Understanding evangelical priorities
Back in June, Christianity Today published this article about ICE agents going after persecuted Christians who had fled to the United States. It’s a powerful piece of journalism that rightly angered people across many different backgrounds. Here are a few excerpts to give you an idea of how this is playing out:
“Ara Torosian, an Iranian pastor at Cornerstone West Los Angeles, leads the church’s Farsi-speaking congregation. He came to the United States as a refugee 15 years ago after being imprisoned for his faith…Now, explosions were rocking Tehran and other Iranian cities, wounding and killing children and grandparents, and Torosian was shouldering new burdens from halfway across the globe.
‘There are people currently in Iran who were baptized in this very church and still listen to our sermons regularly. We are far from them,’ Torosian wrote… ‘We Farsi-speaking believers are living minute by minute with heavy hearts. We’re asking: Are our loved ones safe? Are they alive? What is happening to them?’
But five days later, the suffering of his loved ones came suddenly very close. On Tuesday, the pastor recorded on his phone as masked federal immigration agents arrested two of his church members on a Los Angeles sidewalk. The Iranian husband and wife had pending asylum cases, according to Torosian. They fled Iran for fear of persecution for being Christians and had been part of his congregation for about a year…
In Los Angeles, Torosian said the Iranian couple from his church called him for help when several men wearing US Border Patrol vests approached them near their home. As he filmed agents binding the hands of the husband, the pastor told the agents, ‘He’s an asylum-seeker…It doesn’t matter,’ one agent says in the video…Seconds later, the detained man’s wife collapses to the grass in an apparent panic attack, convulsing and hyperventilating. Torosian moves closer, attempting to comfort her. Agents tell him to keep away or face arrest himself.”
CT includes more stories from other church communities that ICE has raided, noting those being targeted often have no criminal history and were in the United States lawfully while complying with the immigration process. The reward for doing what is expected of them is arrest and deportation.
Understandably, the frustrated question how can evangelicals be okay with this? has been making the rounds ever since, as it often does when the Trump Administration acts against what white evangelicals say is one of their top priorities. Yet evangelicals have largely kept their mouths shut, just as they have countless other times over the past ten years. The obvious question, of course, is why?
Confronted by reality
It's hard to avoid the white evangelical subculture here where I live in Tennessee. I even used to be evangelical. I still count some genuinely good and kind people in the fold as friends; but, like many others who have abandoned this subculture to follow Jesus, I eventually left after having one too many run-ins with controlling and even malicious people.
It's common in white evangelical spaces to hear concern expressed for persecuted Christians, either in the context of some evangelicals believing they're persecuted –they're not, if anything evangelicals are a privileged class– or Christians living elsewhere in the world. Evangelicals even have their own organizations that claim to help persecuted Christians.
I started working professionally with persecuted people groups —including Christians— in 2012. I quickly learned that my evangelical background came with a lot of blind spots. Engrained in me was some of the brittle certainty about…well, everything…that is endemic in white evangelical spaces. The mindset in American evangelicalism that the most important things to know have been figured out (i.e. who God is and how culture should operate) easily seeps into all facets of life. Much of my own certainty was destroyed in the first few years of being around the realities of war, violence, and good people just trying to survive.
Other work experiences opened my eyes to painful truths about American evangelicalism itself. I began to sense in those early years that the handwringing for persecuted Christians was largely performative. I met other evangelicals who worked in other nonprofit and parachurch organizations who had indistinguishable experiences: endless requests from white evangelical churches for stories and information that were always provided, but little to no people or resources flowing back to help. Prayer was rarely followed up with substantive action. Missions pastors tended to be the most frustrating to deal with, often times leading us on despite knowing that members of their church and they themselves would not be getting involved. It was also difficult to ignore that some churches seemed to covet having our respect when we visited, not so subtly expecting us to help them feel good about themselves.
As the years ticked by I watched one peer after another give up on white evangelical churches as sources of tangible help and practical support. I eventually did, too. There have always been exceptions, of course. The one church here; the handful of people over there. Again, I still have evangelical friends who walk the walk; however, especially during 2020 and the aftermath, most of them understand they’re the exception to the larger reality I’ve laid out above. Most have left a church because of it.
It’s easy to view this verbal emphasis on persecuted Christians and lack of substantive action as hypocrisy, even more so now in the face of mass deportations. Hypocrisy may play a role, but there are systemic reasons for how priorities emerge in evangelical spaces and the disparity between words and deeds on a whole host of issues. Let’s explore this first in broader evangelical culture before examining the institutional underpinnings and the end results.
