American Evangelicals Are The Bad Guys In The Bible

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The disciples were idiots.

As a young evangelical listening to my Sunday school teacher read the Bible it was clear to me the disciples were idiots who just didn’t get it.

They could never see the obvious even when it was literally standing right in front of them like Jesus was on the Sea of Galilee when they thought he was a ghost. Or when he stood right in front of Thomas after the resurrection and Thomas somehow couldn’t believe Jesus was standing right in front of him. Or when two other disciples somehow didn’t recognize Jesus even though they were walking right next to him, talking together on the road to Emmaus.

Then there were all their inexplicable doubts and missteps.

They were always getting afraid even though Jesus told them not to be afraid. They often doubted Jesus’ ability to do miracles even when they saw the results with their own two eyes. They argued amongst themselves about who was the greatest and constantly struggled to understand what Jesus meant. They were baffled when he so obviously predicted his own death and resurrection during their last supper together. Nearly all of them abandoned Jesus when he was arrested. And they all went into hiding after the crucifixion when they so obviously should have been waiting by his tomb with coffee and donuts until he came out.

They were terrible disciples.

But I was a good disciple.

If I had been walking around with Jesus back then, I never would have doubted, never would have been afraid. I would have understood all his teachings immediately and never would have abandoned him when times got tough. I was the silent, unnamed hero in the Bible standing beside Jesus shaking my head at those faithless and foolish disciples.

I certainly wasn’t one of the religious leaders Jesus was always criticizing and condemning for their false piety, self-righteousness, and neglect of those in need. They were clearly the bad guys. I was on team good guys because I was a Christian and Christians are always the good guys.

Which is why 81% of white evangelicals can support someone like Donald Trump without batting an eye.

The justifications are many, but a fundamental reason evangelical supporters don’t see a problem with their support of Trump and all things MAGA is because they can only see themselves as the good guys. They’ve been forgiven. They’ve asked Jesus into their hearts. They’ve been filled with the Holy Spirit and inoculated from sin and self-reflection. The idea that they could ever be the bad guy isn’t just ridiculous, it’s impossible.

This is particularly true for folks in so-called holiness traditions like the one I grew up in. We weren’t just saved, we were entirely sanctified. Jesus had driven all the sin from our lives and made it such that we would never sin again. Maybe regular evangelicals could fall back into sin, but not holiness folks like us. Yet much of the holiness denomination I grew up in is now firmly on Team MAGA. That may seem inexplicable to those on the outside, but if you’re saved and sanctified from sin it only stands to reason that being on Team MAGA can’t possibly be wrong because people who are saved and sanctified don’t sin, therefore nothing Trump and MAGA do is wrong otherwise holy people wouldn’t be support it.

It’s an incredibly toxic circular logic that isn’t articulated as much as it is practiced, but it’s why as obvious as it is to outsiders that evangelicals supporting Trump is objectively hypocritical, they don’t see it that way because they can’t see it that way. Much like Nixon once said if the President does it that means it’s not illegal, American evangelicals have convinced themselves that if they do something, it can’t be sinful.

After all, they’re the good guys.

Faithful biblical heroes in an age of sin and faithlessness.

But American evangelicals aren’t the good guys in the Bible.

They’re the bad guys.

They’re the ones abandoning their covenant with God to worship a golden calf at the foot of Mount Sinai. They’re the ones demanding Samuel give them a king because trusting in God has become too hard. They’re the people singing worship songs, holding worship services, and throwing feasts as if all is well, shocked to hear the prophet Isaiah condemning their well orchestrated piety.

Hear the word of the Lord,
you rulers of Sodom;
listen to the instruction of our God,
you people of Gomorrah!

”The multitude of your sacrifices—
what are they to me?” says the Lord.
“I have more than enough of burnt offerings,
of rams and the fat of fattened animals;
I have no pleasure
in the blood of bulls and lambs and goats.
When you come to appear before me,
who has asked this of you,
this trampling of my courts?

Stop bringing meaningless offerings!
Your incense is detestable to me.
New Moons, Sabbaths and convocations—
I cannot bear your worthless assemblies.
Your New Moon feasts and your appointed festivals
I hate with all my being.
They have become a burden to me;
I am weary of bearing them.

