What Covid Did To Evangelicalism, Hamas Has Done To The Democratic Party

Their successors will battle for the soul of America

It is a strange fact of human life that social movements and institutions we know to be lifeless and rotten within sometimes stumble on long after they have expired, as if everything is fine. Nothing to see here. All is well. Then seemingly from nowhere, they receive a little nudge, and their entire edifice falls to the ground, embarrassing their leaders, who had assured us that everything was under control, and confusing the laity. What once seemed secure and unmovable collapses into a heap of debris. From the ruins, bits can be saved and repurposed, but the original cannot be rebuilt. It is over. 

The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. wwwuppertal/Flickr.

The Covid lockdowns did to Evangelicalism what Hamas has done to the Democratic Party. Evangelicalism, by which I mean the largely individualist sentiment that the central proclamation of Christianity is that through Jesus believers go to heaven, has collapsed. Evangelicals mounted no resistance when the federal government declared during Covid that citizens are not bearers of liberty, but rather virus-carriers, who must be masked and isolated from one another. Man is, after all, merely a material creature, a virus-carrier. How is that claim consistent with the Christian proclamation that man was made “a little lower than the angels” (Psalm 8:5)? 

The American Founders believed that government was instituted to protect God-granted rights, but could go no further. Government took the form and limitation it did because man was a spiritual being whose liberties were to be protected because his dignity and downfall consisted in how he responded to mortal life’s pilgrimage. That is why our constitutional order is decentralized. Only in that way can liberty be exercised on a vast scale. 

The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. wwwuppertal/Flickr.

Our current government derides this idea. Life must be controlled from above. Covid was the first confirmation. (Net Zero, the scheme to reduce carbon emissions to zero by 2050, will be the next ghastly test.) The Evangelical churches capitulated. Sunday church services—through which we glorify God and remind ourselves that we are servants here below, called to repent and do God’s bidding? Canceled. The Eucharist—the great thanksgiving through which God in heaven draws near? Canceled.

What Covid revealed was that Evangelicalism is publicly impotent, that its claim that “Jesus is Lord” rings hollow when spoken from its mouth; that the God who creates the world, redeems the world, and sustains the world dwells only in the deep recesses of the human heart, there to endure all manner of external imposition and, ultimately perhaps, violence, by those who would mock God and all who believe in Him. Evangelicalism has collapsed. Rising from its ruins is a new movement, whose contours we cannot yet fully make out. Its name is Christian nationalism. It rejects the modern Evangelical understanding—and the understanding of the “Moral Majority” that came before it—that the political sphere is secular and the private sphere is religious. The central question of Christian nationalism is this: if Jesus is Lord of all creation, not just the inner recesses of the human heart, what would Christian government look like; and might it be the only sort of government that can save America from the impending tyranny that so many now see coming?  For Christian nationalists, secular government leads invariably to tyranny.

For decades, Evangelicals sought to live as Christians within a secular society. Covid has proved that they cannot. As if that is not enough, identity politics, about which more below, has penetrated the Evangelical churches and corrupted the central Christian teaching—that there is only one innocent victim, Christ, while mankind is universally tainted and made toxic by sin. Now “woke,” many Evangelicals believe that category of the innocent victim belongs to identity groups rather than to the God/man, Jesus Christ.

The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. wwwuppertal/Flickr.

The end of the old left began during the Obama administration, but was finally completed with the Democratic reaction to Hamas’s violent October attack against Israel. From the trenches of the universities these past many decades, many of us have witnessed the emergence of a new left, far different from the old left of the 1960s, which sought civil rights for blacks, middle class wages for all, and limited foreign wars aboard. With the exception of a few hangers on from the old left—President Joe Biden, former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, etc.—the new left is the left of identity politics, and is far more zealous than the old left ever was. The identity politics left grades every person on the basis of their group identity, which provides a simple but cheapened understanding of whether they are innocent victims or transgressors. 

With disgust, I note that within identity politics, white heterosexual men are the prime transgressors, and everyone else establishes their victimhood status by distancing themselves from him—first women, then blacks, then gays and lesbians, then other so-called people of color, then Muslims, then the transgendered. The linguistic terms used to indicate innocence and transgression are not, strictly speaking, Christian, as we might expect, but they are stand-ins for these Christian categories: universalist and particularistic; oppressed and oppressor; colonized and colonizer; “people of color” and white; Muslim and Christian, gender fluid and hetero-normative. The reaction of Democrats to Hamas’s violence, especially among college-age Democrats, has opened the windows and revealed the crumbling structure of the old left within the Democratic Party. To enjoy membership in the new left’s Democratic Party, you must ignore the evidence your conscience provides. Merely check the appropriate identity politics boxes, and you know who you have to support. Because Hamas is “oppressed,” “colonized,” and Muslim, its members must be innocent victims, whose actions are to be held of no account because of their victimhood status.

The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. wwwuppertal/Flickr.

Like Evangelicals in the aftermath of Covid, so, too, the Democratic Party in the aftermath of Hamas’s violent attack on Israel. I fear that in the case of the Democratic Party, however, the younger generation, whose moral sense has been poisoned by identity politics’ promise of a world purified of stain and transgression, will rebuild. They will rummage through the ruins and develop a full-blown identity politics unhindered by the haunting, impure presence of Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer who, whatever their other failings, were too old to be fully infected by the poison of identity politics. All three did, after all, support Israel for many decades. Identity politics categories—“oppressed,” “colonized”—never entered their minds. 

All that will now change. Support for Israel will be unthinkable within the new Democratic Party. Pelosi was able, for a time, to contain Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the rest of “The Squad,” who are the leadership vanguard of identity politics. Hamas’s violence represents the end of that containment. Henceforth, all political action within the Democratic Party will be directed towards defending universalism, the oppressed, the colonized, so-called “people of color,” Muslims (rather than Christians), and those who claim to be gender-fluid.

One can, of course, imagine a pluralist America in which members of all these groups participate as citizens equal under the law. That would be liberalism properly understood. Our constitutional arrangements continue to make that possible, if we dare. But liberal pluralism is not the identity politics plan; identity politics will be satisfied with nothing less than a new hierarchy, based on the purity or stain of the identity groups involved. It seeks to establish, if I dare say it, a new social order based on what can only be called spiritual eugenics—this one not based on blood, as was the eugenics movements of the twentieth century, but rather on victimhood scores. 

The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. wwwuppertal/Flickr.

Covid and Hamas have destroyed Evangelicalism and the old-left Democratic Party, and have laid the groundwork for their successors: Christian nationalism and a new-left Democratic Party, ruled by identity politics. Between the two, we can only imagine a fierce battle for the soul of America.