Matthew Kaemingk:
We’ve got a new season. You ready to go?
Shadi Hamid:
I’m ready. Let’s do it. What are we talking about?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Well, I was thinking that America’s turning 250, big year for us. And being a podcast on religion and politics and culture, I thought we’d take the temperature first. So, in these first couple episodes, we’re going to be talking about just the state of the union in terms of religion and politics in America. And we’ve just finished up this book and a big part of the book is talking about how there’s a paradox at the heart of religion and politics today. For many years, political theorists imagine that as the west became more secular, its politics would become more rational and calm that that religion leads to division and passion and irrationality. And that as we become more secular, things would be just more chill, more rational.
Shadi Hamid:
Hasn’t turned out that way.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. So, I mean, how would you describe politics in America today? Would you describe it as rational and calm?
Shadi Hamid:
It feels more like a holy war. And that’s the paradox I think that we’re pointing to. How is it possible that with the decline of religion and public religion in particular, that we actually see an outburst of passion, of irrationality. It’s not what we would’ve expected.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. So, I think I want to try out a thesis on you. And I imagine we’re going to have a little bit of disagreement on this, but I think what I’d like to do is divide up our conversation, looking at how faith and politics is working on the political right, and then how faith and politics is working on the political left. So, here’s my thesis. Here’s what I want to try out on you, is that essentially what’s happening is we’re moving from a religious society to what I would call a spiritually passionate society. That in the past, America had traditional religions, institutional religions. People went to church, they went to mosque, they went to synagogue. They were part of these institutional religions. They focused on a specific text and tradition.
Today, people are leaving institutional religion, but they’re not leaving for a state of rationality, a deep secularism. They’re becoming part of spiritual movements on the political left and the political right, and that they’re actually seeking meaning and purpose and value in and through political tribes, that these tribes on the right and on the left are spiritually charged. And that to become a part of these political tribes, it’s exciting, it’s emotional, it’s experiential, and the politics is really becoming more apocalyptic in its shape.
So, what I thought we’d do is start out with a discussion on the political right, and then maybe in the next episode, we’ll jump into talking about what this looks like on the left. So, for me, I think that I’m seeing two things going on in the political right. One is we have a rise in the alt-right of a quasi-pagan white European movement of blood and soil developing. And then we also have the evangelical right or what’s sometimes like the Christian nationalist right, which is still somewhat tied to Christianity, but it’s somewhat difficult to connect a figure like Donald Trump, for example, someone who money, gold, greed, women. I think he has 10 children now from three different wives.
Shadi Hamid:
I don’t know if it’s 10, but yeah, he has quite a few.
Matthew Kaemingk:
How many kids does he have? Okay. We’ll have to look that up. We’ll get that for you.
Shadi Hamid:
He’s got a lot of kids.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. He’s got a lot of kids, a lot of money, really glorification and power. And when you think about the values of Jesus Christ and historic Christianity, the glory of Christianity was not money, power, women, domination, taking over Greenland. That wasn’t Jesus’ goal. There does seem to be a division there. There seems to be a new form of political religion developing on the right that’s distinct from Christianity in some important ways. So, I’m wondering for you, how are you seeing this develop in terms of, I don’t know if you have agree with my division that we have a neopagan right and then we have the evangelical Christian nationalist.
Shadi Hamid:
Well, I’m reminded of what Ross Douthat once said, I think in 2016, he said, “If you don’t like the religious right, wait until you see the post-religious right.” And I think that was quite prescient that it’s gotten a lot worse. And if only we could go back to the George W. Bush years, not the Iraq part of it, but the more sincere evangelical grounding that actually seemed to be tied to some semblance of Christian morality.
Shadi Hamid:
Obviously, there’s always going to be immorality, but at least it seemed more institutional, more grounded, more aspiring to be like Christ. But as you pointed out, we don’t see that at all now. We see a Christianity on the evangelical side of things. It seems un-Christian to a lot of us. I’m an outsider, so it’s not really my job to litigate who’s truer to the Christlike vision, but I will say, I mean, the Greenland stuff is actually quite a good example because it’s all about might makes right. It’s all about domination. It’s about power above all else.