When you spread out your hands in prayer,
I hide my eyes from you;
even when you offer many prayers,
I am not listening.

Your hands are full of blood!”

Don’t miss that bit at the beginning about Sodom and Gomorrah.

Conservative evangelicals love calling LGBT people “sodomites” almost as much as the enjoy accusing liberals of turning the country into a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah. But the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah wasn’t homosexuality. It was pride, self-centeredness, and a complete disregard for the poor and the needy.

“‘Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy.” - Ezekiel 16:49

To whatever extent America is a modern day Sodom and Gomorrah, it’s not because of the LGBT community. It’s because of the Republican Party and their devotion to the rich at the expense of the poor and needy, a platform American evangelicals have attached themselves to zealously.

When we turn to the New Testament, and the Gospels in particular, American evangelicals role as the bad guys in the Bible becomes even clearer.

They’re not Joseph trusting his wife that she knows what to do with her own body. They’re trying to control women’s bodies.

They’re not Jesus in the desert resisting Satan’s to control the world. They’re chasing after earthly power with enthusiasm and sanctifying it as the will of God.

They’re not the disciples dropping their nets to follow Jesus. They’re dropping their principles to follow Trump.

They’re not the Good Samaritan helping someone despised by their community. They’re the priest going out of his away to avoid helping strangers in need.

They’re not the father welcoming back his prodigal son. They’re clutching their pearls because a father forgave his wayward son.

They’re not feeding 5,000 hungry people. They’re trying to cut their aid, demanding those in need be screened so they can be the ones to determine if they really need help.

They’re not the women silently following Jesus to the cross. They’re the crowd chanting for Barrabbas because they’re had enough of the woke revolutionary.

They’re not heroes of the faith.

They’re blind guides who preach, but do not practice. They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay them on people's shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to move them with their finger. They do all their deeds to be seen by others and travel across sea and land to make a single convert, and when he becomes a convert, they make him twice as much a child of hell as themselves. They tithe their income but neglect justice and mercy and faithfulness. They clean the outside of the cup and the plate, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. They’re whitewashed tombs, who put on a show of righteous to others, but within are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness.

They just can’t see it.

Because when you’re always the hero of your own story, it’s impossible to ever see yourself guilty of villainy.

When villainy is impossible, repentance is never needed and when repentance is no longer needed, it becomes easy to call evil good as you surround yourself with teachers and preachers, politicians and pundits who suit your own desires, telling your itching ears what you want to hear.

It’s this inability not just to repent, but to even listen to criticism, let alone calls to repent that, in turn, fuels American evangelicals’ never-ending persecution complex. If they’re being criticized, they tell themselves, it’s actually an attack against their faith, which means they’re being persecuted, which means they’re doing the right thing, which means they’re the real heroes no matter what anybody else says.

It’s more toxic circular reasoning, but the heart of the matter is still deeper than that.

There’s a myopathy of the self that sits at the very center of evangelicalism. They may invoke the book of Revelation ad nauseam, but a new heaven and new earth isn’t the primary goal. Personal salvation is the goal. As an evangelical teenager on fire for God I talked a good game about “walking the walk,” but in the end all that really mattered was whether or not I was going to heaven and all I needed to get there was faith alone. Loving my neighbor was reserved for summer mission trips, not everyday life.

It’s a sort of perverse inversion of the Greatest Commandment and why evangelical support for Trump is really just the symptom of a much deeper, intractable problem.

Love for neighbor has been replaced with love of self.

Not love for self.

Love of self, the kind of all consuming self-centeredness in which the universe revolves around “me.” The kind of love of self that makes you the hero of every story and allows you to convince yourself you’re incapable of doing wrong, that you are the hands and feet of God ordained with the power to decide between right and wrong, need and want, who is welcome and who should be rejected.

Most of us see ourselves as heroes in our own stories, especially when we are children. But part of growing up means learning to see and admit when we’re at fault, when we are the bad guys. In the same way, part of learning to read the Bible as an adult means learning to resist the temptation to always make ourselves the heroes of the story and instead consider the possibility that the bad guy in the story might actually be us.

The problem with American evangelicalism isn’t simply that they’re the bad guys in so many biblical stories.

The problem is they've become so focused on themselves and so convinced of their own self-righteousness that they’ve become the villain and don’t even know it.