The movement spent 40 years at war with secular America. Now it’s at war with itself.
I’ve spent my life watching evangelicalism morph from a spiritual disposition into a political identity. It’s heartbreaking.
Evangelicals — including my own father — became compulsively political, allowing specific ethical arguments to snowball into full-blown partisan advocacy, often in ways that distracted from their mission of evangelizing for Christ.
To many evangelicals today, the enemy is no longer secular America, but their fellow Christians, people who hold the same faith but different beliefs.
How did this happen? For generations, white evangelicals have cultivated a narrative pitting courageous, God-fearing Christians against a wicked society that wants to expunge the Almighty from public life.
I’ve heard casual talk of civil war inside places that purport to worship the Prince of Peace.
And, far from feeling misplaced, these conversations draw legitimacy from a sense of divine justice. The Church is not a victim of America’s civic strife. Instead, it is one of the principal catalysts.
Having convinced so many evangelicals that the next election could trigger the nation’s demise, Christian leaders effectively turned thousands of churches into unwitting cells in a loosely organized, hazily defined, existentially urgent movement — the types of places where paranoia and falsehoods flourish and people turn on one another. ...continue here.
-- Tim Alberta
