Basic Information:
Author: John Fea
Edition: epub on Libby from the Sacramento Public Library
Publisher: Eerdmans
ISBN: 9780802876416 (ISBN10: 0802876412)
Start Date: August 10, 2024
Read Date: August 27, 2024
208 pages
Genre: History, Christianity
Language Warning: None
Rated Overall: 3 out of 5
History: 4 out of 5
Religion: Christianity
Synopsis :
The author is interested in why Donald Trump has so much influence on Evangelicals, particularly since Trump does not exhibit any of the marks of a Christian. He examines this issue in five parts: the Evangelical natural environment is fear-fear of change, fear of losing moral ground and fear of being dominated. Second, since the Moral Majority started in the 1970’s, the idea was to gain power to influence the United States culture. In addition, the objective was to get a majority of justices on the Supreme Court to decide cases their way.
Fea goes through how fear has played a big part of American Christianity from fearing that Catholics would take over and take direction from the Pope to the fear of what would the slaves do if they were not kept under control.
There is the seduction of power. Religion tends to be given lip service and is needed to retain power, but is not given power, only the illusion of access to power. But this seduction has caused Christian leaders to gravitate towards Trump. This is because of the last point, Trump has promised to make America great again. The Christian leaders have their thoughts on what that is, but Trump has never indicated what this would look like.
In his final chapter, Fea spends time talking about how the Civil Rights leaders were not people of power, but of humility, hope and understanding of the promise of America.
Date Became Aware of Book: March 1, 2024
Why do I want to read this book: I heard Fea on Mars Hill Audio today. In looking around at the books he has written, I saw this title. Evangelical’s alignment in Trump has puzzled me.
What do I think I will get out of it? I hope to understand a bit more why Trump has an attraction for strongly religious people.
Thoughts:
Book
was published in 2018, before Trump’s loss in 2020 and his retry in
2024.
Introduction
The
book starts off with the 2016 Republican primary debate in August
2015 where a question was posed about what is God’s will to do
first when they first are elected.
James Davison Hunter
notes that in grabbing power, Evangelicals have lost the power to
change the world through the gospel. Now people see the gospel
through the light of politics, not through the transformation which
is possible. This is the basis for this book. How Evangelicals came
to lust after power and lost their soul-my words, not Fea.
Over
the course of the election cycle, Trump transformed himself from a
bumbling imitator of a Christian to something which looked
presentable. He convinced white Evangelicals that even if he was not
a Christian, he was one of them and would implement their goals.
Fea says that this book is an attempt to make sense of Trump’s draw to Evangelicals. He does this by looking at the 2016 election, understanding what he calls the Evangelical Playbook, then going through Evangelicalism’s history in America, how fear govern’s how Evangelicals get involved in politics, and finally how Christians believe the United States was founded as a Christian nation.
Christopher Lasch says: Nostalgia freezes the past in images of timeless, childlike innocence. Fea says that Evangelicals are backward looking, rather than understanding change and figuring out how to incorporate the Gospel in the changing times, they want to go back to a different time. Marilynne Robinson has said that “fear is not a Christian habit of mind.”. He talks about separation of church and state. Evangelicals want to combine the two, but do not recognize that this constitutional principle has always served as a safeguard to protect the church from the temptations that come with worldly power.
Fea notes that political power is not intrinsically evil, but because of human fallibility, it degrades into evil. Even if “good” people use it.
This book is the story of why so many American evangelicals believe in Donald Trump.
Chapter
1 - The Evangelical Politics of Fear
How did Trump win over the Evangelicals and thus win the nomination for the Republican Party and eventually the Presidency? Fea traces this to the politics of fear. This fear is the sense that the nation is releasing itself from its moral underpinnings, what Christians feel the nation was founded on. This is the exploration of this chapter.
Fea traces this back to the beginning of the nation, about 1800 during the campaign which elected John Adams. Political fear amplifies concerns and spreads them to the general population. It is dangerous for that reason. Joseph Bivins says that “moral panics” tend to “rely on presumptions more than facts they dramatize and sensationalize so as to keep audiences in a state of continual alertness.”
Fear of Mulims is current. There was a segment which thought that Obama was a Muslim. He represented an American future that most white evangelicals were not yet willing to accept. No matter how much Obama said words which sounded Christian, a large segment of America, mostly Evangelicals did not believe him. His programs and views did not match Evangelical values.
