Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation

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Sarah Palin and the Republican Party’s Sharp Turn From Conservatism

In this excerpt from Jon Ward's Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation, the journalist remembers how John McCain's choice of a running mate showed how he and his family diverged on politics

Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin delivers her vice presidential acceptance speech for the Republican party at the XCel Center during the Republican National Convention. Shepard Sherbell/Corbis/Getty Images

The day the Republican Party took one of its sharper turns away from conservatism I didn’t notice it at first. It was August 29, 2008. I was with my parents in Bethany Beach, Delaware. It was a hot, sunny day— another scorcher — and before we walked up to the ocean to spend the day swimming and reading and talking, we heard that John McCain was going to announce his running mate that morning. We crowded around the television to watch Sarah Palin make her national debut at a rally in Dayton, Ohio. I was intrigued and generally favorable about McCain’s choice. My dad was very excited, as my sister and I both remember.

Five days later, I was 1,200 miles away inside XCel Energy Center in St. Paul, Minnesota, watching Palin give her speech at the convention. My bosses had assigned me to cover the four-day event, and it was the first national party convention I’d ever attended. I lapped up the spectacle for the first few days, and on the convention’s third and penultimate night, I watched from a great seat off to the side in the massive hall as Palin strutted to center stage and blew the roof off the place. It was hard not to be impressed with her raw charisma. The packed arena was electric. But I watched her with an eye that was in the process of being trained in objective critical thinking. The Washington Times [where I then worked] was conservative and severely biased on a few issues, but it took journalism seriously. I was still getting an education in how to view politics prophetically. And when I use the term prophetic, I don’t mean I was being taught how to tell the future. I was being taught how to tell the truth. Because of this tutelage, I had earned more discernment. I had a lot more to acquire, and still do. But I was a different person that night in 2008 than I had been just a few years before.

Because of these experiences, when I crowded around the TV with my family in Bethany Beach, I was on a different path than my parents and siblings. Growing up, I had never been taught to think much about politics. Politics was a dirty word, beneath us Christians. I did not vote in 1996, the first presidential election in which I was eligible. I paid little attention to the 2000 election. In 2004, I cared a little and voted for George W. Bush. In 2008, I didn’t vote, but that was because I had come to believe that journalists shouldn’t vote in elections they covered. It’s likely I would have voted for McCain.

Like others in our church culture, I didn’t think of myself as all that political. But because of my background, I was actually quite political, in that I was a knee-jerk Republican. I was still under the spell of my upbringing, which had taught me there was nothing to think about. Just vote GOP. This dismissal of thinking carefully was based on the notion that because Democrats support abortion, voting for any Democrat was unthinkable.

By 2008, I had come to believe that American Christians who despised politics were making a grave mistake. But I still retained a fairly black-and-white view of Democrats, though that was becoming harder as I met more actual Democrats who were real people and who were doing good in the world. I had not yet come to believe, as I do now, that dismissing politics was in fact an un-Christian thing. The attitude that Christians shouldn’t put too much thought or time or passion into “worldly” things like politics ignored one of the core teachings of Christianity: to fight for the marginalized, the oppressed, the weak, and the subjugated.  

Ignoring politics is possible for those who are comfortable, have enough to eat, do not worry about where they will sleep or what they will wear, and are not victims of injustice. It is a luxury to check out.

However, politics has high stakes for those who are on the margins or being abused, because often they need the government to step in, and they need advocates to help them get the assistance they need. We had taken Christ’s message — “whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me” (Matt. 25:40) — and limited the application to only one group of the weak and defenseless, the unborn. My church culture then made excuses for why the other groups—the poor, racial minorities, drug addicts, prisoners, refugees, and immigrants — were to blame for their own misfortune. We ignored the ways in which many people fell into suffering and hardship because they lacked the safety nets that others were given at birth, often related to family support in various forms.

Palin’s emergence marked a more aggressive rejection of humility, nuance, and the prophetic edge that put Christian principles and self-sacrifice before power and political tribe. It was a doubling down on an us against them view. She appealed to the most populist, anti-intellectual, and nativist instincts on the right. She had little in the way of qualifications for the job of vice president, and even less for the presidency. But she could give a good speech.

Republicans countered that Obama was no different. It was true that he was less experienced than most American presidents. But Obama and Palin thought about the world in very different ways. Palin’s approach was to oversimplify everything and to lean hard into scapegoating the other side. She insinuated that her opponents were foreign, dangerous, and immoral. In contrast, Obama saw the world as a complicated place. He seemed to be introspective and self-critical. I wasn’t that impressed with his speeches, and I thought he put too much faith in his own point of view and could be annoyingly self-righteous. But there was far more self-doubt in him than in Palin. He emphasized the common good. Palin preached tribalism.

For someone like Palin, truth was something we already knew. It was settled and beyond questioning, and the job was to fight against the godless heathens who refused to acknowledge it. For someone like Obama, the fight was not so much against people as it was to strive toward a clarity that was elusive. He was sure of his proposals but less dogmatic about ultimate things, knowing our limitations, understanding that we each see through a glass dimly. He didn’t always live up to the standards for political combat that I held, especially in 2012, when his campaign cut Mitt Romney to pieces with a series of caricatures that I thought were unfair.

But Palin’s rise took a party already imbalanced against the weak and made it more hostile to those on the margins. It also intensified an antiestablishment attitude. Palin’s lack of knowledge and experience prompted her, when called out by the press, to double down on her inexperience and to claim it was an asset. Many conservative Christians already thought that expertise was bad and that insiders were inherently corrupt simply because they were insiders. Palin encouraged that thinking.