Shadi Hamid:
And my understanding of Christianity, that it privileges the weak and the meek and the poor and the destitute. Those are the people of god. But here we see people who want to lord their power over others and there’s a cruelty to it that seems like the opposite of what Jesus would do. And that’s hard for me to understand, and we can unpack that a little bit. It’s been a question, I think, on the minds of Christians and non-Christians alike over the past 10 years, how could this have possibly happened to Christianity? How is it that evangelicalism could be shifted to something unrecognizable?
Shadi Hamid:
And you as an evangelical have a lot of insight into that. I would say though, I wonder if the religion versus spirituality frame is the best way to talk about this because it’s almost making spirituality sound like it’s negative, that we’ve moved from religion to spirituality, and spirituality is the kind of thing that is chaotic and leads to extremism and so forth. It’s certainly one way of looking at it, but another way of looking at it is that now we have religion without religion. We have the passions of religion, but without the institutional framework, without any constraint, without a higher power to give us a north star. So, we have all this anger, emotion, passion, irrationality, faith, but it’s not directed towards anything in particular, I would say.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. So, I think maybe our Christian audience would be helped out by this metaphor of Catholicism versus Pentecostalism. So, Catholicism is very institutional. It’s a 2000-year-old institution with texts and tradition and hierarchy and institutions, and you’ve got a pope who’s running it all as opposed to Pentecostalism, which is not an institution. It’s a global charismatic movement that moves with the power of the spirit. It’s very experiential, it’s very emotional, and it lends itself to a more movement-oriented thing.
And I think that part of what I’m arguing is that politics today is much more experiential, emotional, passionate than it is institutional that for someone like George W. Bush, he would feel himself somewhat submissive to the institutions and traditions of the church in the way in which Donald Trump does not. And so, George W. Bush is more of an institutional Christian, whereas Donald Trump is…
Shadi Hamid:
Nothing.
Matthew Kaemingk:
And so, quite frankly, the growth of more charismatic Pentecostal type people who are being drawn into Donald Trump’s orbit makes sense a little bit in this kinds of way. But I think more broadly speaking, I think that we can talk about the MAGA movement in general as having a spirituality to it, I would argue that you’re dressing up in MAGA clothes, you’re part of MAGA rallies. There’s an emotional experiential movement orientation to it. It’s not really grounded in a text or a tradition, but it actually moves with the spirit of Donald Trump. So, essentially, whatever the charismatic leader says we’re doing, that’s what we’re doing. There’s not like a consistent dogma of Donald Trump. It’s much more of a spiritual movement, I’d argue.
Shadi Hamid:
And whatever Donald Trump says at any particular moment, that becomes the doctrine. So, Trump can go through any number of reversals. He can contradict himself. He can say the opposite of what he said the previous day, but because he’s the one who said it, it’s something that has to be respected and agreed to by the members of the movement. So, in that sense, it’s personalistic, it’s cult-like, there’s a devotion to a leader. In some sense, Christ is replaced by Trump as the north star of the movement. And that’s what makes it, I think, so frightening as an outsider is where is Christ in all of this?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. Okay. So, I want to shift for a minute actually over to the alt-right.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, sure.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Because this is in many ways blatantly anti-Christian. And it seems to me that as we read the texts of the alt-right and the messages of the alt-right, and if you follow internet culture of the alt-right, the paganism is actually pretty clear in terms of the use of symbols and images of Northern European strength, whiteness, masculinity, blood and soil, spiritual connection between people and the land and the sense of power. I think there are many connections between these. Who would you say are some of the core voices or leaders pushing this form of right-wing neopaganism or [inaudible 00:13:19]?