Trump mimicked his GOP rivals Evangelicals and learned how to communicate by their example. Fea talks about how the different candidates fared against Trump with Evangelical voters and how Trump distinguished himself from them or he questioned their integrity.
Many evangelicals love this blending of God and country, and Cruz knew it.
But with fear running high, none of the other candidates resembled a strong man. Trump did. Trump did not emphasize his past, his riches or power, rather he was an outsider, ready to stand up for those who were being steamrolled by the system.
Chapter 2 - The Playbook
Fea starts the chapter off by saying that Christians are only to fear God and nothing else. On the other hand, we are not promised security, safety or prosperity.
On the other hand, humans have a natural fear when we perceive we are threatened-in whatever way.
We are shifting away as a nation from the Judeo-Christian values we thought were the bedrock of American society. We are living in an age of fracture or as James Davison Hunter said, we are in culture wars. Evangelicals voted for Trump because they have been conditioned to a way of thinking about political engagement that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a direct response to these cultural changes.
After World War II, the church flourished in America. Both attendance and membership grew until the mid-1960’s. In the 1950’s the Supreme Court stated a demarcation line between church and state. This has upset the conservative Christians who used to benefit from the demarcation. Government could not get involved with religion and the government could not be used to advance religion. Out went prayer and Bible reading in schools.
To top that immigrants coming into this country were from places which practiced Islam and Buddisam and Hinduism. While the majority of Christians support the Civil Rights movement, that stopped when the government told schools and religious schools they could lose their tax exemption if they did not desegregate. Historian Mark Noll has argued that race and civil rights served as an entry point for the white conservative evangelical critique of active government. …
When President Jimmy Carter, a self-proclaimed “born-again Christian,” supported the Green v. Connally decision, he alienated many conservative evangelicals who ran these academies.
Many of these culture warriors found intellectual support for their agenda from Francis Schaeffer, an evangelical guru who attracted hundreds of bright young Christian minds to L’Abri, his chalet and study center in the Swiss Alps. This was particularly Roe vs Wade which Schaeffer thought dehumanized the unborn. This influenced Jerry Falwell who connected Schaeffer’s ideas with everything moral which the Evangelical movement had.
More because I met his brother: Christian Reconstructionist Rousas John Rushdoony
Fea notes that control of the Supreme Court is essential for the Christian Agenda. Legislature and Executive are nice additions. Once all of this has been accomplished, then Christian laws can be written and passed.
In 2010, James Davison Hunter said that since the early 1980’s the Christian witness has been political.
It is not only important that the right kind of justices and lawmakers be put into office. But they needed to have high moral values. James Dobson said about Clinton: character DOES matter. You can’t run a family, let alone a country, without it. How foolish to believe that a person who lacks honesty and moral integrity is qualified to lead a nation and the world.
Until 2016, the Playbook was not very successful. But Christians had been indoctrinated into the rightness of the plan. Despite its failure to deliver on its promises to reclaim the nation for Christ, the Christian Right has shaped the political sensibilities of millions and millions of conservative evangelicals.
Trump worked hard to marshall the Evangelicals. But what to do with his morality? Some preachers said that they had led him to Christ. Others said to treat him like a baby-Christian, learning his way.
What were Christians to do? The alternative was Hillary Clinton. The problem was that they used the same defenses Hillary did of Bill when they defended Trump. They just hated Clinton. Clinton also was a flawed candidate, which made it easier to vote for the lesser of two evils in the Evangelical’s eyes. She just did not seem to make room for those who had religious reasons for opposition to her positions.
Fea says that Evangelicals cherry-pick the Founding Fathers words, selecting words that support them, but ignoring statements when they do not.
Chapter 3 - A Short History of Evangelical Fear
Despite the biblical passages exhorting followers of Christ to “fear not,” it is possible to write an entire history of American evangelicalism as the story of Christians who have failed to overcome fear. Fea says that Christians have not always managed their fears in a healthy way.
Reagan used the phrase shining city on a hill. This is taken from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Also John Winthrop’s 1630 talk A Model of Christian Charity. Winthrop used a carrot and a stick-the carrot to be like the city shining; the stick, fear of failing God. In Massachusetts, there was the fear of other groups and dissent.
