Monday's postcard, and a postscript to Sunday's essay.

June 12, 2023

Yakima River Canyon a few miles south of Ellensburg

Please bear with me this week as I’m making a couple trips out of town in the service of selling photos and books. More on that tomorrow…

One of the reasons I subscribe to The Atlantic is to read Peter Wehner who writes, almost exclusively, about what’s happening in the world of Christian evangelicals. Since the rise of Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Franklin Graham a generation ago the hyper-politicization of evangelicals has been the hydrogen fuel in Republican political organizing. Yet as Wehner writes, and grieves, the politicization of the faith has come at tremendous cost to the Christian gospel. The anger and mean spirits of retribution it has introduced has not just departed from the Christian message of compassion and communion but, in Wehner’s research, seriously destabilized the foundation of modern evangelism. His latest reportorial essay is out today, entitled: The Evangelical Church is Breaking Apart.

In it he writes:

The root of the discord lies in the fact that many Christians have embraced the worst aspects of our culture and our politics. When the Christian faith is politicized, churches become repositories not of grace but of grievances, places where tribal identities are reinforced, where fears are nurtured, and where aggression and nastiness are sacralized. The result is not only wounding the nation; it’s having a devastating impact on the Christian faith.

When I read Wehner, it reminds me of the anguish with which former George W. Bush speechwriter and advisor Michael Gerson wrote in the months before he died at the age of 58 last fall. Gerson helped Bush promote the Iraq war, but he also was the pen behind Bush’s “compassionate conservatism.” To be sure, my politics and the politics that Gerson advocated on behalf of the Bush Administration were in most ways divergent. But I felt empathy for him as he watched, and wrote, about the dark turn the evangelical movement had taken with the rise of Donald Trump. He was heartbroken and clearly felt a sense of betrayal.

This is from Gerson’s obituary in the Washington Post, where he wrote regular column until his passing: “It has been said that when you choose your community, you choose your character,” Mr. Gerson wrote in an essay for The Post this past Sept. 1. “Strangely, evangelicals have broadly chosen the company of Trump supporters who deny any role for character in politics and define any useful villainy as virtue.”

That last sentence packs quite a punch and in the reporting for Wehner’s latest essay you can see how that punch lands, and knocks the breath out of American Christianity.

—tjc