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah, I would say a couple stand out to me. One is Bronze Age Pervert, another is Curtis Yarvin, both of whom are quite influential, especially with the JD Vance wing of the Republican Party. JD Vance is very online and both Bronze Age Pervert and Curtis Yarvin came to their fame as online figures. I mean, I see Curtis Yarvin on my Twitter feed all the time. He’s always posting and tweeting and so forth.
And I think with both of them, they’re not religious. Curtis Yarvin is an atheist, although he tries to downplay that or even hide that in conversations because he doesn’t want to alienate too much of his constituency, but god does not figure into his discourse. Bronze Age Pervert is very much a Nietzschean, might makes right kind of person that everything is about power and there’s a disregard for the weak.
He looks down on anyone who is weak and doesn’t have power. And it’s almost as if you become more moral, the more power you have. And the weaker you are, the more immoral. It’s almost like you’re to blame for your own lack of power, your own lack of control over your own life. There’s no real sense of empathy and understanding.
And I think that colors a lot of what we see. If we want to draw the analogy to everyday politics, we see ICE’s brutality in Minneapolis, for example, and how ICE and police are being very aggressive towards people who don’t fit a certain description that if you’re Hispanic sounding or if you’re someone who doesn’t seem like a citizen, there’s no empathy for that person. There’s no empathy for anyone who’s on the opposing side. It’s very brutal in that sense. And I think that that is really what’s animating a lot of the new right under Donald Trump. Yeah, it’s very hard. It’s very unforgiving. There’s no real give and take. There’s no appetite for compromise.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. I think that’s it. I think maybe a core phrase for understanding European paganism is a warrior mentality, that strength, beauty, unity, force, this is the glory of a tribe or a nation. And then I think on the other side is a nihilism, a Nietzschean sense of despair and power that we live in this time of decay and we need a warrior mentality, and that’s all that’s left.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. And I think part of this is tied to the fact that young men in America are struggling on a lot of different metrics. They’re falling behind women when it comes to college graduation, rates, employment, living in their parents’ basements, struggling to find love, being unmarried, not having other male friends. So, when you have that kind of crisis of loneliness or despair, and also, I should say high suicide rates as well, that you’re looking for something that can fill the hole. And if religion doesn’t come naturally to you, you’re going to look for alternatives to religion.
And that’s why this fantasy that once religion goes away, everyone is going to be rational and calm and misunderstood something fundamental about human nature, which is everyone needs a fundamental orientation, a fundamental pivot. We’re all faith-based beings. And both of us, we’re big fans of a Dutch theologian, Abraham Kuyper, and this is at the core of his work, this idea that we’re all faith oriented.
And that faith can be Christianity, it can be liberalism, it can be nationalism, it can be socialism, but we all need some kind of ideology that drives us because we’re meaning makers and we desire meaning and we want something to guide our lives. It’s very hard for ordinary human beings to live without that kind of sense of a north star.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So, talk about what that meaning looks like on the alt-right for these young men. How is meaning being made?
Shadi Hamid:
Part of it is devotion to a leader, Donald Trump. Part of it is the sense of male dominance and masculinity that men are superior to women. This is where the whole incel movement comes about, this disdain for women and a sense that maleness is something that has to be prized. There’s also this movement that I’m not really familiar with, but I’ll just mention it if people want to look into it. It’s called looksmaxxing. Have you heard of looksmaxxing?
Matthew Kaemingk:
No.
Shadi Hamid:
So, it’s just a combination of the word “looksmaxxing”. So, basically people will do weird things to their body to optimize their looks and not just women because that’s more normal, but this is young men doing things like altering their jawline. Yeah, stuff like that, just imagine. And finding ways to become one or two inches taller. I think there’s something weird that you do with your legs to get your height up a little bit, but it’s the sense that you have to display or present male dominance.