In the colonies, it was thought that Catholics were the great menace to Christianity, being the same as the great beast. English relations with the French did not help.
There was the pitch by Lyman Beecher about American exceptionalism. This led to America being a favored nation by God. Beecher too was concerned about Catholic ties to the Pope and what it meant for American independence. Right before the Civil War, this push against Catholics became fevered. Talked about the Know-Nothings party.
He goes into several other concerns. What Fea is showing is that Christian fear politics is nothing new and is embedded in any politics which Christians participate in.
In some ways, the Civil War was about differences in culture. The North-individualistic, industrial, humanist; the South-communal, agricultural, and Evangelical. The South had more to fear because their labor was powered by slavery. They had had a series of rebellions which fueled this fear: 1800 (Gabriel Prosser), 1822 (Denmark Vesey), 1831 (Nat Turner), and 1859 (John Brown. The ideas out of the North fueled this unrest.
The South defended slavery as sanctioned by the Bible. But they did not follow the Biblical injunctions on slavery and how to treat slaves. The South took the story of Cannaan’s curse by Noah as the reason that Blacks were inferior. the people of the South—and eventually the Confederate States of America—believed that they were living in a Christian society precisely because they upheld the institution of slavery. Black’s rights were thought to be a modern concept, not rooted in fact or tradition or Scripture. Historian Charles Dew has made a compelling case that it was white supremacy and the fear of racial mixing that caused the South to secede from the Union.
Success did not breed content. Instead it leads to change, which leads to more fear. By about 1915, the modernists had control of the various denominations, leaving the fundamentalists out of the mainstream. Both the modernists and fundamentalists both thought of the United States as a Christian nation. The difference was the fundamentalists tied the nation’s Christianity to the Bible. Since the Bible was the source of all morality, attacks on its authenticity would inevitably lead to social chaos and the eventual collapse of the republic. This led the fundamentalists in the South to tie their Christianity to a racist version. Also universities were leaving their orthodox roots and embracing new thoughts.
Chapter 4 - The Court Evangelicals
Fea starts this chapter out with a quote from CS Lewis’ Screwtape Letters about making politics your religion. He then tells the story of Petrus Damiani who meets the apparition of Saint Severin. Severin wanders the earth because he paid more attention to the matters of State than the matters of the soul. The story illustrates that being involved with the inner workings of power is dangerous to a person’s spiritual life. If it is not obvious by this point, the skills needed to thrive in the court were different from the virtues needed to lead a healthy Christian life or exercise spiritual leadership in the church.
Power tends to corrupt, and maybe not in the way which we think, but in ways that we either lust for more or we want to please those who do. So we do not stand up when we need to morally. Maybe this is why when Christians have power, we tend to want to keep it and lose sight of why we wanted power in the first place?
Talks about how Christians defend Trump. Trump has his own circle of powerful Christians which he keeps on a leash. In exchange, the Christians feel like they have power to influence. So they want to defend Trump to utilize that power. According to Fea, their role is to sanitize Trump’s behavior in front of their fellow believers.
Fea names three sources for Trump’s courtiers: Christian Right, prosperity gospel leaders, and the Independent Network Charismatics. The latter has its roots in Calvary Chapel and Vineyard. Lots of names in this chapter, most I do not recognize. The support is not based upon Trump’s morality, rather that he is a fighter and will bring about the changes these people want. But will he really or is he using them as a puppet? Think about Hitler and how he used the German church-not calling Trump a Hitler, rather the use of the church by political power to the person’s own end.
It seems to be that going through Trump, Christians are trying to change the heart of the nation, the easy way-through power. This has not really worked and as I have seen history, it corrupts the church, making it ineffective for the gospel. Just ask the Catholics and what happened to the church after Constaintine and all of the European with shell State churches. The harder way is through changing the hearts of the people to Christ.
Talks about how Lance Wallnau said that Trump would be America’s Cyrus-the one who liberated the Jews and let them return back to Israel after the captivity. Cyrus was not a saint and neither is Trump.
He then goes into the agenda of the court evangelicals. Three things are their focus: abortion, religious liberty and Israel. This was written before the Dobbs case was decided. Fea’s analysis about what will happen if Roe v Wade is overturned is: It will just make it more difficult for poor women in red states because they will have to travel to a blue state to get an abortion. It may curtail the number of abortions, but it will bring our culture no closer to welcoming the children who are born and supporting their mothers. Fea thinks that the money spent getting favorable politicians into office would have been better spent assisting single mothers and those who are trying to have abortions live with their babies.
