Donald Trump and the Church's Decaying Ivory Tower

The Pew/Pulpit split grows

As we confront the divide between Sunday and the rest of the week, that barrier which compartmentalizes the spiritual away from every other part of life, we have to go straight to the top.

It is the pulpit where this issue begins. Preaching which is overly spiritualized, avoiding the nitty gritty details of everyday life, teaches Christians to figure it out for themselves.

So they do. And then ministers are confused as to why the members see things differently than them.

The gap between the pulpit and the pew grows larger all the time.

I believe there is no greater illustrator of this point than former (and future?) President Donald Trump.

As Trump rose to prominence in 2015, #NeverTrump shortly followed. Many conservative and religious writers, led by the likes of Russell Moore and David French, warned against the man and his considerable moral failings.

It should be noted, they were correct on a number of counts. Trump was and is no role model. The Facebook memes depicting him as Jesus’ right hand man are laughably wrong.

However, as 2016’s religious elites and me and my preacher friends all railed on how awful the man was, many of our church members were crazy for him. I remember having discussions with preacher friends as we all sat baffled at how our members could support the man despite his clear shortcomings.

Maybe we just should have asked them.

But I didn’t. As it all unfolded, I had a lot of cognitive dissonance to wade through. In my nine years of pulpit ministry, some of the best men I ever served were also some of the biggest Trump supporters I’ve met. I could cynically chalk it up to “I know the Bible and they don’t,” but it went deeper than that.

They had their boots on the ground and their fingers in the dirt. They had grandkids in school who they wanted to see protected from perverse sexual curriculum and also to get a fair shot in a merit-based education and career system. They knew what returning to energy, manufacturing, and workforce independence would do for the economy. They did not care about crude language and mean tweets if it meant Roe v. Wade got overturned and the military was “de-wokified.”

In short, they were not sealed off in the ivory tower of a preacher’s office.

Fast forward eight years and you see just how impactful an election can be on the average person’s life. Inflation is out of control. The border is a turnstile. Cities are growing more unsafe all the time. Global turmoil has returned in force. Any federal road bumps to DEI and the woke agenda have been repurposed as ramps.

And yet the ivory tower is still telling Christians to stay out of cultural issues.

That you need to take on 3 side hustles to feed your family, even if it means barely seeing your wife and kids, isn’t a problem. You just love money too much.

You need to get over your opposition to infinite immigration. Jesus would welcome everybody.

Stop caring that crime has made many cities almost unlivable. Racial justice demands Christians “speak up for the oppressed” and scare the police into never enforcing the law.

And they do it all in such Gospel-ese that it sounds really spiritual.

It’s “the way of the cross” to let bad governance make it unaffordable to live. It was “loving your neighbor” to shut your mouth and comply when you and millions of others had to choose between getting medical treatment you might not have wanted or needed, or losing your livelihood. It’s “caring about your witness” to never support a candidate your kid’s trans school teacher finds abhorrent. It’s “practicing Biblical justice” to nod your head and “amen” the constant browbeating foisted on you by CRT.

And if you still stand your ground, you’re just too worldly minded. “You don’t have enough faith in God’s ability to provide,” say the men who are often too afraid to oppose the feminism in their pews because it could cost them their jobs.

No, instead of caring about any of these real world concerns, we think you’re supposed to care about our intramural lectureship politics and microscopic, fourth-level doctrinal disputes. That’s what really matters. Sure, this decline may be costing you dearly, but us super holy luminaries welcome the decline of Christianity’s influence.

The message comes through loud and clear: your Christianity requires you to ignore the physical world in favor of the spiritual.

It’s just gnosticism repackaged. And it can only take root in places sealed off (for now) from the consequences of such sophistry.

The ivory tower is crumbling. Credibility is lost because the average Christian has been left adrift, without answers in a decaying culture.

This November, the wedge will likely be driven even further as thousands of ministers warn their congregations with pietistic “not the donkey or the elephant, but the lamb” sermons, to which the members will say, “That’s nice, but I’d like to be able to afford a cart of groceries again.”

I’m sure the main takeaway for some readers will be about Trump, but he’s just the most easily identifiable manifestation of the problem. The guy was a train wreck on Covid, brags about being pro-LGBT, and has softened on abortion. Yeah, he was demonstrably better than our current president and obviously would be again, but he’s not my point here.

As Christians who live in this physical world, we can’t keep pretending it doesn’t matter.

Everything is political, and the impact on your life hour-by-hour is palpable. 1 Timothy 2 even tells us to pray for leaders who would give us breathing room to lead peaceable and quiet lives in all godliness and dignity.

If you’re still wholly fixed on the spiritual, you can extrapolate from the following verses that just rulers help pave the way for our evangelistic efforts. It’s good and proper for Christians to want leaders who make favorable conditions for Christian living, and in a system in which we have a voice it’s just as good and proper to advocate for such leaders.

The pulpit has to get in touch with the pew on issues like these or we’re going to lose our people’s ears.