Bulwark Takes - CHRISTIANITY IN CRISIS: Trump, Politics, and the Future of Faith

Episode Date: March 1, 2025

Has Christianity been co-opted by politics? Mona Charen sits down with David French of The New York Times and Russell Moore of The After Party for a compelling conversation on the rise of Christian Nationalism and its impact on faith and American politics. Join them for an eye-opening discussion on the evolving relationship between religion and power—you won’t want to miss it!

Good afternoon. My name is Boyd Rogers and I am from the state of South Carolina. This is my fourth principal's first conference. I'm very pleased to introduce you today to our next moderator. Mona Charon has had a storied and fascinating career as a journalist, a speechwriter for First Lady Nancy Reagan, a columnist, a political analyst, and a podcast host. She presently is the policy editor for The Bulwark and host of the Mona Charon Show podcast. Please join me in giving a warm Principal's First welcome to Mona Charon. Thank you all so much. I'm delighted to be here.

Thank you to the Principals First team for handling everything so well, particularly the little excitement that we had earlier today. I have the easiest job here at the Principals First conference because I get to chat with two of the most insightful, interesting, and downright decent people in America. One is David French, New York Times columnist, podcaster, and of course, legal expert. I mean, he has, David was on my podcast, The Mona Charon Show, which will drop tomorrow, by the way. If you don't subscribe, please do that, and you can hear more from David and me. But as I said to him in an email exchange,

you're a utility infielder. You do it all. And I'm also delighted to welcome Russell Moore, who is the editor-in-chief of Christianity Today and the author of Losing Our Religion, an Alter Call for Evangelical America. And Russell has been involved in the culture wars up to his elbows and has taken a lot of flack. And he's always been very courageous but also very gracious about how he's handled these things. Well, we're going to talk today about religion and about Christian nationalism. but I thought it would be good to begin with something about Donald Trump because he, tell me if you agree, I want to spin out something for you, it's a theory of mine, that he is different in Trump 2.0 in the following way. There may be other ways but this one I'm going to test you on.

If you watched that inaugural ceremony, it was drenched in religious imagery. And you had Franklin Graham getting up there and instead of invoking one of the prophets or asking God's blessing on this great nation, which is all very traditional at inaugurations. He looked around and sort of gestured broadly, meaning this inauguration, this guy, and said, look what the Lord has done. Okay. So it's like,

and Trump has been listening to these people who have been telling him that he was spared by the Almighty to do great things, that that near assassination in Pennsylvania was God moving his head a fraction of an inch. Doesn't say why God didn't turn Corey Campatori's head, but, you know, I think that this is my theory, that Trump didn't have much use for God in the past because, you know, all that love thy neighbor stuff would have gotten in his way, but now he thinks God himself is MAGA. So, David, I'll start with you.

What do you think of this theory? You know, I think it's a very interesting theory because you also have to understand who really has his ear in the Christian movement right now. And who really has his ear is not actually the Franklin Graham types as much, although Franklin Graham obviously does to some extent. It's not the classic old school Southern Baptists, for example, or Presbyterians. It's part

of this movement called the New Apostolic Reformation. It's a Pentecostal movement that is drenched in prophecy about Donald Trump, just drenched in it. And so, whereas you might have, say, at a Baptist or Presbyterian convention, this sort of idea that, well, God is in control and God is sovereign, and it's sort of a general, taken as a general truism, with the Pentecostal prophecies around it, it's not a general God is in control. It is God has picked this person for this time. And by the way, because God has picked this person for this time, that means if you are opposing Trump, you are opposing God. You are on the side of Satan. So if you have Trump, who's already steeped in this friend to enemy dynamic anyway, I mean, right now the reality of American public policy, both at home and abroad, is if you're friends

with Donald Trump, you're friends with the American government. If you're not friends with Donald Trump, you are not friends with the American government. And this is something that's deeply inculcated in him. And what message would be more inclined to sort of prick his ear in the spiritual sense than one that says, you are God's man. Everyone who's opposing you is opposing God's plan for America. And I'm glad you began with that because it really introduces a point I wanted to make. The level of fanaticism that we are now seeing in the American, like, broader, it's disproportionately in Pentecostalism, but not exclusively in Pentecostalism. The level of fanaticism we are now seeing around Donald Trump is unlike anything that I have seen, including anything I've seen in the Trump era. It's just escalating, and it's escalating around

these supernatural prophecies and this sort of sense of divine mission, divine protection, divine sanction around the person of Donald Trump. So, Russell, is there no pushback or is there not significant pushback among Christians? Because this, I mean, I'm not a Christian, but it sure sounds like idolatry to me. Well, I think the division that we have right now in churches tends to be between people who want their church politicized and people who do not want their church politicized. And so you have two very different psychologies at work. So the people who aren't on board with this kind of thing are also the people who typically want to be unified. They don't want to argue about this stuff at Sunday school or in small groups as opposed to those who really do want it politicized.