Because Protestantism and its values are no longer the majority basis for consensus in the United States, Christians are now taking up that religious liberty is a concern. This goes to the ability to adhere to religious practices in places which have more gray areas than churches. Such as Christian schools banning the hiring of gays. Also for churches to openly endorse candidates-the Johnson Amendment to the IRS code. the attempts to repeal the Johnson Amendment exposed something deeper: a serious flaw in the way that many conservative evangelicals think about the relationship between church and state. All would agree that the government should not be telling the church what to preach. But in many ways the separation between the two protects the church from being politicalized.
Billy Graham learned the hard way how fallible political leaders are and how it is easy to get into bed with the wrong one. He had a good relationship with Nixon and endorsed him. It was only after the inner workings of Nixon’s White House became known did Graham realize how badly duped he was in supporting Nixon. Cal Thomas wrote: Christian faith is about truth … whenever you try to mix power and truth, power usually wins. Also Henri Nouwen: The temptation to consider power an apt instrument for the proclamation of the gospel is the greatest temptation of all.”
Chapter 5 - Make America Great Again
Fea starts off by asking, was America ever a Christian nation? And if so, what did it look like? The answer to that may be different to a variety of people. Such as if you are a Black, would you say that the discrimination they faced as part of a Christian nation?
The assumption was that before the 1970’s, or maybe before, the assumption was that America was a Christian nation. The thoughts of the Founding Fathers varied from complete separation of church and state to that religion was an integral part of the American experience. Yet anyone who wants to use these documents [US Constitution, 1st Amendment] to argue against the importance of religion—in the America of the time of the founding—must reckon with early state constitutions, such as those in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and South Carolina, that required officeholders to affirm the inspiration of the Old and New Testaments, to obey the Christian Sabbath, or to contribute tax money to support a state church.
This leads us to a second question: Is America a Christian nation today? There definitely is the separation of church and state. But it is predominantly filled with Christian people. We have both fulfilled and failed at our ideas. When we have failed to live up to our ideas we have made efforts to correct our moral indiscretions. But we are still a nation with faults, such as racism, violence, inequality and materialism, practices that do not conform very well to the ethical demands that Christianity places upon our lives. It is important not to look at our yesterday through the eyes of nostalgia. In the end, the practice of nostalgia is inherently selfish because it focuses entirely on our own experience of the past and not on the experience of others. Nostalgia is a form of tunnel vision which gives us eyes to only see one thing and not others.
He notes that Robert Jefferies makes several assumptions and false references to the past, such as 52 out of 55 signers were evangelical Christians. See his sermon called America is a Christian Nation.
The belief that the United States is a Christian nation is a form of idolatry. He notes that God saves people not nations. I think Fea must have read CS Lewis’ Weight of Glory essay.
Fea then gets into preachy mode. He points out that in our system of government, the government is of the people, not of the church. While as a Christian, we believe other religions are in error, it is not for the State to enforce correctness. Also, society and the state are run by humans and humans have sin lurking, even the best of them. We are not to place our trust for salvation in politics, but in God.
Trump’s Make America Great Again is not necessarily to make America a Christian nation. Also If we can nail down the era or eras when America was “great,” perhaps we can begin to make progress on the question of whether Trump’s campaign slogan has any merit. Trump has not said when it was great, so we do not know what he is aiming for.
He talks a bit about the America First Committee of 1940/41 and how it attracted anti-Semitic people such as Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh. Fea says that commentators could not miss the connection between these people and Hitler’s concentration camps. But I did not think the concentration camps were known by very many people until after the war.
Trump had perfected the politics of fear by the time of his nomination in 2016.
Trump is about departing migrants. Is he trying to imitate the Operation Wetback program of the 1950’s?
Law and Order was Nixon’s slogan in 1968 in the wake of the race riots after RFK and MLK were assassinated. Trump used it as well to raise the level of fear.
Fea says that Trump does not care how things were used in the past, he is only caring about himself and the present. Other presidents have seen their term in office as continuity with the past. Not Trump. Alexis de Tocquevile says that only does democracy make men forget their ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries.
