Christianity Used to be Interesting

I was an active fellow of the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA), and went to their national meetings whenever I could, mostly in the 1990s. This organization consists of evangelical Christians who are in the sciences and who get together to exercise their brains to try to figure out possible answers to important questions about faith, science, and reason. At every meeting, you would find scholars, many from Christian colleges, struggling with questions about what God wants us to do in the world with regard to scientific topics. Just a few examples that come to mind are: What does it mean to be in the image of God, when we are biological animals? What does it mean to be created, when we clearly evolved? What should a Christian response be to the threat of nuclear war? This was a big topic at the 1988 meetings, when Richard Bube condemned nuclear war but David Siemens said, if you have nothing to die for, you have nothing to live for, as if that was relevant to the topic. What about advances in biotechnology, or to the stewardship of creation? What can we learn from the new physics about what God is doing today in sustaining the creation moment by moment? This was an important topic in the New York Metropolitan section of the ASA in 1989. I can still remember David Wilcox visibly struggling with what to believe about Adam and Eve. He was trying very hard to say that Adam was the first evolutionarily modern Homo sapiens, the primate into which God poured His spirit, but the evidence simply did not support this belief.

What the ASA focused on, very passionately, was, what would Jesus do?

And this was also the focus of many evangelical churches as well. I remember many very intellectually challenging sermons in evangelical churches in the 1980s.

That’s all gone. Instead of What would Jesus do, the only question of interest to evangelical Christians is, What would Trump do? To them, Trump is the very presence of God upon the surface of this planet. Every question has a simple answer: whatever Trump says the answer is.

This is why you never hear very much about creationism anymore, or about evangelicals attacking global warming science. Because evidence doesn’t matter any more. All that matters is Trump.

For the time being, a few evangelical Christian leaders are questioning Trump. You can read about a few of them here. One example is Mike Pence. But Pence, along with all other Republican candidates, have promised to support the eventual nominee, who will probably be Trump. Nothing else matters now. Pence will fall in line and say Yes, Lord, to Trump. In the end, the few evangelicals who oppose Trump will be silenced.

Evangelical Christianity has not only become blasphemous, but also boring. There are no more complex and challenging questions for evangelical Christian intellectuals.