Evangelicals face fallout after election
The editor-in-chief of Christianity Today did not have to wait for the votes to be counted to publish his essay Tuesday bemoaning what the Alabama Senate race had wrought.
Whoever wins, “there is already one loser: Christian faith,” wrote Mark Galli, whose publication, the flagship of American evangelicalism, was founded 61 years ago by the Rev. Billy Graham. “No one will believe a word we say, perhaps for a generation. Christianity’s integrity is severely tarnished.”
The sight of white evangelical voters in Alabama giving their overwhelming support to Roy Moore, the Republican candidate, despite accusations of racial and religious bigotry, misogyny and assaults on teenage girls, has deeply troubled many conservative Christians, who fear that association with the likes of Moore is giving their faith a bad name.
The angst has grown so deep, Galli said, that he knows of “many card-carrying evangelicals” who are ready to disavow the label.
He said that his readers seemed to agree with the thrust of his essay.
The main criticism he received, he said, was one he agreed with: that he should have made it clearer that he was referring not to all Christians, but to evangelicals in particular.
The bloc that has marched under the banner of the “Moral Majority” and “values voters” has now been tagged as the most reliable base of support for both Moore and President Donald Trump, two politicians who are known for fanning racial and religious prejudices and who stand accused of sexual harassment by numerous women — accusations that each man denies.
White evangelicals across the country delivered 81 percent of their votes to Trump last year, according to exit poll data, and backed Moore in Alabama by the same percentage Tuesday.
“It grieves me,” said Ed Stetzer, executive director of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College, a prominent evangelical school in Illinois. “I don’t want ‘evangelical’ to mean people who supported candidates with significant and credible accusations against them. If evangelical means that, it has serious ramifications for the work of Christians and churches.”
Evangelicals, often known as born-again Christians, belong to many denominations of churches, but they share some basic tenets: believers accept Jesus as a personal savior, spread the gospel, and regard the Bible as the ultimate authority and the sacrifice of Jesus as necessary for the salvation of humanity.
When it comes to politics, however, the evangelical bloc is not rock solid, and the last year and a half has brought the cracks to the surface. There are young evangelicals who are disavowing their elders.
There are Latino, Asian, black and Native American evangelicals who are outraged at white believers for allying with a president they regard as racist and hostile to immigrants.
“We’ve let evil overtake the entire reputation of Evangelicalism,” one prominent evangelical author, Beth Moore, wrote on Twitter the day before the election. “The lust for power is nauseating. Racism, appalling. The arrogance, terrifying. The misogyny so far from Christlikeness, it can’t be Christianity.”