And part of that has to do with the way that you look. You have to look like a traditional masculine man with a particular jawline and bone structure. So, it’s those kinds of things that have come into vogue in recent years in the absence of religion, and they fill the gap that religion once did.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. So, that’s consistent once again with European pagan values, which is power, strength, beauty. And that meaning is found, meaning, purpose, value is found in that combination of power, strength, beauty. And then the last thing I would say is unity and uniformity. So, the other thing you and I are interested in is this, this question of how does America and American democracy hang together amidst so much difference? How do we handle this difference? How do we navigate this difference?
And for the alt-right, difference in diversity is seen as weakness, it’s seen as decay, and that difference in diversity leads to weakness and national decay and decline. And if America is going to become great again, it’s going to need to become more homogenous, that America’s strength emerges from its homogeneity. And so, this is another critical issue for you and I who are thinking about pluralism is that European neopagan alt-right is fundamentally allergic to this kind of diversity and pluralism that you and I are talking about.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. And that’s why I think that immigration enforcement, to use a neutral term, is so critical to the Trumpian vision because it promises to homogenize the country. And if you listen to someone like Trump’s senior advisor, Stephen Miller, Miller constantly talks about diversity as a weakness that it leads to chaos. And this is part of the effort to paint blue cities as havens of extremism and instability.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Crime, decay, ugliness.
Shadi Hamid:
Crime, decay, decadence, all of these things, and that the only way to bring order and stability and law back into the country is by being more uniform. And by that, we can say more white. Even though the MAGA movement interestingly has strong elements that Hispanic men, even Black men to some extent, there are pockets of support for MAGA in those circles, but I think that’s changing among Hispanics in light of the very aggressive ICE enforcement.
But we should say that just because whiteness is the goal, it doesn’t mean that it’s only white people who support MAGA. There’s something, I think, appealing to people more broadly because I think a lot of us, we desire order. We see our cities and we’re like, “Can’t they be better? Aren’t they a little bit chaotic? Why can’t we have more order?” Order is the kind of illusion. It’s the kind of promise that a lot of us can fall under the sway of.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. Okay. So, that’s the Neopagan right. And back onto the evangelical right. So, on this side of things, order and unity is found within a dominant American Protestant faith that America will become strong as it becomes more Protestant, as it performs more evangelical. And so, a partnership needs to be formed between the Christian faith and the state. The state needs to serve Christianity and Christianity needs to serve the state.
Shadi Hamid:
Serve the state, yeah.
Matthew Kaemingk:
So, it seems to me this is that partnership that’s going on. And as an evangelical myself, this is a very hard thing to watch, and it challenges me in a variety of ways.
Shadi Hamid:
For those who are tuning in maybe for the first time to the Zealots at the Gate, could you say just a little bit about what kind of evangelical you are and how you feel about that term? Because we’ve had conversations where it’s like, “Hey, is evangelical the right label because it has so much political baggage now?”
Matthew Kaemingk:
Right. Well, it’s a bit like when you call yourself a Democrat and then you’re not so sure if you want to call yourself that. So, yes, I’m an evangelical. I grew up within the evangelical faith. The kind of evangelical that I am, I come from the reformed or the Presbyterian side of that tradition. And so, for me, theologians like Abraham Kuyper and others are very important. But evangelicalism, for those who are not evangelicals, or not very familiar with it, is a less institutional form of Christianity.
So, as opposed to, say, the Catholic Church, as we talked about earlier, evangelicals don’t have a pope, they don’t have a central council. We are much more of a movement of Christians. We have things like a magazine like Christianity Today and some seminaries and colleges and things like that, but we’re not a cohesive movement. There’s nowhere you can go to get excommunicated from evangelicalism.
Shadi Hamid:
And how do you know how to be an evangelical if there’s no source of authority? Let’s say an individual wants to become a better evangelical and has doubts about their own practice or how they’re approaching their faith. I guess they can go to their local pastor, but there isn’t really a deeper source of authority or institutional grounding. I mean, that’s always going to be the struggle with evangelical movements.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, yeah. So, it is a movement or as I guess the kids would say it’s a vibe…
Shadi Hamid:
Vibe.
