Arnon Grunberg

Outrage

Panic

On evangelicals and Trump - Isaac Chotiner interviewed Albert Mohler, 'the head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and one of the most prominent evangelical thinkers in the United States.'

'You said, in 2016, “Perhaps the best we can hope for in this sad election cycle with these two unsupportable candidates is that we do not allow a national disgrace to become the Great Evangelical Embarrassment.” Trump is now supported by a huge majority of American evangelicals. Has it been an embarrassment?

Yes. President Trump is a huge embarrassment. And it’s an embarrassment to evangelical Christianity that there appear to be so many who will celebrate precisely the aspects that I see Biblically as most lamentable and embarrassing. So I have to make a distinction between voting for a candidate and rationalizing for a candidate, much less being enthusiastic about what I would see as the character faults of a candidate. I intend to vote for Donald Trump in 2020, but my shift is from reluctantly not voting for him in 2016 to what you might call reluctantly voting for him in 2020, and hoping for his reëlection, because the alternative is increasingly unthinkable. But I will not become an apologist for the misbehavior of the President and for what I see as glaring deficiencies in his private and public character.

There will be a good many evangelicals angry with me for stating what I just said to you.

You are someone who does not like President Trump, but how do you understand his appeal? What did you misjudge, or what did we all misjudge?

Well, one of the difficulties for a classical conservative is whether or not conservatism and populism are implacable enemies. For most of the twentieth century, the assumption was that conservatism and populism, or popular support maybe defined as populism, are un-unitable, incommensurate. But the election of Ronald Reagan as President, in 1980, was a counter to that argument. Reagan became the refutation of a conservative assumption that to have that level of popular support meant that you could not truly be a conservative. Evangelicals really became politically activated in the Reagan campaign in 1980. That’s a crucial moment. So I think many observers, perhaps like at The New Yorker, fail to understand that a certain instinct became an intuition in American evangelicalism, which is that the candidate that would be most attractive would be one that would combine a conservative political philosophy and genuine populist support.

Now, Trump is very different than Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was elegant and genial, the total package. But there was enormous personal pride on the part of conservatives in Ronald Reagan’s statesmanship on the world scene. The period between Reagan and Trump was one of evangelical frustration, you could even say conservative frustration. That’s not to say that there was no appreciation for either George H. W. Bush or George W. Bush. There was. I was among those that had a great deal of admiration for both, but there was still frustration. I think we now know there was a lot more frustration at the grassroots level than any of the élites.

In a sense, given my leadership in the S.B.C., I did not sense some of that energy and unrest that exploded onto the scene, which was, frankly, far more populist than conservative. It clearly gained the support of millions and millions of those who had more conservative instincts but were driven by a real populist outrage at the political orders as they were. But I don’t see any evidence that would say evangelicals as a bloc produced Donald Trump as the nominee of the Republican Party in 2016. The evangelical vote was split all over the place. But, when it became a binary choice, and it became Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton, that entire equation changed.'

(...)

'But is electing people like Trump only going to further the trends that you are concerned about? Every day, people can correctly say, “The guy in the White House is making statements that are outrageous about women,” or he’s calling Obama’s birthplace into question, and so on. So it seems like it just keeps the cycle going to choose someone who is this inflammatory, when, if what conservative Christians really want is to slow down various trends, this is exactly the wrong idea.

I think I get what you mean. I think that, if Donald Trump is a permanent fact of American politics, it will become very difficult for American conservatism to survive. I don’t believe that Donald Trump is a permanent fact of American politics. It’s difficult to imagine someone of his temperament and background being elected President of the United States. But it happened in 2016, and there’s at least good evidence that he was among those most surprised. He certainly has a good chance of being reëlected President in 2020, but our constitutional order continues along with term limits for President. And the real test for the Republican Party, and by extension the real test for conservatives, including conservative Christians, is going to come with what follows Donald Trump, either after 2020 or 2024.

So you’re asking very live and relevant questions, but none of these questions can be answered in a vacuum. I don’t know anyone in the leadership of the Republican Party, or anyone in the leadership of American evangelicalism, who thought it plausible that Donald Trump would be the nominee in January or February of 2016. So the binary choice that American voters have faced in 2016 and in 2020 will be replaced by a very different choice in 2024, one way or the other.

On a podcast, you said that you were pessimistic about American conservatives ever having a true majority in the near future, which does make me wonder whether Trump-like options are going to become more popular in the future, rather than less.

I will simply say that I think most thoughtful conservatives recognize that the culture is moving away from us at the most fundamental level, and also by demographics. And that’s one of the reasons why I continually look at reality. We’ve got to face the fact that even just demography matters to the extent that the closer people live to coasts, the closer they live to cities, the closer they live to campuses, the more liberal they tend to become. And, by any estimation, those are demographic trends that show no sign of slowing.

And the intellectual class replicates itself as it can do, and in some ways only it can do, by means of the process of higher education. And you’ve got the other major centers of cultural production, whether it be Hollywood or the media, even major corporate leadership, in the very same situation. So the grounds for conservative hope are always local. The grounds for conservative hope are always families, communities, and the structures that Edmund Burke called the little platoons. The conservative hopes are always invested in a more Tocquevillian vision of America, and, as America becomes a more urbanized and progressive culture, the entire experiment is called into question.

Populism is driven, to at least some extent, by panic and outrage. And panic and outrage are understandable, but they are not the pillars of a stable, long-term cultural or political strategy. I hope that makes sense.'

Read the interview here.

Finally we have an intelligent, eloquent Trump-supporter, who dislikes Trump, but in order to advance the evangelical-conservative agenda he is willing to vote for him, even though he didn't vote for him in 2016.
This is astonishing.

But I remember what a pastor said to me in 2018 in Waco, TX. That Trump is just the coming of the antichrist and that all Christians should hasten the coming of the antichrist. (See also here.)

It very much looks like Trump is not going to get a second term, but if he is reelected it's also thanks to intelligent, rather nuanced people (the emphasis is on 'rather') like Mr. Mohler, who believe that secularization is a bigger threat than Trump.

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