This evangelical sickness
The evangelical seduction apparatus caught me in its web in 1973 when I was in high school. Back then, there were all kinds of approved nondenominational indoctrination organisations that were permitted on campus. I suspect that’s still true? I’ve never stopped to wonder until I started writing this paragraph. Surely it must be so.
Anyway, they caught me. But it was a very different world back then. It came with no predetermined political slant, no right-wing strings attached. I was a liberal back then, and so were most of the adults who worked for the evangelical organisation that brought me in. The right-wing politics came later.
Back then we were free to imagine Nixon was the Antichrist. Later it was Reagan. After all, there were six letters in each of his names: Ronald Wilson Reagan — 666. Get it? We were easily impressed by bullshit like that.
But it was a surprisingly short step between thinking Reagan was the Antichrist and thinking he was the Second Coming. That’s the direction the evangelicals found themselves moving back then. That was right around the time I began to suspect I was in the wrong game, though not before I flirted with the dreadful self-righteous politics of the Prosperity Gospel.
But that’s another story. In any case, I can tell you this. Back then we would have known, with a kind of fanatical certainty, that Donald Trump was the Antichrist. It would have been obvious. Not only would we not have voted for him, back then someone like Trump would have never come to power. We would have made sure of that.
No, the world of the evangelicals was not ready for Donald Trump in 1973, nor was it ready even by 1983. But by 2015, the world I used to belong to was primed and ready to claim him for their very own. How blind evangelicals became in so short a time!
But that blindness was voluntary. No one forced us to change. We changed of our own accord. I just happened to notice we were all becoming pod people, and I woke up and got out just in time. Others weren’t so lucky.
People I used to know back then, people I follow from a distance on social media today, have become hateful. The kind, loving, decent people I used to know back then would not recognise themselves today. They would have been sickened and horrified and ashamed to know what they were becoming, what they have become, had someone been around to warn them.
I don’t want to oversimplify the change. It was gradual and happened in different ways to different people, of course. But the big picture did change in fact, and it began, in part, by our being taught to hate abortion.
You see, back then, outrage about abortion was a Catholic thing. We Protestants laughed at what we thought of as their silliness. Most Protestants back then — including Billy Graham(!) — were staunchly pro choice. But along came a man named Francis Schaeffer and his rabidly zealous, militant son Franky. They taught us to hate abortion. They didn’t have a lot of scripture to back it up, but they were very, very persuasive. They had convincing books and films. They turned the moral and loving people I used to know into hate-filled abominations.
Like me, Franky Schaeffer — who calls himself Frank today — woke up and realised the mistake he was making. Today he repudiates his and his father’s work. Today he feels justly guilty for the hateful bullshit he and his father taught us. But his former students became the teachers, and they no longer listen to him. The monster he created became a living, breathing thing, independent of Frank’s and his late father’s former teachings.
So today we see things that would not have been possible back in 1973. Today we see a woman like Kate Cox being forced to carry a genetically defective child to term by the state of Texas, despite the medical fact that the child will almost certainly be stillborn, despite the medical fact that Kate could have died, or possibly would never have been able to have children again.
The state of Texas is governed by men and women who were raised evangelicals, who were raised in the tradition of Francis and Franky Schaeffer, who were taught the lie that abortion is evil and who were taught it was a thing to hate. And that hatred grew up to be unreachable by logic or mercy or sanity.
Kate Cox is lucky. She is a woman with the financial means to go to another state and have an abortion. Other women won’t be so lucky. They will be caught in this inhuman trap. There is no way out for them. No way at all. They are voiceless, helpless, ultimate victims of a relentless, ruthless machine without feelings.
Steven Weinberg once wrote, “Good people can behave well and bad people can do evil. But for good people to do evil — that takes religion.” And now you see how this evangelical sickness works. Now you see how easy it is — and how little time it takes — for good people to do evil. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.