Matthew Kaemingk:
… in that sense. And this is, I think, the great strength of American evangelicalism. And I would say it’s its great weakness or its vulnerability today in that it lacks a thick tradition, intellectual tradition. Evangelicals historically, when it comes to politics, they’ve been very issue-based. So, in the past it was, well, we don’t like alcohol or we don’t like abortion or we don’t like homosexuality or whatever it is.
So, evangelicals would get excited about an issue, but they wouldn’t really have a political philosophy of what is the government for? What is the government responsible for in the same way that perhaps liberalism or conservatism or socialism has a fully orbed…
Shadi Hamid:
World’s view.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. This is what we want the state to do. This is what taxation should be. Evangelicals haven’t really had that.
Shadi Hamid:
But is that an evangelical problem as much as it is a broader Christian problem, the Christian discomfort with executive authority with the role of the state because Christianity was founded as a dissident movement against the state that Christianity, at least in the time of Christ and shortly thereafter for the subsequent two or three centuries, had no role of state power. So, it leads to an awkward relationship once you actually do have power.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. That’s a very Muslim question. That’s a very Muslim pushback. Yeah. So, whereas with Islam, Islam began in the very beginning as a political movement. Muhammad was a political leader. He was a military leader. He was engaged in questions of taxation and things like that. Jesus never collected taxes. Jesus never set up an economic system. He never ruled even a village.
So, I think that’s right that Christianity, because it didn’t have political power for the first 300 years, Christianity has always had a mixed relationship with power. We’ve always been a little bit ambivalent or uncomfortable with taking political power, at least at our best we’re uncomfortable with it. When we’re comfortable with political powers, usually-
Shadi Hamid:
Then you start having problems.
Matthew Kaemingk:
We start having problems. Right. Yeah. So, I think at our best, Christians feel mixed about taking and seizing political power in that kind of way. So, yeah, I think that’s an inherent tension within the Christian faith. But I think it’s a good one. I think it’s healthy for human beings to feel quite uncomfortable picking up a sword. I think that’s right.
Shadi Hamid:
But then isn’t part of the problem now that evangelicals, broadly speaking, have become comfortable with political power that the vast majority of white evangelicals are supporters of Donald Trump, sometimes fervent supporters of Donald Trump. It’s become one of the strongest constituencies for MAGA, for the Trump movement is white evangelicals. So, have they lost some of their skepticism about worldly authority and what’s led them to lose that skepticism?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. I think there’s multiple things going on. I think there are evangelicals who are quite comfortable with seizing political power. I think there are other evangelicals, however, who see Donald Trump as a necessary evil, so they’re not happy about the choice they’ve made. I mean, I think about my own evangelical church, my own little evangelical church that I attend in St. Louis, and I think about there are a lot of Trump voters in my local church, and I think some of them genuinely like Donald Trump and are happy about him, but I think many more of them were of the opinion that the left is taking over, the woke are coming. And Donald Trump is our only hope to save America from godlessness. I think it’s more, for many of them, a necessary evil that we have to take power.
Shadi Hamid:
And it comes from a perceived sense of weakness that evangelicals have felt under attack for a long time and have felt like they’re marginalized in the broader society and that secularism has become the dominant worldview or faith, if you will. So, they feel embattled and because they’re so embattled that they have to find some kind of savior figure to pull them back from the brink.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah, I think so. I’m not sure if these all evangelicals would say Donald Trump is a savior figure. I think the fervent ones would. I think the others would just use the phrase of necessary evil or bulwark that-
Shadi Hamid:
Or imperfect vessel.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Imperfect vessel. Yeah, something like that, that we’ve got to do this because America at this point in history is losing its religious identity. And so, it’s a necessary evil.
Shadi Hamid:
Well, maybe one thing I would want to just ask you about more personally, were you ever tempted by Trump and what he offered? Was there ever a time when you felt that maybe something like that could be interesting? No, we don’t have to.