Conclusion
Fea admits he is not an expert, nor trained in making political decisions. He is a historian. History is a limited discipline. Historians are good at giving context to what happened, not in providing direction. Christians have a diverse set of priorities, not just the three listed previously. He gave a lecture on this and the result: The diversity of opinion among politically savvy Christians was evident in the personal notes and emails I received after that lecture.
He notes that the average age of the conservative Christian Evangelical is 57. The Evangelicals he teaches have a different set of priorities than these older ones.
Within a year of Trump’s election in 2016, Fea and several professors from his college did a tour of the South with an emphasis on the Civil Rights movement. He noted that the movement had a different emphasis than what he is seeing today. It had Hope, humility, and a responsible use of American history defined the political engagement and social activism of the civil rights movement. Which raises the questions he had at the start of the book: How might evangelical politics change if we replaced fear with hope? How might evangelical politics change if we replaced the pursuit of power with the cultivation of humility? How might evangelical politics change if we replaced nostalgia with history?
Can evangelicals recover this [the Civil Rights movement] confidence in God’s power—not just in his wrath against their enemies but in his ability to work out his purposes for good. Can they recover this hope?
The historian Christopher Lasch once wrote this: “Hope does not demand a belief in progress. It demands a belief in justice: a conviction that the wicked will suffer, that wrongs will be made right, that the underlying order of things is not flouted with impunity. Hope implies a deep-seated trust in life that appears absurd to most who lack it.” It is not the optimism that things will get right if we elect the right people, but that God is working out his purpose in this world. It is not the avoidance of pain and suffering, but knowing that it has a purpose.
But too often fear leads to hopelessness, a state of mind that Glenn Tinder has described as a “kind of death
Fea notes that the Civil Rights movement did not have political power. (My thinking is they had moral power). They did have access, but used that access to speak truth, such as the state of the Vietnam War. Most of all, though, the civil rights movement was shaped by people of humble means who lived ordinary lives in ordinary neighborhoods. David Davison Hunter talks about a Faithful Presence: [A] theology of faithful presence first calls Christians to attend to the people and places that they experience directly. That would be first and foremost, those people who are closest to us. Faithful presence . . . would encourage ambition, but the instrumentalities of ambition are always subservient to the requirement of humility and charity.
The humility on display during the civil rights movement was just as countercultural then as it is now. He says that non-violence is always counter-cultural. Many in the movement practiced what theologian Reinhold Niebuhr described as “the spiritual discipline against resentment.” How do you practice this? Are there resources on this?
To African-Americans, going back to “better” times is to go back to Jim Crow and slavery. The leaders of the civil rights movement could not make appeals to a golden age. They could only look forward with hope. Their appeal to the past was for liberty, freedom, or justice. The appeal of MLK to a Christian nation was not an appeal to a state run church, rather an appeal to Christian values. Civil Rights leaders used the past as a means of moving forward in hope and calling the church and the nation to live up to the principles they were built on. While many white Americans today succumb to the narcissism that tells them that their place in the story of the nation is not worth serious reflection, King and his followers had a clear-eyed understanding of the past
Fea ends the book with How might hope, humility, and history inform the way we white American evangelicals think about politics and other forms of public engagement?
Evaluation:
How did somebody like Donald Trump with all the moral baggage he possessed win over the Evangelical Christian vote? That is the subject of this book. This book is a bit dated, reading it during the 2024 election campaign, since it was written in 2018. Still, it is good background.
The main reason which Fea explores is the politics of fear. He traces this back to the American colonial days when those who came to this new land to escape religious persecution, set up their own standards. Then as the United States expanded and those who were not of English descent, feared the Catholics, particularly since the French were on their northern border. Then slavery-both the slave revolts and the northern abolitionists. Then as we went into the 20th Century, the changing ethnic makeup and ethics of the country brought this fear of change.
But there were other reasons which Fea talks about: the mid-20th Century brought power to white Protestants. But the Supreme Court limited the integration of Church and State in the 50’s and 60’s. Evangelicals felt the State was intruding when the Supreme Court decided that Christian colleges would lose their tax-exempt status if they were segregated. This propelled Reagan into the presidency over Carter. The Playbook Fea talks about was to infiltrate the court system with favorable judges. Eventually, Evangelicals felt a need for the Strongman to fight through for power. Trump fit this, despite his morals. There was some justification that Trump was now a Christian, even though he seems to deny that.
