NY Times Op-Ed: Pro-Trump Christians, Never-Trump Christians, And Tim Keller

Following up on last Sunday's post, The Life, Death, And Legacy Of Tim Keller:  New York Times Op-Ed:  What Has Trump Cost American Christianity?, by Ross Douthat:

When religious conservatism made its peace with Donald Trump in 2016, the fundamental calculation was that the benefits of political power — or, alternatively, of keeping cultural liberalism out of full political power — outweighed the costs to Christian credibility inherent in accepting a heathen figure as a political champion and leader.

The contrary calculation, made by the Christian wing of Never Trump, was that accepting Trump required moral compromises that American Christianity would ultimately suffer for, whatever Supreme Court seats or policy victories religious conservatives might gain. ...

[T]he votes of religious conservatives may determine whether we get another Trump nomination in 2024. Figures as various as Ron DeSantis, Tim Scott and Mike Pence are betting that there’s a path to the nomination that involves peeling away religious voters from Trump’s coalition, beginning in Iowa, where evangelical Christians often hold the key to the caucuses. “Has Trump hurt or helped Christianity?” probably isn’t going to be the framing that the non-Trump politicians choose, but some version of that question will hang around the political battle.

So it’s useful to ponder why the intuitive answer for, say, an Iowa Republican might be very different from the natural answer in New York or Boston or Washington, D.C. Consider some recent analysis by the politics and religion writer Ryan Burge, who tried to parse whether there was any kind of “Trump effect” in religious practice after 2016. Specifically, he looked at the share of Americans who never attend church in the six years since Trump’s election compared with that share during Barack Obama’s final six years as president.

Overall, the rate of church nonattendance has been climbing for some time, so one would expect some increase independent of political conditions. But Burge finds that among Republicans, the pace of disaffiliation didn’t change much between the Obama and Trump presidencies. Among Democrats, however, there were sudden increases in how fast nonattendance rose: at a 16 percent clip, up from 3 percent in the Obama years, among Democrats born in the late 1970s, and at a 14 percent clip, up from 2 percent pre-Trump, among those born in the late 1940s, to pick just two examples.

That divergent experience maps, to some extent, onto debates between pro- and anti-Trump Christian commentators. ... [S]eeing both sides doesn’t tell you how to integrate the two perspectives. Which brings me, finally, to Tim Keller, the Presbyterian pastor, author and evangelist who passed away last Friday.

Keller was an exemplar, maybe the exemplar, of a traditional Christianity trying to witness the most liberal portions of America. He built his church, Redeemer Presbyterian, in the heart of secular Manhattan; he won converts among the city’s liberal professionals; his books and sermons and public ministry were all designed for people with secular presuppositions and a deep suspicion of traditional Christianity. But he wasn’t compromised or half-assimilated: Keller at his most influential was always an orthodox Presbyterian, which made him a conservative on sexuality and marriage and gender roles, with a consistent chorus of critics to his theological left.

During the Trump era, Keller’s way of navigating these difficult waters, especially his emphasis on the political homelessness of Christians, drew a new kind of criticism from his right. He was accused (sometimes gently, sometimes harshly) of cultivating a winsomeness that no longer had a meaningful liberal audience and failing to recognize that the time had come for sharper distinctions — a wartime Christianity, if you will.

But in fact Keller proved, until the end, that even if conditions were worsening for Christian preaching, the Gospel could still be preached effectively, and the secular intelligentsia was not yet impregnably fortified against his kind of Christianity. ...

At the same time, he sustained his mission to the liberals without becoming a thundering critic of his fellow Christians who chose a more politically combative way. It was clear enough that Keller was not a Trumpist and that Trumpism made his kind of evangelism harder, but he did not adopt resentment against populism as a central identity or obsession.

Instead, more than almost any prominent religious figure in our polarized time, he maintained “Christian” as his primary marker of identity, and left a legacy of writings and sermons and personal encounters in which the soul of the reader or listener is always the central matter and politics figures little, if at all. ...

[H]is legacy is ... proof that factionalism and partisanship need not define every religious reputation, and that for the preacher, the Christian evangelist, there are still ways to be faithful and effective that start with saying “non serviam” to right and left alike.

Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:

• More On The Life, Death, And Legacy Of Tim Keller (May 28, 2023)
• The Life, Death, And Legacy Of Tim Keller (May 21, 2023)
• Tim Keller, Forgive — Why Should I And How Can I? (Nov. 20, 2022)
• Wall Street Journal, Pastor Timothy Keller Speaks To The Head And The Heart (Sept. 11, 2022)
• Tim Keller, The Fading Of Forgiveness — Tracing The Disappearance Of The Thing We Need Most (May 16, 2021)
• Tim Keller, Christians Do Not Fit Into The Two-Party System. And That's A Good Thing. (Oct. 25, 2020)
• Wall Street Journal, Princeton Seminary Revokes Award To Tim Keller Because Of His Traditional Theological Views (Mar. 26, 2017)

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