The "God's Not Dead" Syndrome in the Era of Trump

In 2014, the film God's Not Dead came out to moderate fanfare. In it, a Christian college student named Josh (Shane Harper) takes a philosophy class from a professor (Mr. Radisson, played by Kevin Sorbo), whose goal for the semester is to convince his students that there is no God. The movie culminates in a debate over the existence of God between Josh and Radisson. Josh wins the debate and convinces his class that God exists, and the movie ends with a Christian rock concert.
 
In and of itself, there is little original to it. It was made by veteran Christian film maker David A.R. White, and the plot is similar to that of the first film that he produced, End of the Harvest (1998). Such stories exist in various forms and have for decades as folk legends in American religious communities. Since then God's Not Dead has generated two sequels. God's Not Dead 2, flips the script: a Christian history teacher (played by Melissa Joan Hart) in a public school is threatened with the loss of her job and faces a lawsuit for supposedly proselytizing while answering a student's question about whether or not Rev. Marin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi's commitment to non-violence had any connection to the teachings of Jesus. In the end, the teacher is vindicated and returns to the classroom. (For the record, the scenario is absurd--the teacher answered a student's question in a fine way and the lawsuit appears entirely spurious). 

Whether it is the teacher or the student that is being persecuted in these movies, however, the central point of these tales remains the same: evangelical Christians are persecuted in our society, but the persecutors are continually confounded because of God's work to preserve them.

This narrative is repeated so often because it resonates deeply with many evangelicals. The Christian scriptures were written by a persecuted religious minority, so they speak to the experience of the oppressed. Among many evangelicals, there is a sense that they do not fit into the world. While that might be expected because of the Biblical narrative, for many this is experienced as a loss of cultural influence. There is a tremendous amount of change taking place and the difficulty of knowing what is socially acceptable to say, and what will lead to social stigma, creates meaningful anxiety. As in the God's Not Dead movies, critics of reasonable Christians are associated with the political left (the ACLU plays a key role in the prosecution of Hart's character in God's Not Dead 2). Often, the phantom of a hegemonic "political correctness" is identified as threatening normal people's ability to speak. While refusing to bow to the supposedly fragile egos of millennial "snowflakes," evangelicals demonstrate their own fragility in outrage at hearing the occasional "happy holidays" in lieu of "Merry Christmas."

It is worth noting that the trope of the marginalization of Christmas in American culture goes back to the 1920s, and that the only time Christmas was banned in North America was in the seventeenth century by the Puritans in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The sense of persecution that I like to call the "God's Not Dead Syndrome" is not actually fear of legal persecution for most people, but rather of social discomfort. The First Amendment certainly protects religious speech, but it does not guarantee that everyone will treat you the same way regardless of what you say. The discomfort of not knowing how one's words will be received is real, but it is also not a legal threat.

As the God's Not Dead movies demonstrate, however, these fears are concentrated not around private speech, but around speech in public spaces, and especially in the classroom. As evangelicals feel that their dominant position within American culture is threatened, they worry that the next generation will lose their faith through subversive education.

This fear has a long tradition.

The Catholic Archbishop of New York, John Hughes (popularly known as "Dagger John"), fought a legal battle to prevent the public school society of New York City from teaching of protestant theology from the protestant King James Version of the Bible in the 1840s; his argument that this violated the freedom of conscience of students' and their parents led to the creation of non-sectarian public education. Seeking Catholic education for students, he played a key role in developing the parochial school system and founded the institution that became Fordham University.

An Anti-Catholic political cartoon from c.1871, criticizing the Irish for removing the Bible from public schools.

Similarly, the rise of American fundamentalism around the turn of the twentieth century was driven by a sense that education was a threat to the truth of Christianity. It was defensive, oriented toward preserving the "fundamentals" of the faith from the twin errors of Biblical higher criticism (especially the work of German theologians) and Darwinian evolution.

A Fundamentalist cartoon from The King's Business (1922), showing modernism, held up by denial of the Bible and Darwinism, working to break the foundation of Christian civilization through its assault on the church and schools.

In this cartoon, first published in 1922 and then used in Seven Questions in Dispute by William Jennings Bryan, modernists are depicted as descending through a variety of heresies on their way to atheism. Note that the most advanced modernist is dressed in the academic regalia of a professor.

One response to this threat was the enactment of laws that prevented the teaching of evolution in public schools. The Scopes Trial came out of a challenge to such a law in Tennessee by the ACLU, and despite the fact that Scopes lost, the event was a publicity nightmare that further reinforced fundamentalists' sense of cultural marginalization.

Understanding how deeply this persecution narrative pervades evangelical thought is essential to making sense of the posture of evangelicals in the era of Trump. There have been several stories noting the strain of fear and defensiveness among evangelicals and conservatives. Some of these reflections were inspired by Attorney General Jeff Sessions' description of the state of religious liberty in the US in his announcement of the creation of the Religious Liberty Task Force last month:

Let us be frank. A dangerous movement, undetected by many, is now challenging and eroding our great tradition of religious freedom. There can be no doubt. This is no little matter. It must be confronted and defeated. This election, and much that has flowed from it, gives us a rare opportunity to arrest these trends. Such a reversal will not just be done with electoral victories, but by intellectual victories....

But in recent years, the cultural climate in this country--and in the West more generally--has become less hospitable to people of faith. Many American have felt that their freedom to practice their faith has been under attack.

What's striking here is that Sessions describes the administration as having to push back against widespread religious persecution. But while he points to a number of lawsuits that were identified as problematic in his speech, each one was resolved in a way that conforms to Sessions' understanding of religious liberty as it should be. Sessions' identifies a threat that is not ultimately political, but rather "intellectual" and driven by a "cultural climate." Although the pitch is usually framed as one of protecting Christians from the state, Sessions seems to be making a different claim: The US government is the friend of Christians (the lack of examples of the persecution of non-Christian religious groups in his address is significant) and protects them from the other forces in our society that would undermine their ability to practice their faith.

And to an extent, this makes sense. Recent supreme court cases have emphasized the protection of religious liberty (Burwell v. Hobby Lobby and Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, among others) and the GOP controls all three branches of the federal government and all three branches of 26 state governments (for comparison, democrats control eight state governments and the rest have divided government). Religious conservatives are politically dominant and Sessions is suggesting that this will preserve them from persecution.

The use of state power to strengthen Christianity seems an odd result of the God's Not Dead Syndrome. Certainly, it is different from what we heard during the Obama administration. Nevertheless, I suspect we will continue to see it deployed by the Trump administration to encourage white evangelicals to show up and vote in coming elections.