Matthew Kaemingk:
No, that’s a good question. It just makes me uncomfortable.
Shadi Hamid:
Oh, it means it’s good.
Matthew Kaemingk:
It means it’s good.
Shadi Hamid:
Okay. Because I’m actually not entirely sure what the answer to this is, even though we’ve known each other for a long time as friends. But was there ever a moment even earlier on, maybe closer to 2016, 2015, where you might’ve felt some of the siren call of Donald Trump and what he was offering where you felt almost tempted despite your better judgment and you thought, oh, because you’re someone who, for example, you care a lot about issues like abortion. And Donald Trump was promising a lot by appointing certain kinds of supreme court justices that there is an argument to be made that he could be a means to a greater end.
Shadi Hamid:
If your goal is to stop what you see as the killing of live human beings, really, that if what it takes is someone like Donald Trump to save lives, that could be justified from a moral, even religious perspective. So, I’m curious, were you ever close to that kind of thinking yourself?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. As a conservative evangelical, was I ever tempted…
Shadi Hamid:
Yes, indeed.
Matthew Kaemingk:
… tempted in my heart to vote for Donald Trump? Ah, thanks for the easy, comfortable question. Well, first off, I’ll tell a little story. So, on the election night, 2016, I was actually in Amsterdam and I had signed up to give a lecture in Amsterdam on evangelicals and American politics the very next day, the day after the election. And the lecture hall was filled with all of these Dutch citizens who were asking me after Donald Trump won, “Why did American Christians vote for Donald Trump?” And they just couldn’t, they couldn’t understand how could American Christians do this when the man is the opposite of Christian values in every single way.
Matthew Kaemingk:
And of course, in the Netherlands, they have 13 different political parties. They actually have three different Christian parties. They have a left-wing Christian party and a right-wing Christian party. And so, they have a million choices. And what I said to them in that moment was, “Here in the Netherlands, you have lots of choices and you can pick a party that’s very closely aligned to you.” They have one for the environment and one for workers and one for animal rights and Christianity and immigration. But in the United States, I said, “We only have two choices. So, you are going to be signing up for someone in the United States who you deeply disagree with on certain issues. So, everyone in America is forced to vote against their values in a certain way.”
So, in the Netherlands, voters don’t have to compromise themselves when they vote. It’s actually the 13 different political parties they have to compromise in order to get anything done. And the opposite is true in America, is that voters have to compromise themselves. And then our political parties don’t compromise at all. They don’t work together.
Shadi Hamid:
It’s a good way to put it together.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. So, essentially what has to happen in the heart of an American voter is you have to tear your own heart when you vote because you have to morally compromise yourself in important ways, unless you’re a total ideologue and you just think the Democratic Party is perfection or you think the Republican Party is perfection. But most of us, when we make a choice for president, we’re making an imperfect choice.
And so, that’s a long way to get back to your question of, was I ever tempted by Donald Trump? I would say yes and no. So, no, I never found Donald Trump attractive as a leader or as a human being. I’ve always found him morally repugnant and was never tempted to praise or enjoy Donald Trump, as a Christian, as an ethicist, no. But I was tempted to make the imperfect choice to say, “You know what? I have two choices and I can see the argument of I am a pro-life Christian, as you said. I view abortion as morally repugnant.” And so, I think for me, it was tempting in that moment.
And the way I described it to my Dutch audience was, imagine you have Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump and they have all of their political platforms, all of their things, except Hillary Clinton is in favor of slavery. So, she has all of her healthcare, all the things that she loves, but one line is she is for slavery. Would you still vote for Hillary Clinton? Because for evangelicals, abortion is a moral evil in a similar way that slavery is. So, to vote for Hillary Clinton in that moment is to say, “I’m siding with a leader who I agree with in every way except for this issue of slavery.” And so, in that way, I’ll answer your question. Yeah, I was tempted because I thought maybe if I elect Donald Trump, we could get a few more steps towards getting rid of abortion.
