I've read so many essays like this in recent years, well meant, making many excellent points but always out of focus, off, and ultimately as problematic as what as being critiqued.
The Trumpite sect is vile and anti-Christian but our critique must be based on Scripture - not in selective ethics-based readings at the expense of doctrine, but in a full-orbed understanding of the New Covenant and its calling for believers. McKibben raises many great points but ultimately fails this basic set of criteria.
It's easy to pick up the New Testament and find ways to tear into and tear apart the modern Christian Right. Why? Because it's not Christian in any meaningful sense.
But neither is an approach that ignores critical teachings and produces instead a kind of hybrid religion that combines Enlightenment values and liberalism with Christian ethics. The end result is just as much of a perversion. It may be less offensive in some respects but it's no less a problem. This is the story of Mainline Christianity throughout the 20th century.
I am equally disturbed when I listen to a lecture or podcast on a doctrinal subject and resonate with the speaker - even sensing a kind of spiritual kinship. But then a week later I'll hear them on a different topic and they start in on politics and ethics and I'm left wondering if we read the same Bible, trust in the same Christ, or worship the same God. I say this having experienced it on both ends of the spectrum. I've heard speakers excel on certain topics only later to find out that either theological modernists or Right-wing advocates - both of which are unfaithful to the New Testament.
From the standpoint of the Founder's Liberalism, Trump is a repudiation, someone they would take up arms against - at least on paper. American history is of course complicated and having read a great deal of it, I sometimes wonder what people think that was country was or is. There is much in terms of values that is taken for granted today that has only been the norm for about fifty years. The country previous to the 1960's and 70's was much different and often marked by extreme examples of corruption and hypocrisy.
I continue to argue that Trump is not as much of a departure as some think. A key difference is his unwillingness to play the game and go through the motions, to keep up the facade of moral leadership and the rule of law. With Trump the mask of the American Empire and all its ugliness and amorality is removed. Previous presidents have been corrupt murderers too and yet they hide their deeds behind layers of rhetoric and plausible deniability. Trump doesn't and so while some of his supporters may find this refreshing, we are rightly revolted. But we shouldn't be surprised.
A study of post-war American social, political, and economic history reveals why Trump emerged. It makes sense and if through Trump's efforts America self-destructs, then so be it. Empires fall. Life goes on. The powers that be or the powers that self-destruct are ordained by God. It's only if you have some false fairy tale notions of what America was and is, will these developments upset you.
What does upset me is the fact that American Christians have fallen for this charlatan on a massive scale and have embraced and baptised his evil. Some even think he's a Christian - this man who thinks it sent a Christian message to bomb Islamists in Nigeria on Christmas day. He wished to make a vengeful statement, the expression of a mafia don, not a Christian. But it's about what I expect and I'm sure his sycophantic followers will praise him for it - despite the fact that it's all based on misperceptions, lies, and false assumptions and (for that matter) utter distortions of New Testament ethics and teaching. It's layer upon layer of error and deception.
McKibben is appalled at Trump's style - cartoons showing him defecating on protesters and the like. What do you expect? He's a crude and vile reprobate. Again, the story to me is the fact that this figure has become a virtual messiah to the majority of Evangelicals. The apostasy that I long believed to be present is now on full and open display - but how few are able to see it! They think they're experiencing a revival, they're giddy with what they think are gains and growing success. Poor fools.
McKibben gets lost in the weeds of democracy and liberal values and his assumptions about what America is and supposedly has stood for. Wake up. His wide-eyed credulity and willingness to believe the official line is sometimes astonishing. It's an empire and has been since its inception. It's always been about theft and murder and as it has passed each historical milestone and epoch this tendency has been further amplified. The real turning point was the Civil War. When that was over a new country emerged that became very expansionist and fabulously wealthy. This would lead to a century of warfare and eventual global domination. It began with the Spanish-American War and the endless invasions of Central America to the backing of dictatorships, endless coups, and the mop-up role the US played in the world wars (all dressed up as something different) which allowed Washington to become the dominant power on the globe. Decades of proxy conflicts and sometimes direct wars led to millions of deaths and the destruction of societies - and much of American society along the way. Did the US help with some medicine along the way and other humanitarian tokens? Sure, but it was always in its own interests to do so. Don't be naive.
