Christian Christians,” by which I mean Christians who are jettisoning bedrock Christian teachings to conform to the post-Christian order. Liberal Evangelical professor Kristin Kobes Du Mez ain’t never gonna call me darlin’.