And I think the interesting thing that we've seen is the shift from the appeal to evangelicals in, say, 2016 from now. I mean, Mike Pence was the vice president because the assumption was we have to appeal to evangelicals with somebody who supports traditional family values and is pro-life and so forth. I think Donald Trump tested that theory and found out that his constituency, they don't vote for him because he holds certain positions. They adapt to certain positions because he holds them.

And so I could have never imagined, say, in 2016, that a Republican president would appoint a pro-choice Secretary of Health and Human Services, would announce an IVF policy the way he did the other day, and there would be almost nothing in response. So I think he's tested that and found what it is. So I want to stick with you for a second, Russell, because you had this line that was quoted by our friend Jonathan Rauch in his book, and it really summed up something, and I'd like to hear you expound upon it. You said, the church is bleeding out the next generation, not because the culture is so opposed to the church's fidelity to the truth, but just the reverse. The culture often does not

reject us because they don't believe the church's doctrinal and moral teachings, but because of the evidence that the church doesn't believe its own doctrinal and moral teachings. Yeah, when I first started out in ministry, if someone, if a young Christian came to me and said I'm having a crisis of faith, it was typically over miracles or they thought the morality was too strict or something along those lines. I almost never encountered that now. Instead, it is, I don't believe the church believes all of the things that I have been taught. I had one woman who came up to me one time and said, my daughter went to college and is having a spiritual crisis because she said the atheists she knows demonstrate peace, hope, love, gentleness, self-control more than the people in her church.

That's a crisis in my view. So David, there's a lot of evidence that churches are losing members. There are now, as I understand it, more people in America who the Pew research, and it said that people were more likely to vote for Trump, and I should say, of course, voting for Trump doesn't make you a bad person necessarily, but people were more, this is murmuring in the crowd. Mona, the crowd is turning against you. Yeah. I hear you, believe me. But what the Pew data showed is that among frequent, so in 2016 we heard that there were a lot of people who called themselves evangelical, but they weren't really churchgoers. They were just casually attached, and they were using that label, and they voted for Trump. But the really religious people, the ones who were in

the pews every Sunday, they weren't caught in and onto this at all. And now you see just the opposite. Now in the data, you see people who are weekly churchgoers are more likely to vote for Trump than those who are loosely attached. And the only group for whom this is not true, at least among white Protestants, is the mainline churches. So explain that, please. What's going on in those churches? Yeah. So essentially, and I remember all this data too. I remember late 2015, early 2016 as a lifelong evangelical. I'm like, those are the non-churchgoing evangelicals that are supporting Trump. And all that went away

so fast. And I'll tell you the point where I really noticed this shift is when he secured the nomination, when there was no doubt that he was the Republican nominee. And there's a statistician of religion named Ryan Burge. I would urge anyone to follow him if you are curious about just the raw facts of religion in the United States. And he says this very well. He says, white evangelicals are Republicans and Republicans are white evangelicals. There's just a total, total identity between the party and the church. And it's so total. So Mona, he also charted out where did every other major religious group in America fall regarding ideologically compared to the two parties. And they found that every other religious group in America, whether it's black Protestants were

slightly to the right of the Democratic Party, members of the LDS church were slightly to the left of the Republican Party, atheists were slightly to the left of the Republican Party. Atheists were slightly to the left of the Democratic Party. Every group had its own sort of individual distinct identity. Non-white evangelicals were to the left of the Republican Party, but white evangelicals were identically aligned with the Republican Party. And so when Trump secured that nomination, what he inherited was basically 40 years of acculturation that has taught white evangelicals, if I am an evangelical, I am a Republican. And so whoever is the Republican nominee is not evaluated on their own merits necessarily. It's

they're a Republican. I'm a Republican. This is part of my identity as a Christian. And so therefore I am voting. And so essentially what happened then is locked into that Republican nomination. He became the Republican standard bearer. He became the only option for tons of evangelicals because again, they had been taught for 40 years that support for a Democrat could be sinful, that support for a Democrat means that perhaps you're not even a Christian. And so this locked in and connected him to this church culture. And then, so that was stage one. And then stage two is this radicalization process that began to kick in. Because again, they are taught, again, for 40