McKibben wastes his time on Eisenhower and the role the Mainline 'Churches' played in Civil Rights and the like. It's all rot. It's all misguided and as unbiblical as the way Nixon collaborated with Billy Graham. Civil Rights was an understandable response to the conditions of the time, but it was not approached Biblically by the Mainline Churches but on the basis of Enlightenment Humanism - which in turn was read into some of Christ's teachings, but often at the expense of others. I'm glad they succeeded in some respects but I won't confuse the campaign with New Testament teaching nor will I grant that Martin Luther King Jr. was a Christian in any meaningful sense. I may respect him in some ways over the likes of say, Jerry Falwell, but that's not really saying much.
Paula Cain is a blatant counterfeit. Is Doug Wilson a self-taught pastor? Am I supposed to be impressed because someone like Chris Hedges has a divinity degree from Harvard? It doesn't matter if what he was taught was Enlightenment religion. He's wrong and lost - just as Wilson is. The issue isn't certification or the acknowledgment granted from the right institutions, but Biblical truth. For that matter I would point out to McKibben that the United Methodist Church is an apostate body and if he was a serious Christian then he would leave it out of conviction.
I'm supposed to be outraged that Wilson opposes women's suffrage. I'll go one further. Christians shouldn't vote at all. Wilson's patriarchy is a distortion of Biblical teaching, but I find McKibben's egalitarianism to be equally (if not more) problematic. What's the criteria he employs to make these judgments? It's not Scripture and so why does he talk about hijacking Christianity? Have Wilson and his ilk done so? Yes, but so has the Mainline - a group of apostate Churches that hijacked Christianity by different means.
You can hijack a plane with a gun, knife, or bomb. Whatever the case, it's been hijacked. Am I supposed to be impressed because a knife is more humane?
Is Christo-Trumpism toxic and anti-Christian? Most certainly, but reading this article it's also abundantly clear that the Christianity of the New Testament is just as alien to McKibben - and dare I say he would find it to be just as toxic?
He politicises the narrative of Jesus' birth in a way similar to how the Right manipulates it and the gospel narratives to their ends. This isn't about politics but redemptive-history and cosmic war. I will freely grant that a prima facie reading of the New Testament is more likely to drive one toward left-leaning themes and narratives. I completely agree. There's nothing there to lend itself to Right-wing nationalism and the social-Darwinist ethics of their economic models. But McKibben is blind and does not understand the supernaturalism of the message and the doctrine that essentially undergirds it all. The Mainline abandoned Biblical doctrine long ago and replaced it with sociological paradigms and a new set of ethics. This is incredibly ironic because the Right has done the very same thing, simply from another side of the political spectrum. A plague on both their Scripture-twisting houses and the demonic ethical systems they both promote. Both camps are given over to idolatry - a kind of Janus idol - the two twisted faces of American liberalism and identity, humanism and power. Both are completely given over to mammon. McKibben clearly doesn't understand while the other faction simply celebrates its own handing over and judgment.
There's so much else he mentions that leaves me just throwing my hands up into the air. From the New Deal to USAID, McKibben frustrates me as much as someone like Erwin Lutzer, Albert Mohler or frankly even Glenn Beck.
It's funny that he mentions Fosdick and the Riverside Church as it was not long ago that I was walking those very Upper West Side streets, walking from Grant's Tomb while looking at Rockefeller's impressive but idolatrous deception (Riverside Church) and then taking in the symbiotic way in which Union Theological Seminary is wed to Columbia - the same Ivy League and Establishment symbiosis one sees when visiting Princeton. There's nothing to celebrate. It's a tale of capitulation, compromise, and apostasy. Does McKibben wish to pretend that Rockefeller was a Christian? He wasn't. Neither was Fosdick, nor the institution (Union Seminary) that lost its way in the 19th century when it embraced the likes of Charles Briggs. I wasn't looking at these buildings (including the old headquarters of the NCC) in a wistful manner but shaking my head in disgust and contempt - in the same way I look at Liberty University or Grove City College. They are monuments to unfaithfulness, idolatry, and deception.
McKibben rightly rejects the Christianity that has made Charlie Kirk into a martyr and the Church that celebrates ICE violence and has allied itself with the fascistic Heritage Foundation, but we must also reject his New Deal Jesus and his Neibuhr-inspired understanding of post-war Christianity. It's refreshing to read other takes on the Christo-Trump movement but in the end McKibben's Christianity is just as diseased and counterfeit.
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