Shadi Hamid:
But then what prevented you from taking that step? Because the logic that you just laid out, I think it can be a defensible argument that if you prioritize one thing over everything else, if you really do see abortion as an abomination at the level of slavery, and I’ve heard some evangelicals describe it as genocide, mass murder. If you really think mass murder is going on, then you actually should do quite a lot to resist it. I mean, you could even justify potentially taking, I mean-
Matthew Kaemingk:
Taking up arms.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. If you really thought it was mass murder, then maybe you would take extreme measures to stop it. And one of those measures could be voting for someone like Donald Trump. Because this gets me to a broader question of what can evangelicals like you do in the current climate to bring us to some level of sandy on some of these bigger questions, you were able to resist the siren call of Donald Trump in the end where most of your fellow evangelicals were not able to do that? So, is it just something at the level of one’s individual personality that it’s very specific to you that you just didn’t feel that you could do it and it’s not something that’s necessarily generalizable to the masses?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. There was two reasons why I didn’t follow that logic. Two reasons why I would never vote for Donald Trump. One is just a fundamental commitment to the future of our democracy. So, I want to win that abortion debate democratically. I want to work through the democratic process to do that. And I see Donald Trump as fundamentally endangering the democratic process and democratic institutions. And I don’t think of the political issue of abortion as worth getting rid of democracy, so that’s where you and I can connect on that.
And the other thing I think is that I believe in order for America to flourish, we need a healthy Republican Party and we need a healthy conservative movement in America, and we don’t have one right now. And I see Donald Trump as an existential threat to the conservative movement itself. I don’t believe Donald Trump is a conservative in any meaningful way. And so, that was another reason I voted against him was because I thought he was a cancer to the conservative movement and a cancer to the Republican Party in general. And in that way, he endangers American public life.
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. One other thing I wanted to bring up was the question of immigration, which I’m also curious about because I think evangelicals get a bad rep and people don’t realize that a lot of the refugee resettlement groups in America are led by evangelicals. Evangelicals do a lot when it comes to refugees. And there is a tradition of charities abroad as well that are led by evangelicals and welcoming the stranger, if you will, from a Christian perspective, yet this Trump-led Republican Party has focused so much on immigration as being the defining issue of our time.
And I’m curious how you’ve seen evangelicals square the circle on that, because I think a lot of them would, in theory, like to still welcome some number of refugees and have asylum seekers and people who are really struggling when it comes to that to have some way to apply to come to America, but you have an administration that is completely against doing that and wants to bring immigration to zero.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. So, there’s an evangelical ministry for immigrants and refugees. It’s called World Relief. And I would love to have them on the podcast sometime to talk about this problem because I don’t have an answer to your question and it’s a fascinating paradox. On one side of things, American evangelicals, statistically speaking, are very much against immigration, and yet on the other side are incredibly charitable and generous.
American evangelicals give more money, volunteer, serve more in protecting refugees and getting them homes. I have many friends when a refugee comes from Syria, they will set up an apartment, they’ll get furnishings, they’ll get clothes, they’ll help the kids get backpacks and go to school. Incredible evangelical generosity to these refugees and immigrants. And then also politically, very much anti-immigrant at the same time. And so, that’s a paradox that has fascinated me. And as someone who’s written about evangelicalism, immigration and hospitality, it’s been a fascinating one. I have some answers, but for the most part, it really does perplex me.
And then not to mention just that Christianity itself, I mean, Jesus was a refugee. He ran away from political terror. He was in danger of being killed by the king and his family fled to Egypt. He was a refugee there. And the faith itself is a migrant faith. It’s a global faith. It’s a dynamic faith, and it’s one that’s missional. So, you’re supposed to want to welcome people and tell them the gospel story. So, it is quite a paradox.