Surveying the cultural disparities
There’s a lot of sameness among white evangelicals, but variation does exist. While most white evangelicals are in close lockstep when it comes to politics and cultural beliefs, there is a lot of diversity when it comes to theology. This is not an anecdote, although stories abound. In their 2022 State of Theology report, evangelical bastions Ligonier Ministries and LifeWay Research noted that there is much stronger cohesion on social, political, and cultural issues —92-94% abortion and sex outside of traditional marriage are sins— than there is on core theology, such as 43% of evangelicals strongly or somewhat believing the statement “Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God.” Historical evangelicalism and even today’s evangelical institutions say the latter claim is heresy, pure and simple.
Theology and beliefs play a role in evangelical spaces, but to what end? Hard data and lived experience suggest both usually exist in service to cultural and political aims, regardless of if the theology is good or bad. Most white evangelicals say the Bible is the source of their cultural beliefs, believing their own interpretation is what the Bible says. From pastors to those in the pews, this is easy to see in endless calls to be biblical, with calls to be Christlike rarely heard. When a specific interpretation of Scripture comes before Jesus or replaces Him altogether, priorities inevitably shift to culture warring.
Regardless of the issue —immigration, criminal justice, civil governance, marriage, sex, gender…you name it— at this point it’s clear most white evangelicals work backwards from their cultural desires to the Bible, searching for prooftexts to create slapdash theology that supports pre-existing views. Put simply: many evangelicals have already decided what the Bible says before they even read it. That brittle certainty I mentioned above? This is where it comes from. When you’re so certain you already have the absolute truth that you aren’t curious about what Jesus says first, much less other parts of the Bible, then different points of view rooted in Scripture will make you feel deeply disrespected and disoriented.
This also shows that the disparity between words and deeds can’t simply be ascribed to hypocrisy. Pay close attention to what’s happening here: this is ultimately about what evangelicals want Truth to be. If being Christlike isn’t the goal —again, evangelicals constantly say it isn’t; they want to be biblical as they define the term instead— then following a set of rules, saying the right words, and performing certain roles is the logical end result. One might call this a kind of attempt at civil religion, but I’m not sure you can call it faith.
You don’t have to take my word for any of this. Even some of the most notable voices in American evangelicalism have pointed out this problem and what the results of it are. The late evangelical theologian and pastor Tim Keller once wrote of this:
“Recognizing these ‘two addresses’ of evangelicalism (theological and sociological) helps us discern something important. Within the framework of the four theological marks, what I’ll call the six social marks of evangelicalism can be stronger or weaker. The term “fundamentalism” was one way used in the past to describe those who hold these social traits very strongly:
Moralism vs. gracious engagement: Strict conformity to behavioral codes. Secondary doctrines made primary with resulting self-righteousness. Everything is either wholly good or wholly evil, leading to withdrawal from society. A spirit of condemnation. Separatism and sectarianism. No ability to engage opposing views with patience, humility, hope, and tolerance.
Individualism vs. social reform: Belief that we are wholly the result of our personal choices. Little understanding of how culture forms us or of evil systemic or institutional forces.
Dualism vs. a vision for all of life: A pitting of biblical beliefs against culture. Either we seek a hostile takeover or we seal off Christian beliefs from our work and life in society. No thought for how faith shapes the way we work in the secular spheres and how it can serve society.
Anti-intellectualism vs. scholarship: A distrust of experts, reverse snobbism against education, and distrust of any result of scholarship or research that isn’t believed as “common sense” to most people. Skepticism of science. A refusal to show other viewpoints any respect. A shallow commonsense approach to biblical interpretation that ignores the biblical author’s intended meaning in the original context and the scholarship that helps us discern it.
Anti-institutionalism vs. accountability: A distrust of traditional institutions. The use of celebrity-driven, brand-driven platforms and networks that lead to fast growth but low accountability. A tendency toward authoritarianism.
Enculturation vs. cultural reflection: A wedding of Christianity to popular, traditional U.S. culture. Three features: (1) Gender exaggeration: due to fundamentalism’s tendency to ‘baptize’ American culture, there’s a legalistic tendency toward nonbiblical gender stereotypes (especially those of the 1950s), a denigration of women, and coverup of abuse; (2) Nationalism: a ‘God and Country’ ethos that rejects reflection on the dark sides of U.S. history and society and expresses fear of a multiethnic future; (3) Racism: often overt, but at the very least a racial and cultural insensitivity and cluelessness.”
Hypocrisy alone can’t explain the discrepancies between words and deeds in white evangelicalism. In fact, there may not be much hypocrisy at all. The chasm is the direct result of what the culture and beliefs are. Virtue signaling to show one is adhering to the tenets of white evangelical cultural is the point; it far outweighs substantive action and even historical evangelical theology. While those on the outside may look at white evangelicals and say You aren’t living out your values, what the core values actually are suggests they mostly are living their values. It certainly explains why evangelicals speak loudly about persecuted Christians and a myriad of other issues, with little to no action, especially action that would cost them in any real way.
