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American culture is undergoing a “vibe shift.” There’s a resurgence of hope among conservatives that politics and culture will increasingly return to reality. But alongside this, there seem to be signs that the soil of society is prime to receive the word of God. This is surprising, given that for quite some time, many Christian leaders believed that evangelical support for Donald Trump would dry up any interest in the message of the gospel. For years, David French has been arguing that support for Trump is “collapsing” and “destr[oying]” Christian “witness.” In 2019, Mark Galli, editor of Christianity Today, argued that Trump should be removed from office, and he challenged evangelicals to consider “what an unbelieving world will say” if they continue to support him in spite of his moral failures. Peter Wehner has characterized evangelical support for Trump as a “bad trade” because the “world is noticing” how they have supposedly abandoned Christ’s teachings. And, of course, the most prominent figure who has regularly made such arguments in various outlets since 2015 is Russell Moore. Moore has characterized evangelical support for Trump as trading “the power of the gospel for the gospel of power,” destroying evangelistic credibility and all but guaranteeing that many will walk away from the faith.
To be fair, Trump is no moral exemplar and has not always been promising as a champion for socially conservative values: He and Melania publicly supported abortion access and IVF during the campaign; he supports gay marriage; he invited a porn star to speak at the RNC; he has had high-profile affairs and been divorced multiple times; and his mocking rhetoric can often verge on the cruel and un-Christian.
And yet, over a week into his second term, it is clear that gospel opportunities were not sacrificed on Trump’s altar; evangelical voting patterns did not devastate evangelism. In both politics and culture, there has rarely been a time when more people have been interested in Christianity. We are entering an evangelistic hot zone, especially among young men who are searching for faith and meaning on YouTube and popular podcasts. This may be the spring before an evangelistic harvest of what I call “reality-respecters.”
Just a couple of weeks ago, Wesley Huff, a popular young Christian apologist, was invited on The Joe Rogan Experience, the biggest podcast in the world. For over three hours, Huff defended the faith and presented the gospel to Joe Rogan and his millions of listeners. Amidst the digressionary journey that is a Joe Rogan episode, Huff ably defended the faith and the reliability of the biblical text using classical, left-brain arguments that many had assumed were obsolete in our postmodern age. Huff employs logic with the assumption that reality can be known—that we can have confidence about events in the past. And Rogan ate it up. Many have already speculated that this will be the most heard presentation of the gospel in world history. The conversation has 5.3 million views on YouTube, and untold millions of listens on Spotify and other podcast platforms—likely north of his 11 million listener average.
Rogan, along with many other high-profile atheists, has slid into the category of “cultural Christian.” Many of these figures express a new openness to Christianity, oftentimes for its civilizational resources, recognizing the Christian roots of the values that built the West. Some of these figures, such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, have embraced genuine faith. And these high-profile examples are merely representative of a broader phenomenon on the ground: So many regular people are exhausted by woke insanity and looking to get back to reality. There is a widespread decline of faith in materialism, and the immanent frame the secularists and atheists pushed on public consensus for decades is falling flat. Paul Kingsnorth and Russell Brand are two examples of such conversions.
Huff’s Rogan episode was released on January 7, one day after Donald Trump’s election was certified and just two weeks before the inauguration. The timing is noteworthy. Fears that Trump’s evangelical support would undermine evangelistic efforts, discredit our witness, and offend seekers are not coming to pass. That Trump’s victory did not impact evangelism the way many expected should invite us to reconsider some of our assumptions about how politics and the capacity of the church to spread the good news are related.
For too long, there’s been category confusion. Politics is its own sphere with a certain logic proper to it. Thus, it is an error to conflate our political actions with evangelistic terminology. Christians should honor Christ and love our neighbors in every sphere of life—however, this looks different in different domains. Treating your ballot as an apologetic tract is confused. Politics is not about minimizing offense in order to maximize openness to the gospel. Politics is about the prudential pursuit of justice and social order. The prudence part recognizes the reality of present options and trade-offs. We often must make choices among highly flawed options about what we believe will do the most good or the least damage. Making such a choice does not equate to worshipping a political figure or engaging in evil. That our vote might raise the ire of our political opponents is not a good reason to abstain from politics.
Politically-minded Christians have also fallen into the trap of false certainty. We have no idea how our political actions will be perceived as time goes on. It is ironic that many critics of Trump accuse his supporters of trading their faith for political expediency, of committing immoral acts because the ends justify the means. But voting for a flawed figure is not inherently immoral. One could even argue that these critics are engaging in a form of consequentialism: foregoing practical political goods in the here and now on the gamble that this will aid future evangelism. But there’s no telling if that gamble will pay off. As the saying goes: “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.”
It seems that God’s providence is at work because and not in spite of the leftist overreach of the past few years. The most unlikely people are waking up to the civilizational madness and spiritual emptiness unleashed by opposing nature and God. Those figures such as Ali and Brand are open to spiritual realities at least in part due to their clear-headed pursuit of political sanity. It is plausible that the defense of the natural order—such as the distinction between men and women, the given goodness of our bodies, or the need for common sense border enforcement and immigration policies—might make others more likely to hear our claims about supernatural realities.
We can’t be certain about what is on the horizon. But it is clear that things are not necessarily panning out according to the never-Trump jeremiads. Evangelistic opportunities were not sacrificed on the altar of political agendas. So let’s make proper distinctions, vote with prudence, and evangelize with boldness. But above all, trust the Lord—he sowed the seeds of this harvest when we weren’t even looking.
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