years, if the media doesn't like somebody, I need to like somebody, right? If the Democrats really are motivated against somebody, then I need to have their back. And so he locks into all of this, and then on top of that come some of the things like I talked about just a moment ago, the prophecies, the declarations from major spiritual leaders that America's about to fall if he doesn't win. And so he just benefited, he kind of came in and benefited on 40 years of acculturation in the white evangelical church, and then it just got turned to 11. It just got turned to 11 because every time he got worse, the intensity of the religious support for him grew all the more. And that's what was so stunning to me. It was as if

every display of bad behavior, the religious leaders who had backed him to the hilt had to dig in more. They just kept digging in to the point where, and I knew, we were cooked, totally cooked as a conservative movement by January 7th, 2021. Because I could see what everyone else sort of in professional politics could see, which was on January 7th of the three big, most powerful Republicans in America at that point, between Mitch McConnell, Mike Pence, and Donald Trump. With Republicans, Mike Pence's approval plummeted, McConnell's approval plummeted, and Donald Trump stayed sky high with Republicans. And that taught me that the radicalization was essentially complete. It was complete by that time and then fulfilled now. So, Russell, it sounds like in this process of radicalization,

these particular kinds of evangelical Christians have kind of bleached Jesus out. You know? It's like Donald Trump Jr. says, well, turn the other cheek. What has that ever gotten us? Well, it's worse than that. As I've mentioned before, I started hearing from pastors who would say whenever they kind of parenthetically quoted from the Sermon on the Mount, if someone strikes you, turn the other cheek, that people would come up afterward and say, where did you get those liberal talking points from Jesus Christ? And what was most disturbing about a lot of these stories is that when the pastor said,

I'm quoting from Matthew, the response is not, oh, I'm sorry. It was, well, yeah, that was fine for then, but we're in a state of emergency right now. So we're in a hostile culture so those things don't apply. As though Jesus were delivering the Sermon on the Mount in Mayberry instead of in the Roman Empire. So this is kind of what you seem to be sketching out, both of you, is that this is a kind of form of idolatry. It is really post-Christian, right? Because if it doesn't really involve the Gospels, if it's not about traditional Christian virtues that have been successfully taught and transmitted for 2,000 years, it is about, you know, a party and there was a good line in a piece by Pete Wehner in The Atlantic where he quoted a pastor, I think, who said,

for a lot of these people, Christianity is more of a hood ornament than a true faith. So what do you make of that? Is that what we're dealing with? Are these people in a way post-Christian? I think that what is at the root of a genuine connection and genuine experience of transcendence in American life right now that people can get a kind of jolt, sort of an artificial simulation of life by hating people and lining up behind a political ideology. I mean, I think often about what Steve Bannon said to The Atlantic a while back when he said, you know, you've got the guy who's Dave from Accounts Payable, but online he can be Ajax the Warrior. And Dave from Accounts Payable, when he dies, some people

stand up and say some words and go home. Ajax the warrior has a funeral pyre. And what I want to do is to give Dave from Accounting the idea of being Ajax the warrior all the time. And so there is a sense in which there's a feeling of doing something by lining up behind an ideology and trying to find who the dissenters are and and exile them I think our danger those of us who aren't on board with that is we can do the same thing with anxiety we can feel as though we're doing something simply by giving up hope and worrying about it rather than marching forward. Okay, but you have not succumbed to that. You have formed an organization called the After Party. So if you could both just tell us a little bit about what you do and how that's going. Yeah, so basically with the after party, what we did is we created a new Christian political curriculum that focused much more on what we were calling the how of politics than

the what. So the what would be what tax rate is there? The what would be what level of aid to Ukraine? The what would be what kind of border security? And look, and if you're looking for the Bible to give you the answers for all of these policy questions, you're going to be looking for a long time. Because the Bible is like light on policy, right? It really is. But the Bible is very heavy on virtue. So it tells Christians, I was speaking at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary a couple of years ago, and somebody asked me, what book are you reading right now to get you through

this moment? And I gave like the most evangelical answer ever. I said, the Bible. And I said, but in a very specific way, I'm reading the New Testament knowing that every syllable of that book is written to a people infinitely more oppressed than American Christians are. Like infinitely. If you talk to, imagine you pull somebody from the Coliseum. They're about to be facing the lions and they're like, you know, you think you had it bad? You just had a beating, I know, but I just endured a tweeting. And so you're just in this world where there's this sort of sense that has developed that is this sense of emergency. And so in this sense of emergency, because as Russell was just

