There’s a story in the Christian Gospels about Jesus, fresh from an epiphany at the Jordan River. He goes into the wilderness to pray and fast for forty days, and, the text says, he was hungry, and the devil tempted him.
Whatever you think about Jesus or Christianity, the story makes good reading because it zeroes in on some universal human needs: bread, status, power, recognition… in short all the defenses against our insecurity as frail creatures trying to coexist and live meaningful lives on a big blue rock hurtling through space.
It’s a familiar conversation that Jesus has with the devil, who comes to him when he’s hungry and probably feeling somewhat sharply how contingent and uncertain life is: show me what you got, badass; you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours; give me your allegiance and I’ll give you the world. It’s language right off the street, right out of the boardroom and the bedroom, straight from the television, direct from your politics, and (the text implies), coincidentally, straight from Hell.
What’s interesting to me right now about American Evangelicalism is the strange lack of serious about Jesus, and this story slices right into the heart of that.
Malcolm Muggeridge wrote somewhere that when you talk to the devil, you’re talking to yourself. I doubt Muggeridge had much interest in publicly denying or affirming the existence of a devil (and nor do I); but he was certainly interested in temptation and evil, and he understood full well that if there were no devil, our conversations with ourselves would do just as well. The devil (if any) couldn’t do better than to ask us what it is we truly desire and what we truly fear.
After that, the devil can take a well-earned vacation in Cabo while we wreak a quiet and civilized bloody hell to get what we want and protect ourselves from injury. Show me chaos, and I’ll find you the motivating fear and desire behind it.
So what is it that the Christian Right really wants? What are they afraid of?
It’s perilous to generalize about American Christians: there are quite a few who opt out of the bloc-voting super-majority And that bloc-voting super-majority isn’t itself monolithic: most oppose abortion rights, but there are also claques of immigration die-hards, fuzzy-thinking economics wonks newly-awakened to the beauties of tariffs, and some anti-transgenderism fanatics. A good number resist “Woke,” whatever that means to them (I find it a particularly unhelpful term no matter who uses it).
Still, when I see the poll-percentages, when I read the rhetoric, when I listen to the interviews on Fox News, I’m disinclined to resist generalization.
There are many stripes, but the broad outlines seem clear enough.
Some of course want dominion, and are not shy about asking for it.
Some, such as the current Vice President Elect, flirt with post-liberalism, a philosophy that holds that too much freedom inevitably corrupts a society, and must be curbed.
A lot of them want a holy war on liberalism, and don’t care how much they have to distort the truth to get it.
At the base of all of this, as historian John Fea rightly says, lies fear and insecurity, the dragon at the root of the tree.
Conservative and pro-life evangelical David French concurs:
The American Protestant church—a church that often proved quite willing to suppress the religious freedom of rival factions (including Catholics)—lost power but gained liberty, and it’s not only deeply unhappy at the outcome but sometimes seems fundamentally unprepared to live in this more-perilous new world.
Unprepared to live in this more-perilous new world strikes me as an extremely apt phrasing for the condition in which Jesus finds himself in the wilderness, face to face with a devil who promises to stabilize the peril. Of course many Christians will say that Jesus was divine and so never unprepared for anything, to which my response is, Then his temptations were a sham. But I believe in the truth of the story, at least: that our temptations are conversations about our own insecurities.
I got a mailer from a Christian pastor in need of money a couple of days ago; he’s over the moon that Donald Trump’s election will set America on the right course again towards what God wants, but of course the fulfillment of this plan is in some doubt for unspecified reasons connected to Democrats.
What he was concerned about was the usual litany of things: prayer in schools, an end to homosexual marriage, ending transgender operations on school-kids, an end to the right to abortion, getting the Christian God back into the national conversation.
My trouble seems to be that, try as I might, I can’t read the Gospels and imagine that the Christian God wants to be part of our national conversation at this level.
But it seems to me extremely likely that the devil would want to be.
I’ve read the Beatitudes, and it’s difficult to imagine anything that resembles American Right politics less. That Evangelicals are pleased to make bedfellows with people who incarnate the opposite of the Beatitudes is a mystery to me, or would be if it weren’t so obvious why they’re doing it.
In the story from the Gospel of Luke, Jesus refuses all such offers.
The text’s preface says that he was “full of the Holy Spirit,” a strange phrase that needs thousands of years of theological lacquer stripped off of it to affect us the way it might have done Luke’s first readers. The Greek is πνεύματος ἁγίου, a spirit of holiness or a holy spirit; the Holy Spirit is grammatically permissible but not obvious or mandatory until maybe the second or third century. Without denying the Christian Trinity or the unique personhood of the Holy Spirit demanded by Christian orthodoxy, we can say that the sense of the text is, Jesus had a single-minded purpose that was not to be dissuaded. He was possessed of a holiness, which means set apart, unlike, not playing the expected game.
Whatever the πνεύματος ἁγίου was, it didn’t include dominion at any cost.
It seems to me that in American politics, the devil is making offers that Evangelicals are, for the most part, having a really hard time refusing.