Finally, has the push for power been effective, not so much in terms of gaining power, but in terms of spreading the Good News-note literally the term evangelical means gospel or good news. Fea answer is no, because now the message of the gospel has been hidden by the quest for power.
Fea finishes the book by comparing the Civil Rights movement of the 50’s and 60’s. There emphasis on Hope, humility, and a responsible use of American history is the path Fea thinks is the way out of the quagmire the Evangelicals are in now. Believe Me is a good book to read for understanding and enlightenment on a bit of our political situation. It covers the infatuation the Evangelicals have with Trump, but not the bigger picture of the rest of his popularity.
Notes from my book group:
Fea says he is writing this book as a means to figure out why Donald Trump is persuasive with Evangelical Christians. What reasons does Fea give? Are they convincing? If you consider yourself an Evangelical Christian, do you look favorably on Trump? If so, do your reasons correspond with Fea’s? If not, why do you favor him?
How much interest do you think God has in our elections? If you think He is interested, does he intervene? If so, how so?
Do you think God wants Christians to intervene in elections? If so, in what ways? With what kinds of issues? If not, what leads you to that conclusion?
Fea says that James Davison Hunter thinks that by looking for political power, Christians have lost the ability to change the world through presenting transformative good news. Why does he think this? How does he say this loss of ability happens? Do you agree?
Fea notes that political power is not intrinsically evil, but because of human fallibility, it degrades into evil. Do you agree with his statement? How does power corrupt even “good” people? Can a Christian wield power without being corrupted?
What is the politics of fear as Fea describes it? How have you heard fear used in the most recent political campaign? Is it effective? What effect did it have on you? As a Christian, how do you respond to fear?
Joseph Bivins says that “moral panics” tend to “rely on presumptions more than facts they dramatize and sensationalize so as to keep audiences in a state of continual alertness.” Is this true? What effect does it have?
The term “strongman” is used. How is it defined? Why is a strongman desirable? How do the Evangelicals reconcile the need for a strongman to represent their values in politics today?
Fea says that Christians are only to fear God and nothing else. On the other hand, we are not promised security, safety or prosperity. Do you think he is right in his synthesis of the Christian response to fear and what it means to live in a society?
James Davison Hunter says that Evangelicals voted for Trump because they have been conditioned to a way of thinking about political engagement that emerged in the 1970s and 1980s as a direct response to these cultural changes. True? If so, how have you seen this? Where do you think this conditioning will end up?
In the 1950’s, the Supreme Court created a demarcation line between Church and State. Describe what the Court said this separation should be. Do you agree? What do you think the proper boundary line should be, if any? Why? If another religion became predominant in the United States, do you think they should follow the same rules you laid out?
Fea notes that Christians supported the Civil Rights movement until during the Carter years, the Supreme Court said that private Christian colleges needed to desegregate. If there is separation between Church and State, why did the Court decided that segregation in private, religious colleges needed to take place? How would this affect other areas where a church could teach something, but the court would rule otherwise in its institutions of learning?
Christian leaders' stance on the morality of a politician should matter. What did they say about President Clinton? Did they apply the same standards to President Trump? If not, what was the difference? Did they change?
When you think of the term city on a hill, what do you imagine? What attributes? How do politicians use it?
What is American exceptionalism? What does it look like? Can this be achieved?
Describe the concept of Cannaan’s curse. Do you think this is what Noah intended? Do you think God honored that curse?
Does success lead to less or more fear?
Many Christians of all stripes considered America to be a Christian nation. Describe the varieties of ideas which this invoked? What does the term mean to Christian Nationalists? What did Martin Luther King, Jr mean? What do you think when you hear that term?
What do you think the Christian leaders who are associating with Trump are trying to accomplish?
How does Fea describe that power corrupts?
How does fear play into this corruption?
Are there parallels between how Hitler used the German church and how today’s politics is working through the American church?
Do you think the type of Cyrus is correctly being applied to Trump?
What does political power do to how the gospel is presented? Are the two inherently in conflict?
What period of time would you consider America as a great nation? What were the strengths which America portrayed during that time? What weaknesses? How would different groups, such as African-Americans, Asains, women, …? Consider those times?
