Perdition

Hurricane Helene flooded my home state recently in a nearly-apocalyptic fashion. The death toll will be significant; entire communities have been swept away. Billions of dollars in property damage await those fortunate enough to return to homes that weren’t completely annihilated. 

As the hurricane’s wrath turned on North Carolina, I was researching for a book on 19th century Protestant ministers in North America, Britain, and Europe. Out of curiosity I looked at sermons on natural disasters, and time and again, one theme emerged: Every natural disaster—no matter who the disaster victimized—was understood to be a warning of God’s coming judgment. Whether the victims were pious or not, God’s judgment was a theme of the pastoral exhortation. Whether the victims were British farmers, or urban workers in American cities, or enslaved men and women of color, or slaveholders, no one escaped God’s judgment. 

The theme of judgment’s regularity belies the fact that for 19th century Protestants, and particularly for Presbyterians, society’s near-constant moral unworthiness in the eyes of a thrice holy God formed an essential pastoral polemic. The awesomeness and totality of God’s judgments associated with nature’s power left humans awed by God’s power and their respective unworthiness. The tragedy of the Fall and God’s holiness come in to sharp relief at such moments. It is what prompts the mournful lament of the tragedy of human life in the Book of Common Prayer: “there is no health in us.” In our world we call these hard to understand providences “tragic,” with good reason.

Conservative Christians, particularly Protestant Evangelicals, seem comfortable with understanding natural disasters as tragic. Our understanding of tragedy is too limited though; natural disasters, disease–those are tragedies, we tell ourselves, because we are powerless to stop them. Anything we might have agency in, however, like politics, is often shunted out of tragedy and into the biennial justifications Christians use to justify voting for candidates–usually but not always Republicans–as the “right” thing to do. Right, in this paradigm, always being divinely blessed, rightly ordered, morally justified, etc. We can’t conceive that our own politics might be a part of an unstoppable mess that might be part of God’s judgment, because conservative Evangelicals have ceased to see themselves as worthy of God’s judgment. Big families, good Christian school or homeschool curricula, and ensuring our communities aren’t in close association with the hallmarks of Blue America leaves us all too convinced that we are worthy of heaven, instead of still being sinners in the hands of a holy God. 

And so Evangelicals seem unwilling to think that our politics, even our conservative politics, might be essentially tragic. It is of a very different sort than the natural disasters visiting the southeast and the toll it takes on American life will be different. Even so, the 2024 presidential campaign is a type of tragedy. For many Evangelicals, choosing between the two is a near-existential psycho-intellectual crisis. Because we lack an understanding of the tragic, we tend to think that everything we do must somehow be "redemptive." Many have been taught to think about politics “biblically” by parents who thundered against the infidelities and immoral policies of Bill Clinton, only to see those same parents make a positive case for voting for moderately pro-choice, twice divorced, noted philandering, largely irreligious, Donald Trump. For these evangelicals, their tribe’s hypocrisy is galling, and they’ve turned against Trump as a sort of protest vote. 

Evangelical #NeverTrumpers aren’t necessarily wrong, but their reaction illustrates they’ve conceded the essential—and inaccurate—beliefs about evangelicalism their parents had. Evangelicals have not been bedrocks of conservative politics historically, nor have they been the massively influential religiously unified voting bloc their proponents and opponents claim they’ve been. Evangelicalism has always been a mass social movement with little in the way of churchly or ecclesiastical commitments. Historically, evangelicals were not especially curious about how the exercise of the franchise related to the church, preferring instead clericalist anathematization—often from pastors who ruled autocratically over “independent churches”—instead of meaningful ecclesiology. Those selfsame pastors who lamented the sins of modern America also participated in it enthusiastically. D. G. Hart in his From Billy Graham to Sarah Palin cited conservative intellectual George Nash’s observation that “evangelicalism was a form of Christianity essentially uncritical of modernity, since as a mass movement itself born-again Protestantism depended for its very well-being upon social forces such as mass communication, political and economic centralization, and cultural homogeneity that sustained the social and cultural ills evangelicals lamented.”

