‘Mainstream’ evangelicals are bankrupting the Christian message

I applaud Margery Eagan for highlighting the manifesto just issued at ReclaimingJesus.org regarding evangelicalism and the Trump administration (“Are Trump Christians really Christian?’’ Opinion, April 2). I have long been part of the informal coalition of evangelicals represented by the manifesto, but I am also well aware that people like me, and the authors of the manifesto, are a minority within evangelicalism, well left of the movement’s mainstream.

Unfortunately, the mainstream of evangelicalism, self-defined and so regarded by much of the media, is represented by those who are “Christians’’ because (a) it is culturally acceptable, (b) they have accepted Jesus as savior through an intensely private and individual experience, and/or (c) the gospel mandate has been narrowed down to issues such as abortion and homosexuality.

Whether these “mainstream’’ evangelicals are actually Christians is certainly not for me to say, but it is also clear that most in the media will portray them, and their unconscionable support for the Trump administration, with scorn and derision — yet another example of the bankruptcy of the Christian message.

Eagan reminds us that there is another, almost certainly more authentic evangelical voice seeking to be heard in the wilderness of American religion and politics.

Michael Knosp

Melrose

The right and left have brought us to where we are today

“Are Trump Christians really Christian?’’ That’s what prominent Christian leaders and others have been asking.

The answer is clearly that they are not. As Margery Eagan points out, their mix of tolerance and cheerleading for Trumpian upward redistribution of wealth, abuse of women, racism, immigrant bashing, and foreign aggression in the guise of “defense’’ is the opposite of the radical social message of historical Christianity.

Sadly, however, as Francois de La Rochefoucauld said, “Hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.’’ History is replete with wars fought for the basest of motives but cloaked in religiosity. American fundamentalism’s culture wars are no different. At their core, the hatreds and ambition of the so-called religious right align with those of their more secular comrades. Theirs is the anger of those who have thrown their lot in with the ideas and hegemony of the plutocracy. In so doing, they have turned their backs on the rest of their brothers and sisters, and indulged in an orgy of blaming and demonizing them. Their religious touchstone, however “sincere,’’ is self-delusionary fraud.

However, many of the religious and secular voices appropriately critical of what drives “Trump Christians’’ risk falling prey to a certain smugness themselves. The reliance of many such voices on the so-called resistance of the Democratic Party to Trump is badly misplaced. In a house falling down around us, the Democrats have nothing on offer but an empty politics of “diversity’’ and “identity politics’’ for the actual or wannabe upwardly mobile.

Forty years of joint Democratic and GOP moves, of neoliberal economics and imperial warfare, have brought about this depraved new age. Neither could have done it without the other. Trump is merely the charlatan who capitalized on these endless betrayals to get himself elected, then self-servingly accelerated the parties’ existing billionaire-centric policies.

James Taff

Roslindale

The soullessness of a new machine

It is no longer newsworthy to identify phony Christianity in the Trumposphere. The core teaching of every major religious tradition, including Christianity, as well as every respected secular system of ethics, is some form of the golden rule — that if you want to be worthy of being treated as a human being, you have a duty, as a matter of morality and decency, to care for the needs of those who have insufficient resources. To deny or ignore this duty renders one human in little other than a biological sense.

The only recognized exception to this duty is self-preservation. Donald Trump cynically appeals to a self-preservation instinct, and incites his base to believe that malevolent factions are trying to harm America. Muslims, the LGBQT community, immigrants, and athletes who kneel during the national anthem, not to mention members of his own administration, are just a few of Trump’s betes noir du jour. The belief that such people, by virtue of their identity, are intent on harming America is baseless paranoia, and it betokens willful ignorance or disordered thought processes, both by Trump and those who are taken in by him.

The intelligent and charitable person, Christian or otherwise, knows that social problems in America are such that they can only be meaningfully addressed by large institutions. Businesses have no inclination to solve social problems; indeed their self-interest is often a contributing factor to the underlying problems. Only government has the resources and power to enforce equal access to education, fair compensation for labor, equitable civil rights for all Americans, affordable health care, environmental cleanliness and safety, and other prosocial objectives.

When those who oppose government action in such areas are in control, we have nothing to fear from the rise of artificially intelligent machines, since soulless and inhuman automatons are already running things.

Keith Backman

Bedford