How do the strengths and weaknesses stack up against America today?
Fea says that The belief that the United States is a Christian nation is a form of idolatry. Discuss this statement. What is idolatry? How does Fea think it is idolatry?
What would America as a Christian nation look like? How does it differ from today?
Fea notes that he is a historian and that historians are good at giving context to situations, but are not trained to provide direction. During a discussion on current events, what types of information do you seek? From whom? How do you know if the information you are being given is trustworthy?
Fea asks at the start of the book, How might evangelical politics change if we replaced fear with hope? How might evangelical politics change if we replaced the pursuit of power with the cultivation of humility? How might evangelical politics change if we replaced nostalgia with history? What are your answers to these questions?
He also asks, Can evangelicals recover this [the Civil Rights movement] confidence in God’s power—not just in his wrath against their enemies but in his ability to work out his purposes for good. Can they recover this hope? How can this be achieved?
“the spiritual discipline against resentment” is a phrase that Reinhold Niebuhr used. Why does Fea say we need this today? How do you practice this?
Fea wants to move forward from today’s situation. What does Fea consider moving forward? What would you consider moving forward? How does this get accomplished?
Fea says he is writing this book as a means to figure out why Donald Trump is persuasive with Evangelical Christians. Did he accomplish this? How? What understandings do you take away from this book which you did not have before?
How do you want your life to change because you read this book?
Many of these questions are either from or adapted from LitLovers.
Why the title of Be Me?
Does this book work as a review of modern involvement of Christians in politics?
Did the ending seem fitting? Satisfying? Predictable?
Every book has a world view. Were you able to identify this story’s world view? What was it? How did it affect the story?
In what context was religion talked about in this book?
Why do you think the author wrote this book?
What would you ask the author if you had a chance?
What “takeaways” did you have from this book?
Are there solutions which the author presents?
Do they seem workable? Practicable?
How would you implement them?
Describe the culture talked about in the book.
How is the culture described in this book different than where we live?
What economic or political situations are described?
Does the author examine economics and politics, family traditions, the arts, religious beliefs, language or food?
How did this book affect your view of the world?
Of how God is viewed?
What questions did you ask yourself after reading this book?
Talk about specific passages that struck you as significant—or interesting, profound, amusing, illuminating, disturbing, sad...?
What was memorable?
- To Change the World: The Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in America by James Davison Hunter
- Common Sense by Thomas Paine
- The Duty of Americans, at the Present Crisis
- Age of Reason
- The Age of Revelation, or the Age of Reason Shewn to Be an Age of Infidelity.
- The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis
- Origins of Courtliness by Steve Jaeger
- Twilight’s Last Gleaming: How America’s Last Days
- God and Donald Trump by Strang
- Blinded by Might: Can the Religious Right Save America
- Tempted by Faith, Kuo
- Was America Founded as a Christian Nation
- Letter from a Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King
Good Quotes:
- First Line: On August 6, 2015, the night of the first Republican presidential primary debate, what would become one of the most extraordinary presidential campaigns in American history faced an unsurprising moment--that is, highly unusual in most of the industrial world, but unsurprising in Republican politics.
- Last Line: Believe Me
- Nostalgia freezes the past in images of timeless, childlike innocence. Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, pg 118
- Hope does not demand a belief in progress. It demands a belief in justice: a conviction that the wicked will suffer, that wrongs will be made right, that the underlying order of things is not flouted with impunity. Hope implies a deep-seated trust in life that appears absurd to most who lack it. Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, pg 80-81
- Christian faith is about truth … whenever you try to mix power and truth, power usually wins. Cal Thomas
- The temptation to consider power an apt instrument for the proclamation of the gospel is the greatest temptation of all. Henri Nouwen, In the Name of Jesus, 57-60
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 - The Evangelical Politics of Fear
- Chapter 2 - The Playbook
- Chapter 3 - A Short History of Evangelical Fear
- Chapter 4 - The Court Evangelicals
- Chapter 5 - Make America Great Again
- Conclusion
References:
- Publisher's Web Site for Book
- Amazon-Book
- Amazon-Author
- Barnes and Noble
- GoodReads-Book
- GoodReads-Author
- David S. Gutterman review (pdf) in the eJournal of Public Affairs,
- Reading Religion review
- Christianity Today’s review
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