The issue here seems to be us not understanding how priorities emerge, rise, and fall in evangelical spaces, a problem we now turn to.
Examining institutional underpinnings
Despite the overwhelming emphasis on the individual and nuclear family at the expense of community and institutions in white evangelical culture, institutions still very much play a critical role, mostly by internally enforcing the culture described above and projecting it outward for political and social gain. This plays out across white evangelicalism, from publishers to online platforms, to parachurch organizations to influencers, to denominations to individual churches. It’s a symbiotic relationship —a populist group putting their leaders and institutions on a pedestal, and leaders and institutions protecting the populist group and waging culture wars on their behalf— ensuring that change is all but impossible in evangelical spaces and locking in new cycles of self-radicalization along the way.
To understand how this works, let’s briefly return to how the word biblical gets thrown around in white evangelical spaces. When many of us hear this term our minds go to the stories of Jesus, ancient cultures, scholarship, wisdom literature, literary myth, and the myriad of other beautiful things contained in the pages of the Bible. In white evangelicalism, biblical simply means the culture we desire and seek to impose on others. It’s a useful tool leaders wield institutionally to shut down internal dissent and defend against external criticism, demanding obedience from all along the way. Words like biblical are degraded into being propaganda, and sometimes used to target people who have legitimate questions and concerns. In some white evangelicals spaces the term biblical is increasingly thrown out with no effort even to find a prooftext.
Once you see this it’s impossible to unsee, but it also shows how shifting priorities are decided, popularly ranked, and enforced in white evangelical spaces. Going back to the beginning, many evangelicals say they care deeply for persecuted Christians and missions because they are in a subcultural context that tells them they do, with little to no regard for evidence to back up the claim. But how exactly do they come to believe this?
That largely depends on where you find yourself in white evangelicalism, but commonalities are easy to spot, especially in churches. Parachurch ministries that may or may not provide direct aid to persecuted Christians have their literature prominently displayed in church foyers and are featured in internal communication. The pamphlets usually gather dust over time, with many congregants not noticing just how little of their church’s budget is dedicated to such work. Prayer gatherings for persecuted Christians are sparsely attended. Missions pastors do most of the outreach and communication, with only a handful of congregants actively participating in the work, and only a fraction of members attending the annual missions conference. Visiting organizations and missionaries heap gratitude on a church that throws table scraps their way, knowing they’ll likely lose what little they are getting if they point to the flaws in this system, much less push for more funding. The congregation pats themselves on the back after feeling admired and offers to pray for more resources, with no plans on providing them even when they are in a position to do so. Having minimal knowledge of persecuted peoples is confused for being tangibly involved.
The common theme here is that, institutionally and culturally, there is the appearance and performance of caring at a high level. But this is a far cry from doing the ongoing, sacrificial hard work of building relationships with those in need and serving them in the ways they’ve asked to be served. Living vicariously through the work a few others do instead of moving toward persecuted Christians and neighbors who need help is not the same thing as caring at a high level, even if the environment you are in loudly says its a top priority.
With institutional backing, cultivating a good witness has been replaced by apologetics, attempts to seize the reins of public policy, and a craving for cultural domination. Celebrity pastors, influencers, and pundits in the evangelical consumer culture supplanted Jesus, prophets, and the more reasonable among the pastoral class. What one wants to be true or who one hates is the witness, not loving God and neighbor. Defending being biblical has replaced sharing the Good News. Inside an evangelical institution, you can have an array of beliefs on historic first order doctrines, but much less wiggle room when it comes to modern secondary ones that pertain to culture. This is how you end up with a sizable minority of evangelicals doubting the divinity of Jesus and that apparently being just fine, but a large majority having absolute certainty around the need to wage total war to keep women out of church leadership.
It’s also why a large percentage of a church’s funding and people stay inside the church, while only a small amount and number get out the doors to try to help persecuted Christians and neighbors in need.
Closing Thoughts
None of this means that every single white evangelical has zero concern for persecuted Christians. I know from experience that at least some do, a handful even seriously so. I just don't think anyone should be surprised the large majority of evangelicals are silent about persecuted Christians being deported. Helping such people in tangible ways is simply not a high priority in most white evangelical spaces. Many evangelical churches in this country exist for themselves and to foist their culture on others. It’s engrained in evangelical milieu and rooted in institutional rules, spoken and unspoken. It is what it is.
Yet all of it feels biblical to those on the inside. It’s purity culture beyond sex and gender, applied to pretty much everything. With Trump and co. fighting the key evangelical culture wars on their behalf, it is simply more clear now just how low of a priority helping persecuted Christians is to evangelicals.
