Losing control

I first became aware of the “religious right” in 1980 while attending a megachurch in suburban Atlanta, and from the start it seemed to be focusing on defeating enemies rather than acting positively to promote religious values in public life. If you subscribe to its media, and I did for a while, you would have heard the latest outrage against “Christians,” specifically why we needed to stand up for our rights by electing folks to office so that they could send friendly judges to the various benches, the bottom line marginalizing perceived enemies. That’s probably the primary reason many evangelical Christians supported Donald Trump for president four years ago.

The religious right hasn’t been very successful on stemming what it might consider moral decay despite all the money its groups have raised over the past four decades as it is. But several things that have taken place just this year have caused me to suspect that they’ve lost control completely and thus run the risk of being marginalized in their own right.

We witnessed the worldwide spread of COVID-19 — the “coronavirus” — coupled with denial that Trump’s mismanagement of the crisis caused many more deaths in the United States than it should have; right now, a number of Trump-supporting state governors are trying to lift quarantines in their respective states to get the economy going again — and seeing a spike in positive cases as a result. That was followed with the exploding “Black Lives Matter” protests that some are even now convinced represent a media/left-wing conspiracy to divide the country (as if such division didn’t already exist). Then you had Trump’s stunt of clearing peaceful protesters in order to hold a Bible in front of a church, likely cheered by some but condemned, rightfully, by most.

But perhaps even most devastating was yesterday’s Supreme Court decision, authored by Trump appointee Neil Gorsuch, that Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act did indeed protect LGBTQ individuals from employment discrimination. After all, one reason religious right groups supported Trump in the first place was in the hope that such folks would be driven into the closet to stay. (To that, evangelist Franklin Graham made an angry remark about “religious freedom.” It was more likely that he was thinking, We didn’t get what we thought we had paid for.)

The first mistake, of course, was in believing that secular conservatives were friends of the Gospel in the first place — they do what they do because they want votes, not because they share those values. But ultimately and more importantly, disappointment will be your reward when you seek power at the expense of your soul, not least because you end up losing both.