Evangelicals’ lack of a systematic understanding of the relationship—or non-relationship—between the church, elections, and politicians led to de facto theocratic politics wherein ministers or so-called “ministry leaders” wedded spiritual pronouncements to political ones. The vote—a decidedly non-spiritual act if ever there was one—became a sort of sacrament for 80s and 90s Moral Majority evangelicals convinced that they had a spiritual duty to redeem America. This redemption, however, was somehow both political and spiritual, leading evangelicals to assume that there was somehow an inevitable and specific policy end to the sanctified private and public Christian life. This deeply confused and wildly inconsistent polemic is what allowed Christians in good faith to baptize not voting for Bill Clinton and then two decades later to baptize voting for Donald Trump, two men whose positions on abortion and whose personal morality are largely equivalent. 

The dispositional theocracy practiced by evangelicals misses the essential point that politics, and the vote, is far from sacred. And the tendency to sacralize something as base as politics—or something as essentially secular as voting for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris—illustrates the poverty of the evangelical imagination regarding the reality of tragedy. Our politics—like natural disasters—are essentially tragic. Christ speaks to this reality when he references the collapse of the tower of Siloam in St Luke’s Gospel. 

Or those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed them: do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who lived in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.

Repentance is what saves people, not their relative moral superiority, cultural superiority or their adherence to religious custom as such. Red staters suffered in Hurricane Helene; libs did too. Lest we repent, all of us will suffer spiritual death, no matter our politics, no matter our culture. Put simply, who we vote for won’t save us from natural disaster, from political disaster, or from eventual perdition. 

Evangelical treatment of politics as nearly sacramental, rather than a part of temporal or natural life, has left them unable to conceive of political tragedy. Greg Wolfe in Image sees this as an essentially American failing, and he’s probably right. “My youthful, earnest religiosity” Wolfe writes, papered over “an abyss of waste and horror with innocuous pieties.” 

Naturally, this got me thinking, not only about the way that religion can become a set of blinders, but about my own experience, which had involved its share of personal tragedy. It also set me on a search for a faith that can encompass tragedy without reducing it to a meaningless episode, something left behind and forgotten in the larger story of redemption.

Over the intervening years I’ve become convinced that we all refuse tragedy at our peril, whether we are believers or not. The strange truth is that tragedy is largely absent from the pews and bookstores of the postmodern West. We study it in old books and plays, and we use it casually to refer to plane crashes and early deaths from cancer, but the full-blooded thing itself is gone. The absence of the tragic sense of life is killing us.

Evangelicals seem convinced that they could never be a part of a national political tragedy, and their refusal to concede the essentially tragic nature of American politics is to their peril. Every succeeding generation of evangelicals, left right and center, seem convinced that salvation lies in their own political exertions, seemingly unaware that they too could be a part of a national political tragedy, wherein God’s judgment comes on the moral and immoral, on the pious and impious. There are cases, I am sure, to be made for voting for Trump, and that is who most of my tribe will tend towards. Maybe it is necessary. Maybe it is prudent. But don’t tell me it is anything other than tragic that either of the two leading candidates for the presidency will eventually govern the American republic. 

One of my favorite movies is Sam Mendes’ 2002 film Road to Perdition. In what is perhaps the film’s moral crescendo, Chicago mobster Michael Sullivan pleads with his boss John Rooney—a noble man in many ways—to let him take revenge on Rooney’s son Connor for killing Sullivan’s wife and child in cold blood. Rooney—played to perfection by an octogenarian Paul Newman—concedes the rightness of Sullivan’s desire for justice but reminds him that he is still Connor’s father, and he can’t let Sullivan kill his son. When Sullivan reminds Rooney of the gravity of his son’s sins, Rooney snaps at him. “There are only murderers in this room! Michael, open your eyes! This is the life we chose—the life we lead. There is only one guarantee. None of us will see heaven.” 

As Americans go to the polls, we do so living the reality of a political tragedy. There are only despots on the ballot; this is the political life the American republic has chosen, and the life it is leading. There is only one guarantee. If God chooses to weigh us only by our electoral choices, none of us will see heaven.