Both the ignorance and the combativeness came from the same Gnostic scorn that most Christians held for anything that was not explicitly Christian. White conservative Christians viewed most of the political world as tainted and beyond redemption, so why would anyone want to know anything about it anyway? And there was a sizable number of Christians who, while lamenting the decline of America into a growing godlessness, would also interpret decline and even catastrophe as good, because those things hastened the return of Christ, the rapture which would usher us out of this world and into the next. This was a confused and dark nihilism mixed with a Darwinian “survival of the fittest” individualism.

C. J. MAHANEY’S CHURCH — THE ONE I’D GROWN UP IN — now comprised congregations all over the country and was beginning to spread into other nations and continents, with at least twenty-eight thousand members. He was speaking around the country and publishing books.

C. J. and the other church leaders called themselves the apostolic team. The original apostles were the dozen chosen disciples who lived and traveled with Jesus. After his death, other apostles were chosen to continue the work of the faith. But it was always a select, small group. Becoming an apostle, or thinking of oneself as one, carried with it massive implications for the infallibility of one’s judgment. This imbued these self-proclaimed modern “apostles” with a sense of righteousness and bestowed on them incredible authority over others.

C. J. had installed Josh Harris as senior pastor of Covenant Life Church in 2004. Harris was thirty by that time, having worked at the church for seven years. Harris was someone who wouldn’t push very hard against anything C. J. wanted. But the leadership around C. J. was fraying. C. J. and Sovereign Grace Ministries had retreated from political or public engagement years before, but he could not escape the politics within his own leadership structure. He was being caught in a trap of his own making. The culture of hypersensitivity to any possible sins—in oneself and others—was being turned against him.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Lou Engle and Ché Ahn — two other leaders who had helped start my childhood church — continued to move in a more political direction, even though they were much farther away from the nation’s capital than C. J. was. Engle’s antiabortion rhetoric became more violent and threatening. “The Bible says that no atonement can be made for . . . innocent blood that is shed except the blood of the one who shed it,” Engle wrote in his 2011 book, The Call of the Elijah Revolution. “Does the blood of Christ release us as a nation from the bloodguilt of 44 million unborn babies?” He wrote that America could not “turn back to God” unless it ended all abortions, and he sounded ominous notes: “Make no mistake: God will deal with [abortion], either with a mercy, compassion, and prayer movement, or with a justice and judgement movement.” He concluded, “The Lord is mounting his holy war horse, and He is releasing a call. Will you ride with him?” He did not call for violence. In fact, he called for a peaceful movement of prayer and fasting. But the implication of his statements was that a violent judgment was coming if America did not repent.

Engle’s focus was also increasingly on fighting against gay rights. Engle threw himself into the debate over Proposition 8, the ballot question in California intended to ban same-sex marriage that passed in 2008 and was later overturned by a federal judge. Engle’s appeal, for some, was in his radicalism. He called on young people to give up everything to serve God single-mindedly, and he portrayed the fight to end abortion as a way to do that. He also offered his followers a chance to be part of something historic. He referred to his first gathering of young people on the National Mall as “a spiritual watershed in America’s history.” Those self-aggrandizing statements are easier to make for those who believe that God speaks directly and uniquely to them through their intuitions and dreams.

Engle was building up a national network of relationships with other religious figures and politicians. In August 2008, he appeared at a press conference with former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, who had been a leading contender for the Republican presidential nomination, and Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a DC-based right-wing advocacy group. Engle sought to build a movement that was diverse — racially and denominationally.

Engle was lukewarm about McCain at the press conference appearance, but his tone changed when McCain nominated Palin. Just before Palin debated Joe Biden in the vice-presidential debate on October 2, 2008, Engle sent an email to Palin. “Sarah, I could be wrong, but I’ve been praying for five years for an Esther, with dreams of being a Mordecai to that Esther. I believe you’re the one,” he said.

Esther, whose story is told in the Old Testament book bearing her name, was a Jewish woman who rose to become queen of Persia when the king chose her as his wife, based in large part on her beauty. But then Esther foiled a plot to kill the Jewish people hatched by the king’s adviser and helped the Jewish people living in exile in Persia avoid genocide. She won them permission to fight back as well and to kill those who intended to attack them. Esther was helped through these challenges by her cousin Mordecai. Engle’s grafting of an American political figure into the biblical mythology was his way of convincing himself, his followers, and Palin herself that she was on a divine mission from God and had God’s blessing. But the particulars of the story reflect a violent struggle against other groups. And his comparison of himself to Mordecai was clear as well: he saw himself as an adviser to those with political power.

This use of biblical stories as allegory for current events was a way to place certain political figures on a pedestal, where they could not be questioned or criticized. It was part of a trend, foreshadowing the way that other politicians would be deified using Old Testament stories several years later.

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Reprinted with permission from Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generationby Jon Ward. Copyright © 2023 by Jon Ward. Published by Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group. Used by permission.

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Order a copy of Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation here.

 

wow that is some powerful and really close to the way i feel. criticize me all you want but this is huge people are finally calling this stuff out. and you cannot accuse him of hating the church like many have done me.he did state the case way better than i did.

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Nothing is more dangerous than a religious fanatic, as every American should know by now.

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Today's "christians" need to be tough, hard nosed, militant.  We are at war.

It's time to forget all the nonsense of meekness, kindness, turn the other cheek, do unto others, charity, mercy, love.

We must fight the liberals, the immigrants, the queers, the commies.  We must defend Capitalist Jesus at all costs.