saying, that worked for then, not now. And so what we wanted to do with the after party is rebalance the instruction around the biblical waiting. And the biblical waiting really is on virtue. It is on ethics. It's on morality. And our theme verse was Micah 6.8, which says, what does the Lord require of you, O man, what is good? It is to act justly. So you don't forsake justice to be the nicest person in the room, right? But it says you act justly, you love kindness, and you walk humbly with the Lord your God. And our message to the church was very simple. If those three virtues, those three, justice, kindness, and humility are not present, we're not doing it right. And we're not doing it

right. And what I will tell you is it was amazing to me, even amongst pastors who would join on like Zoom calls and events who are kind of friendly to our perspective, still had the same question, which was, but what if that doesn't work? What do you mean? What do you mean, what if it doesn't work? These are not contingent commands, right? It's love, kindness, and walk humbly unless you lose the 2016 presidential election. No, it's not that at all. And so what we were really trying to say is here are the non-negotiable minimum standards of conduct through which Christians should, how we should present ourselves into the political arena. And oh, by the way, the political arena is not a special morality-free zone. It is not. And so by trying to do that, we tried to refocus the values where the Bible

actually emphasizes them. Yeah. I think you said, I'll be with you once, you said at one point that some Christians you have seen say, well, I'm an asshole on Twitter, but I go and volunteer at the soup kitchen once a week, right? And that doesn't obliterate the being an asshole on Twitter. They think that if you can compartmentalize it, like if I'm really a great coach in my son's little league team and I'm a fantastic Sunday school teacher, I can be Ajax online and be vicious and cruel to people, which again, there's no biblical sanction for that. And also, a lot of people in this country only encounter evangelicals through the political sphere first. That's right.

Are we putting our best foot forward there? No. No., as a collectively, now there are exceptions who are wonderful, but collectively the message that is being spit forward from the Christian community in this country, white evangelical community in this country is mainly, I am afraid of you and I don't like you. And I am preparing to go to battle against you. And that's the message that's being sent. And I, it's hard for me to conceive of a message And that's the message that's being sent. And it's hard for me to conceive of a message more opposite of the love of Christ. So yeah, Russell. It used to frustrate me in the pre-Trump era, whenever reporters would call and ask about evangelicals, it always had to do with political action. And so I said to

one of them, you all seem to think that evangelicals are cicadas who are in dormancy until the Iowa caucuses every four years and then come out. And there's more to it than that. But David's right. We have moved into a time that is, it's not just that religion has become politicized. It's that in many places, the boundary markers for whether you're in or out have to do with these political and partisan and ideological categories. And what we found is that there actually are a lot of Christians who want Christianity and who don't want to go to church in order to sign up for political arguments of any kind, right, left, or center, but who don't know really how to do that. And so I get the question constantly from, you know, when I first started in ministry,

I would have parents who would say, you know, I've got a wayward adult son or daughter. How do I deal with them? Now it's almost always the reverse, where I have young Christians who are saying, I really want a relationship with my mom and dad, but all they want to do is argue about Trump. What do I do? And there are a lot of people who are saying, that's not what I'm here for, wherever I am on the political spectrum. So what does it look like and what do we do? And so that's why we said this is for, as David said, not the list of principles. Because one of the things that was really alarming to me, I went through a kind of spiritual crisis as a teenager. And one of the reasons is because

there was a Christian coalition voting guide in my church. And I'm looking at the Christian position and thinking to myself, where is the Christian position on the line item veto, which was there. And it just seems like the Christian position happens to line up perfectly with all of the planks of this candidate's position. You just didn't read St. Mark. It's right in there. It's in there, yeah.

And so the question is, is this just a means to an end? I came to the conclusion it's not. It's deeper. It's more important means to an end. I came to the conclusion it's not. It's deeper. It's more important. It's true. But that's one of the reasons why it's so tragic to see it turned into just another arena for political argument. Just to put an exclamation point on what you were saying earlier

about how political litmus tests are becoming the religious litmus test, an actual person with some notoriety in the Christian nationalist world actually tweeted this out not long ago. The creeds and confessions are not enough. If you want to know if your church is sound, ask your pastor what he thinks of David French. And if he likes me, run away from that church. This actually happened in the world. It's utterly bizarre. That's it. That's in the New Testament. Who do you say that David French is?