Perhaps a metaphor would be helpful to wrap this up. Remember those House of Mirrors attractions you used to find at carnivals, fairs, and amusement parks? You walk inside and every wall is a mirror, a maze of them, actually. Your reflection and the mirror images of others are everywhere. Notably, you can’t see the outside world, much less around the next corner. Reality as you sense it has been warped and severely restricted. The music playing overhead and the voices you hear around you sets the whole vibe, leading to feelings that range from fun to anxiety-inducing, feelings you have little control over. It is difficult to find a way out because it all feels the same.
Living inside of white evangelicalism is like being in a self-referential House of Mirrors. Beliefs and actions reflect back in on themselves. The illusion of having the truth and knowing your way around has replaced the humble pursuit of both. Everything more or less looks the same, with one mirrored corner giving way to another. The voices of others who believe as you do and the drone of the larger evangelical consumer culture shapes your mood and decides what and who you should care about, and how much you should care. You hear we are concerned about persecuted Christians, so it must be true. There are, after all, two or three people your church “supports” who work with such people. Surely our prayers are leading to larger financial support and more volunteers and advocates for those ministries, but you’re being told to focus on this urgent culture war instead, so you never get around to asking.
All of it comes together, blinding you from the true reality of what you are a part of. The outside world sounds close, but it is in fact very distant. This is Gospel living. This is absolute truth. This sinful world fails to see we are just being biblical.
The bottom line here has little to do with hypocrisy: 8 in 10 white evangelicals voted for this Trump Administration, knowing full well the horrors they would commit and illegal activity they would attempt. Evangelicals found an ally who told them he would fight to make America biblical and ensure they are respected again. These priorities far outweigh anything and anyone else, including the status of people white evangelicals would be right to care about. These priorities far outweigh Jesus, too.
I don’t have answers for any of this; however, as someone who was once in this subculture, I have empathy for those still on the inside who can sense something is off, but can’t put their finger on exactly what it is. This is a cultural system designed to blind you from truth, prevent change, camouflage nationalism, and squash questions and critiques. It’s designed to keep you in the metaphorical House of Mirrors.
Misleading stories always give way to malformed spirits, perhaps especially when you are unaware it’s happening. This is true for anyone whether we are evangelical or not. How much more so when people with power over you don’t have the interests of God’s Kingdom at heart, or your best interests at heart?
If there is an answer it certainly starts with Jesus. Listening to other kinds of Christians can help us in understanding that, such as this recent interview Stephen Colbert gave about his faith as a Catholic. The whole conversation is worth watching; but, if you’re pressed for time, I’ve set the video to begin at the part most relevant to everything here.
“…really, to be able to look at something from another point of view, you can't actually accept the context. Respectability comes from context. You have to stand outside of the context of your society and look at it from the side. And you know what? That's something that being a Catholic helps you do, and I'll tell you why.
Look what's happening with our nation right now. Who knows what the next few years are going to bring? It seems like a fair amount of turmoil. Who knows? I could be wrong. I hope I'm wrong.
I actually want every president to be successful. It hasn't started off great. And God help us, if the United States stopped existing…because everything stops existing eventually…if it stopped existing, my church would not. But what frightens me about knocking down the separation of church and state is not what it does to my country, as much as I don't want that to happen for my country, is that what it does to my faith. It's not getting religion in my politics. It's getting politics in my religion.
And so if you're a Christian nationalist and the nation fails, it sounds like you got a pretty bad Christ over there. It sounds like you got a weak Christ over there. You know what I mean? What does it say about the message of the Gospel if a mere market fluctuation could damage the reputation of the Lord? That's why you have to keep a separation of church and state.
This is not a Catholic nation because the Catholic Church is not about nations. And that's one of the light of eternity, non-respectability things that I expect because the church is not respectable. The church is eternal. They're different. And respectability comes from a cultural context of the moment. And it's important to not get caught in that trap, to try to see things in the light of eternity, not in the cultural context of the moment.”
A road to freedom out of the Evangelical House of Mirrors begins here. It brings to mind the paradox of freedom Paul writes about in Galatians 5:
“You were running well; who prevented you from obeying the truth? Such persuasion does not come from the one who calls you. A little yeast leavens the whole batch of dough. I am confident about you in the Lord that you will not think otherwise. But whoever it is that is confusing you will pay the penalty. But my brothers and sisters, why am I still being persecuted if I am still preaching circumcision? In that case the offense of the cross has been removed. I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves!
For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters, only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become enslaved to one another. For the whole law is summed up in a single commandment, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another.”
About Me
I explore faith, church culture, and formation in the American South from my hometown of Memphis, TN. I’m an institutionalist who believes the means are just as important as the ends. Everything on this site is an expression of my faith and love for the Church.
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