The extremists you warned us about

Over the last decade, there has been so much hyperbolic fearmongering from media, academics, and some Christian leaders about the supposedly dangerous threat presented by evangelicals, many of whom dare to exercise their citizenship and vote for conservative candidates. But we should listen to the prophetic admonition about unhealthy engagement in the public square, the kind of grasping for power that Chuck Colson warned about in his still-relevant book God and Government. Any instance of taking God’s name in vain is one too many.

Yet, one must ask if the burgeoning cottage industry of books, conferences, podcasts, and films is necessary. Every year, books like The False White Gospel, Confronting Christofascism, The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy, and American Idolatry, to name a few, flood the market, making the case that American evangelicalism is a dangerous threat to democracy. These increasingly shrill voices work to blur the line between a mob who stormed the U.S. Capitol and the church ladies in our congregations thinking less about the next election and more about their next Sunday school class. Historian Mark David Hall, in his new book, Who Is Afraid of Christian Nationalism? helps to separate fact from myth. He writes of these polemics: “Their works rely more on rhetoric than arguments, and when they provide evidence, they often make erroneous or overstated claims based on it.”

Meanwhile, in the days since the horrific attacks on Israel carried out by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, we’ve seen the rise of actual extremists whose language isn’t at all coded or dog-whistled. These activists promote actual terror and anti-Semitic hatred. The wanton slaughter and sexual violence of innocent Israelis didn’t provoke sympathy from this left-wing cohort but instead motivated supportive protests in cities across the country. The same white-knuckled partisans who are quick to label evangelicals a threat often downplay these anti-Israel protests as simple advocacy for Palestine, ignoring the calls for violence against Jews. But the genocidal chants of “From the river to the sea,” “Go back to Poland,” and “Oct. 7th is just the beginning” cannot be whitewashed. On college campuses, Jewish students were harassed, locked in rooms while surrounded by violent protestors, and left unprotected by their feckless administrators. The protesters even resorted to blocking traffic in major cities.

Commentator Seth Mandel has rightly called this sad phenomenon “A Charlottesville every day.” This, of course, while many Jewish hostages still endure torture and sexual violence in Gaza at the hands of Hamas.

Christians should lament the double standard in outrage between that directed toward evangelicals and that directed toward the anti-Semites. The latter seems to engender maximal nuance and benefit of the doubt while the former is labeled a monolithic threat to American democracy. After the horrific assault on democracy on Jan. 6, 2021, led by a fringe group of extreme right-wing Americans, the national conversation automatically accepted the conventional wisdom that the roots of domestic terrorism began on Sundays in American evangelical congregations. As is the case with any incident involving a bad actor even tangentially related to Christianity, national soul-searching and introspection is demanded, even by some evangelical leaders.

Yet we have tens of thousands of radical students across the country offering, in Jonah Goldberg’s words, “material support for terrorism.” Again, we are in an environment where there is a push for national conversations but demand endless navel-gazing and doublespeak when it comes to anti-Semitism. To put it bluntly, anti-Semitism is the last acceptable bigotry in America.

Christians shouldn’t be afraid of prophetic witness and we shouldn’t be fearful of speaking out against bad actors on our own side. Like every cohort in the population, evangelicals have their share of crazy uncles. But when it comes to real threats to democracy, it’s not likely that our fellow church-attending brothers and sisters are the real threat to the American experiment. It’s more likely the mobs waving Hamas and Hezbollah signs and shouting “Death to Jews.”

For the handwringers on the left, the alarm you are hearing is coming from inside your own house.