The story is told of a patient who rushed into a dentistry one day, exasperated by a throbbing molar pain; after nearly a week of attempting to ignore his wisdom toothache, he finally had enough. The patient called-in sick to work and went desperately into the first dentistry he could find. After waiting forty minutes for a dentist to call his name, the patient found himself laying down on the dental chair, anxious, with his mouth wide open as the dentist began his work. The patient earnestly pointed to the left molar which had been aggravating him with pain.
The dentist began probing the mouth of the patient with his dental scaler; subsequently telling the patient, “Are you sure you don’t want me to examine this molar on your right side first? You have a terrible cavity here.” The patient, slightly vexed, with his mouth partially anesthetized earnestly pointed back to the molar on his left side. The dentist puzzled, tapped the tooth adjacent to the right molar adding sarcastically “Wow, you really have a beauty here—are you sure you don’t want me to start with this tooth first?”; and tapped the tooth adjacent to the previous one, and the next one and so on—adding each time a snarky comment of his own.
Finally, after the sixth insensitive remark the patient, imploding with rage, shot up from the dental chair and using the remaining control he had of his facial muscles shouted, “I ONLY CARE ABOUT MY LEFT MOLAR DAMMIT.”
I employ the analogy of the angry patient to frame a broader observation pertaining to the condition of the contemporary American evangelical. In the months subsequent to the 2016 presidential election, some of us have had little to no appetite to relitigate the entire experience—the election was physically draining and the outcome was what it was; Donald Trump is president. However, an observation which has preoccupied the imagination of nearly everyone (irrespective of their political orientation) that I have talked to during and since the election continues to be, 'why are Christian evangelicals lining up behind Donald Trump?'
And perhaps I am not the best person to try and tackle this glowing in-congruency; after all, for all intents in purposes, I would consider myself to be a frustrated Christian. I think any person of faith can attest to the disappointment that embarks in one’s heart when the mental construct which one had of one’s faith is contradicted by the effectual experience of operating within the regime of any organized religion.
At any rate, I am trying to live out my faith--imperfectly, but trying.Nonetheless, I did grow up in a vibrant Latin-American bilingual evangelical community in Southwest Houston; some of the people that I most love and respect in the world are members of that community. I owe who I am in large part to their willingness to be a force for good in my life, and so I feel wholly invested in the condition of the evangelical community.
And as I began to ponder the question which continues to be brought to my attention time after time, I realized that the question of why evangelicals were willing to take a bet on Trump was far more complex than the caricature concoctions that my friends on the Left had managed to generate; or the wild theories that Conservatives such as myself were so prompt to associate evangelicals with (Evangelicals love Trump’s bravado, Trump says it like it is, etc.); that the truth of the matter was far more intertwined in the messy reality ailing American evangelicals. Similar to an aching molar, four decades of stagnating wages, globalization and the legacy of the gospel of prosperity would lead to the victory of Donald Trump and the creation of the frustrated, non-church going, transactional Christian.
I would be lying if I said that it had dawned on me earlier, but the truth is that it was not until early August 2016 while having a conversation with an immediate family member that the topic of who to vote for came up; my family is Mexican-American, and given Trump’s remarks about the Mexican community those who did not outright despise Trump for having said what he said about my community, were not eager about having The Donald Trump conversation. But here I sat in my father’s pickup truck attempting to explain Donald Trump’s rise in my party, the Republican party, once more, to a Mexican member of my community (given that, yes, I am that stereotypical person in every family that everyone always goes to to ask political questions), expecting to hear the characteristical disdain filled rants about Donald Trump.
Surprisingly, my relative responded to Trump’s “Mexicans are rapists” remark, by saying “Well, I’m not a rapist—so, he was not talking about me, I think I will vote for him,” which left me puzzled--dying to know how they had reached this conclusion. I had spent the year prior supporting every other Republican candidate to defeat Donald Trump and now one of my own immediate family members had embraced the man who I am convinced will undermine the future of the party that I love. I was incensed. How!? Why!?
And then I sat down, got off my high horse and had these family members tell me the speech which I had heard time and time again, but I had been too aloof to understand until it was said in my own home. “I am getting billed for healthcare insurance that I don’t have access to; I don’t trust ‘the system’—they took my savings away during the (2008) recession, and my wages have dropped by two thirds in the last eight years—I’m not voting for more of the same!”
For those who want to single out every incongruence between Donald Trump and the message of Christ—the material is there, the incongruences are plenty. But somewhere along the line, we forgot that Christians vote their condition too. That it makes little difference in your life to be a Christian if your son is the latest young person in your community to die of a heroin overdose.
It makes little difference in your life to be a Christian if you continue to find your neighbors in the same public library, submitting resumes online because they cannot afford to have internet since they have not been working due to the local factory closing down. It makes little difference in your life to be a Christian when you wake up in the community which you have lived in your entire life, but which you no longer recognize as the socially conservative setting it once was.
Christians of all races, of all income levels, saw in 2008, when then Sen. Barack Obama sat across from Ellen DeGeneres and proclaimed his support for ‘traditional marriage’—only to change his tune four years later, on an issue which arguably determined the 2004 election against the previous Democratic nominee (John Kerry) for the presidency. Christians felt that shift. They felt sidelined.
American evangelicals had collected and kept, over time, the obnoxious comments pertaining to their socially conservative values by the Left, and they were ready to cash in on the incessant questioning of their values; they knew that the vehicle would never be perfect for the mainstream audience, that irrespective of who the candidate was, their candidate would be labeled racist, homophobic, bigot—as is the case every four years—just like they had been labeled; however, this time they were all seeking a wrecking ball for candidate, a wrecking ball which would break through the caricature concoctions made of them.
A wrecking ball which would break ‘the system’; the system that they blamed for stagnating wages, a system which had ignored their inner cities; and a system which had embraced globalization at the height of a wage crisis in the country. All of these traits, coupled with an American Christianity, framed in large part by the legacy of the gospel of prosperity (which for roughly half-a-century has predicated on equating financial success with the will of God) left evangelicals imploding with frustration at an America that they did not recognize: with one candidate which represented more of the same, and another which represented a vehicle for their darkest frustrations.
