For Christians, Political Power is the Golden Calf of Trumpism
Jonathan Skrmetti, Ryan Walters and the weapons of this world
Right-wing Christian politics is a central feature of American democracy today. Moreover, leading commentators and extremism experts are concerned by the rising number of illiberal and authoritarian threats emanating from the Christian right. These come in a number of theological and denominational configurations—from the Catholic integralism of Adrian Vermeule to the decentralized and charismatic New Apostolic Reformation of televangelist Lance Wallnau—but other danger comes from less high profile corners of Christianity.
Two hardliners in state government have made national headlines this year, and they are affiliated with a corner of Protestantism not well known outside the American South and Midwest. Oklahoma State Superintendent of Public Instruction Ryan Walters and Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti both attend congregations of the churches of Christ, the same denomination in which I grew up. Walters and I attended the same churches of Christ-affiliated college in Arkansas, and Skrmetti attends a congregation in a Nashville suburb just a few miles from the church of Christ college where my parents met.
This matters to me because, unlike some Christian traditions, the Restoration Movement that birthed the churches of Christ was once dominated by men who viewed political power and its application through government as something to be shunned, not sought.
James A. Harding, the namesake of Harding University, the alma mater I share with Ryan Walters, once wrote this on Christian involvement in government:
“Yes, we are to pay taxes. Any foreigner can do that. We are to submit to the civil authorities in as far as a foreigner, as subject of another power, can do it. We are to overcome by gentleness, by meekness, by teaching the doctrine of Christ and by living according to it. But let us have no part nor lot in Satan's governments, the governments of this world.”
More generally, the movement and its founders were mindful of the diversity of opinion among believers. For Barton Stone, differing opinions was an unavoidable consequence of human freedom and the most dangerous error was insisting on a need for division between religious practice and political rights where there was none. As Stone put it, “All Christians believe that the Bible is God's revelation to the world,” but living according to this belief “is a liberty, which could never be denied to any man, without denying the liberty of thinking at all.”
Everyone has to make their own choices about what they believe about God and the universe, and about how these beliefs ought to guide their ethics and actions. But Walters and Skrmetti are wielding public power in a way that starkly contrasts with the original disposition of their faith tradition.
Golden Calves and Gender Fights
Tennessee AG Jonathan Skemetti has led the fight over the state’s ban on gender affirming care for minors, which recently reached oral arguments before the Supreme Court. The state’s position is that it has the right to protect children, but opponents have argued the law is not protecting kids but rather enforcing a circumscribed set of ideas about biology, gender, and medical science for the whole public.
Skrmetti has insisted the law and its application come down to “regulation not discrimination.” But this is hard to square with state lawmakers’ past descriptions of gender dysphoria as “mental illness.”
In his book Civil Government: Its Origin, Mission, and Destiny, and the Christian’s Relation To It, David Lipscomb, the namesake of the Nashville college both my parents attended, argues, “God has never authorized any being or power beneath his own throne to make laws to govern his own people…God is the only law-maker of his people, the only rightful law-maker of the universe.”
But today’s right-wing Christians have become awfully comfortable wielding the law to achieve narrow ends. It’s hard to separate Tennessee’s insistence that it is allowed to regulate these choices for minors from the obviously religious dimension to the question of gender identity, especially considering the scripture-referencing brief filed by GOP lawmakers in support of Tennessee’s law.
In Oklahoma, State Superintendent Ryan Walters made waves this November when his office distributed a video of him leading a prayer to public schools, asking it be shown to students and sent to parents. In the video, Walters prays:
“Dear God, thank you for all the blessings you've given our country. I pray for our leaders to make the right decisions, I pray in particular for President Donald Trump and his team as they continue to bring about change to the country. I pray for our parents, teachers and kids that they get the best education possible and live high quality lives. I also pray that we continue to teach love of country to our young people, and that our students understand what makes America great and that they continue to love this country. Amen.”
As to how early Restoration leaders might have responded to Walters’s prayer, here again I will quote Harding: “Yes, we should pray for rulers, of course; we should pray for all men, good and bad; but I think it is a mistake to say that we should endeavor to answer our own prayers.”
Walters telling students and parents to pray for a politician he likes and equating that to loving the country is an affront to liberal democratic principles, but also to any reasonably Christian sense of what constitutes idolatry. It is perverse, if not now uncommon, to conflate spiritual rectitude with adoration for the United States or support for particular politicians. Certainly many devout and admirable Christians are also patriots of upstanding character. But to suggest these things must be coterminous is false worship.
Restoration Lost
The churches of Christ could not, today, be mistaken for anything other than a conservative branch of Protestantism. But there are liberal ideas to be found in the common sense theology and political abstentionism of early Restoration Movement thinkers. There was once a genuine belief the Bible and a person’s conviction were the two most important elements of faith. And there was a wariness of power and its application, a sense that no Christian could come into power as it’s designed here on Earth and walk away without having been corrupted. It’s a liberalism that I think anyone familiar with the churches of Christ should be sorry to have seen disappear.
What I reveled in when I was younger was the sense that figures like Harding and Lipscomb understood the church not as a means of securing dominance over anyone but as a conduit for discipleship. Hierarchy was to be distrusted. And the weapons of this world—literal and figurative—demeaned the work of discipleship.
The churches of Christ abandoned this posture long before the rise of Trump. But Walters and Skrmetti are figures of such arch political zeal that they would be almost unrecognizable to Harding and Lipscomb.
My own humanism would be unrecognizable too. But I remain grateful for what I consider a rigorous instruction in intellectual humility and liberal antipathy for concentrations of power that courses through so much of the tradition that raised me. I mourn its loss.
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