Can We Find Christian Hope in a Trump Victory?

If you’re out there biting your nails today, I don’t blame you.

If you feel like we’ve somehow crossed over into a parallel universe (and wondering when exactly we traversed the threshold, and how the hell we get back), you’re not alone.

Classic Christianity offers hope of a renewed world. Yet where’s the hope in a world where Trump can be elected not just once, but twice, and largely on the back of an apparently ‘Christian’ voting block?

THE UNDOING OF EVANGELICALISM?

Eight years ago, Trump rode the Evangelical vote to victory. That’s to his credit, in a sense: he knew just what strings to pull to bring them into line. He understood (in a way maybe those of us who grew up in Evangelicalism didn’t) how gullible they were, how easy they would be to manipulate.

On the first Tuesday in November, they lined up in droves to vote for him. That vote and their passionate defence of this man, however, added fuel to the movement some call ‘faith deconstruction’. Now, I don’t love that term. For one thing, it has lost its original meaning. For another, it leaves off the all-important reconstruction aspect so many of us have discovered. Nevertheless, whatever you want to call it, a growing stream of people starting scanning the American Evangelical room for the exit signs. Four years later, when Trump lost the 2020 election and his Evangelical supporters behaved like spoiled and petulant children who didn’t get their way, still others within the camp decided enough was enough.

Why? Because all the while, the spineless men (and yes, a few women) who held sway within Evangelicalism and their rank-and-file followers traded more and more of the moral principles and dignity they claimed to uphold for the slim promise of influence and power, the power to remake society in whatever way they saw fit. Or maybe they at last revealed that such dignity and such moral principles meant fuck all to them from the beginning. Either way, they claimed God actually wanted them to make these bargains, that God was in fact calling them to sell out. They even dug up a few carefully curated Bible verses to convince themselves.

If you’re someone who could no longer stomach this horror show; if you have watched the respect you held for your community and leaders and even family crumble; if you have pulled up stakes and left Evangelicalism behind, I salute you. Such a religious system isn’t worth your investment and such a god doesn’t deserve to be worshipped.

I pray, though, that you might find hope in the faith reconstruction mentioned above: the rebuilding of a better faith, the discovery of a better God, the revelation of better ways to be Christian.

SO… WHAT IF HE WINS AGAIN?

If Trump triumphs in this election and retakes the Oval Office, we can expect his Evangelical sycophants to continue to shovel excuses and absurd ‘biblical’ justifications onto the shit-heap of their moribund version of ‘Christianity’.

But with each successive layer, they might just bury their own system a little deeper. Perhaps another Trump presidency will show that American Evangelicalism is a long-dead corpse, the plug of whose life-support should have been mercifully kicked out of the wall decades ago, a corpse that deserves to be buried. And many more who don’t want to be buried with it may choose to escape.

So you are not alone. You are one of many, a group growing ever larger. And therein lies the hope. It’s the very realistic hope that this movement represents a paradigm shift. It’s the hope that a rebirth of robust faith – one actually interested in the words and way of Jesus, one committed to kindness and to welcoming the marginalised, one that eschews power for the slow and compassionate work of God – might arise from the scorched earth of Evangelicalism’s win-at-all-costs support for Trump.

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