Okay. I think we're running out of time. Just one last thing I'd ask you to think or talk about with us, and that is, is there a hunger out there for the real thing? I mean, do you get that feedback that, you know, there are people in these churches who maybe aren't the loudest, but who feel that they've been losing something because the church is getting so politicized and that there's an appetite for somebody to come along and say, you know what, we need to put that aside and focus back on God and one another and all of that. Absolutely. There are a lot of those people and there are a lot of those people who are very young who don't have the social pressure to have to belong to a church.

They're part of the church because they really do believe in Jesus. And one of the things we saw on the left is in a lot of the mainline churches that became very partisan and politicized in the 60s and 70s, where the Easter message is the resurrection teaches us how to recycle and that kind of thing, where you had every issue turning into a policy sort of argument. People could figure out if I want to do leftist politics, I can just do it. And now you have a lot of people who are figuring out if I want to do right-wing politics I can do that without giving up a Sunday morning and so there are a lot of people who are saying we don't want that we really do want to follow Christ but they're not sure how to do it and one of the things

that I get constantly is from Christians who are saying well give us a word of hope. And my response to that is to say, the Bible tells us that hope that is seen is not hope. Instead, suffering leads to endurance, endurance leads to character, and character leads to hope. And so genuine hope is not reassurance, well, this is all going to turn out okay. Instead, it is long-term, yes, things are going to turn out okay, but it may be that what God is doing right now in the church requires a time being baffled and bewildered rather than just coming up with another market-driven blueprint, which got us into this mess in the first place. David. You know, I teach at my alma mater, Lipscomb University, a Christian school in Nashville, and I can tell you that the kids I'm teaching make me

genuinely hopeful for the future of the church. Because the kids that I'm teaching are love your neighbor Christians. They are not fear the world Christians, right? And I think that a lot of us may be in this room, and this would be me and the churches that I grew up. I grew up in fear the world churches, where everything was about training you to go forth and do battle, right? Go forth and fight. And it created this weird sort of hair trigger mentality where you're just, where's the persecution? Right? And then like you're 17 in high school and someone offers you a beer and you say no, and they go, come on, man. And you go, there it is. There's the persecution.

And so it created this sort of fight or flight response that is creating the problem that we have. But what we really, what I am seeing is that young people, older folks, middle-aged people are hungry for kindness. They're hungry for it. They're desperate for it. And so I think that this is a moment for love your neighbor Christianity. This is a moment for love your neighbor Christianity. This is a moment for counter-cultural Christianity. One that circles around the fruit of the spirit, kindness, peace, patience, gentleness, self-control. We don't have too much of that out there, right? And so what I have found in this land of the disconnected, and there's just been some incredible work done. I don't know if you've read

some of what Derek Thompson has written in The Atlantic about how we just don't spend time with each other anymore. We're not around each other. There's a group called Over Zero that did out of belonging index that said that about two-thirds of Americans feel a sense of non-belonging in their homes and their communities and their workplaces. And from my standpoint, if you're a love your neighbor Christian, that's like your music, right? Any WWE fans in here, like other than me? Okay. So there's like, one of my greatest moments is I saw Jerry the King Lawler wrestle Tojo Yamamoto in a Texas cage match in Rupp Arena live and in person. So I'm- Oh, me too. Yeah. That was great. Incredible.

Incredible stuff. But in the wrestling world, you always know who's coming out the door because of the music. You're like, that's the Undertaker's music. He's coming. And so I feel like all of this loneliness and all of this lack of belonging, I don't know what our music would be,

like Strains of Amazing Grace or something. That's our music. That's when we come out to heal those hurts. That's when we come out to demonstrate love in the face of hatred. That's when we come out to demonstrate kindness in the face of cruelty. This is the moment for the church. This is the moment when hatred arises, love arises the greater. And so I think that we should not be discouraged by the hatred. We can lament it. We can grieve it. But don't be discouraged by it. Don't be discouraged by the bomb threats. Be motivated.

But motivated in a specific way. And motivated in a way to heal this country. And that's true when there's a hunger even beyond. I was teaching on a secular campus where my students, I don't think any of them had ever met an evangelical Christian until me. And one of them, I guess, assumed because I'm anti-Trump that I'm a liberal, and started asking me questions. And I was answering the questions. And he said, so wait a minute. You're kind of a Bible-thumping revival preacher.

And I said, yes. I feel so seen after four years of being called a cultural Marxist. That's exactly what I am. And then we talked about ultimate matters of life and death. There are a lot of people who are asking those questions and who want to belong to a genuinely counter-cultural community. It would be a shame if there weren't a church here to do that. Well, with that, I will say thank you both so much. This has been a great conversation. And thank you all.