Shadi Hamid:
And maybe this brings us back to some of what we talked about at the start of the episode, that evangelicalism is being hollowed out and evangelicals themselves are prioritizing politics over religion, that their fundamental affiliation now is a partisan one to the Republican Party. So, whatever the Republican Party believes, if that’s a strong and harsh anti-immigration attitude, they’ll take that on as their own because that is their identity. They are part of a tribe, they are part of a MAGA movement or a Trump movement that sees immigration a particular way.
We also know that evangelicals are becoming less practicing, that if you look over time, evangelicals aren’t going to church as much as they once did. Evangelical now, some people adopt the label as a political label. They might not even really have any attachment to the evangelical faith, but when they hear the word evangelical, they think evangelical equals support for Trump. Evangelical equals support for the Republican Party, therefore I’m an evangelical and I sympathize with that even if they’re not going to church.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. You get this crazy thing where you have people who call themselves evangelicals, they don’t go to church, they don’t read the Bible, they don’t believe that Jesus rose from the dead. I mean, if there’s a more central doctrine to the Christian faith, I don’t know what is, but we’re taking on evangelicalism as a political label that has no belief content to it. So, it’s a huge issue.
So, then the question, of course, is what do we do about that as evangelicals? And I’ll go back to my little local church, and my pastor is struggling with this as well. And one of the things that he says, and I think it’s really quite wise, he says that, “When you don’t have a community, you find a cause.” So, it goes back to that loneliness thing that you talked about. When Americans are lonely, when they don’t have a community, they will look for a political tribe, something to belong to.
And I think that if evangelicalism is ever going to become a healthy faith movement in America, it’s going to have to start with small spiritual communities of depth, practice, study, prayer. It’s going to have to return to, honestly, a more institutional form of faith. These evangelicals are going to have to start going to church. They’re going to have to start being in Bible studies, and they’re going to have to start engaging in some communal forms of discipline.
And what I mean by that is the way that evangelicals are behaving online, the language they use, the way they treat people, they need some communal discipline to speak and treat others in a Christlike manner. And what’s terrible is we have a lot of Christian leaders online who are speaking in a very un-Christlike manner, in a very unloving manner, and speaking about their opponents in very cruel ways.
And so, the way for healing for American evangelicals is going to be humility, community, character, and it’s a slow thing that is countercultural to evangelical obsession with growth and strength and beauty and all of those kinds of things. And it’s something that my PhD students are working on. They’re asking those questions of how do you develop a spiritually healthy citizen who will not sell their soul for a political movement?
Shadi Hamid:
But if the answer is institutions, which I think is a good answer, it leads us to a paradox that the very thing that evangelicals need to get back on track is the very thing they’re most skeptical of. If evangelicalism is inherently suspicious of institutional structures, then how will they become more grounded in an institutions?
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. Well, I think that is what I’m saying is that’s the that-
Shadi Hamid:
They have to find a way to-
Matthew Kaemingk:
That’s the inherent-
Shadi Hamid:
Get over that skepticism.
Matthew Kaemingk:
Yeah. That’s the inherent weakness of evangelicalism is its individualism. So, this belief that it’s me and Jesus rather than being in a community. So, that’s the political instability at the heart of evangelicalism is it’s individualistic, it’s experiential, anti-intellectual, anti-institutional. And so, this is where I come from, the reformed Presbyterian tradition, which does value education, community, institutions, traditions. And I think that’s going to be an important thing, but it can’t be just reviving old institutions. It’s going to have to be a developing of a new imagination for that. And yeah, so we’re obviously not going to answer that today, but hopefully in the future we can bring on some evangelicals who are doing that kind of hopeful work of a healthier politics.
So, I think that about does it for our conversation on the spirituality of the right. And in our next episode, let’s get after the left. I think we’ve done a good job offending all of our friends to the right of us. And in our next conversation, why don’t we make some enemies to the left? Does that sound good?
Shadi Hamid:
Yeah. Sounds like a plan. Let’s do it.
Matthew Kaemingk:
All right, guys. We’ll see you in the next one.
