{"id":3043,"date":"2022-05-11T02:30:42","date_gmt":"2022-05-11T02:30:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/?p=3043"},"modified":"2022-05-11T02:32:57","modified_gmt":"2022-05-11T02:32:57","slug":"how-politics-poisoned-the-evangelical-church","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/petersantilli.com\/?p=3043","title":{"rendered":"How Politics Poisoned the Evangelical Church"},"content":{"rendered":"

May 10, 2022 at 01:15PM\u00a0 \u00a0How Politics Poisoned the Evangelical Church<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cBefore I turn to the Word,\u201d the preacher announces, \u201cI\u2019m gonna do another diatribe.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u201cGo on!\u201d one man yells. \u201cAmen!\u201d shouts a woman several pews in front of me.<\/p>\n

Between 40 minutes of praise music and 40 minutes of preaching is the strangest ritual I\u2019ve ever witnessed inside a house of worship. Pastor Bill Bolin calls it his \u201cdiatribe.\u201d The congregants at FloodGate Church, in Brighton, Michigan, call it something else: \u201cHeadline News.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Explore the June 2022 Issue<\/h2>\n

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

View More<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n

Bolin, in his mid-60s, is a gregarious man with thick jowls and a thinning wave of dyed hair. His floral shirt is untucked over dark-blue jeans. \u201cOn the vaccines \u2026\u201d he begins.<\/p>\n

For the next 15 minutes, Bolin does not mention the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, or the life everlasting. Instead, he spouts misinformation and conspiratorial nonsense, much of it related to the \u201cradically dangerous\u201d COVID-19 vaccines. \u201cA local nurse who attends FloodGate, who is anonymous at this time\u2014she reported to my wife the other day that at her hospital, they have two COVID patients that are hospitalized. Two.\u201d Bolin pauses dramatically. \u201cThey have 103 vaccine-complication patients.\u201d The crowd gasps.<\/p>\n

\u201cHow about this one?\u201d Bolin says. He tells of a doctor who claims to know that \u201cbetween 100 and 200 United States Congress members, plus many of their staffers and family members with COVID, were treated by a colleague of his over the past 15 months \u2026 with \u2026\u201d Bolin stops and puts a hand to his ear. A chorus of people responds: \u201cIvermectin.\u201d Bolin pretends not to hear. \u201cWhat was that?\u201d he says, leaning over the lectern. This time, they shout: \u201cIvermectin!\u201d Bolin nods.<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t my first time at FloodGate, so none of what Bolin says shocks me. Yet I\u2019m still struggling to make sense of the place.<\/p>\n

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\"photo<\/picture>
Bolin in February. After he held indoor Easter services at FloodGate in 2020, in defiance of Michigan\u2019s emergency shutdown orders, attendance at his church soared. (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Having grown up just down the road, the son of the senior pastor at another church in town, I\u2019ve spent my life watching evangelicalism morph from a spiritual disposition into a political identity. It\u2019s heartbreaking. So many people who love the Lord, who give their time and money to the poor and the mourning and the persecuted, have been reduced to a caricature. But I understand why. Evangelicals\u2014including my own father\u2014became compulsively political, allowing specific ethical arguments to snowball into full-blown partisan advocacy, often in ways that distracted from their mission of evangelizing for Christ. To his credit, even when my dad would lean hard into a political debate, he was careful to remind his church of the appropriate Christian perspective. \u201cGod doesn\u2019t bite his fingernails over any of this,\u201d he would say around election time. \u201cNeither should you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Brighton is a small town, and I knew the local evangelical scene like it was a second reporting beat. I knew which pastors were feuding; whose congregations were mired in scandal; which church softball teams had a deacon playing shortstop, and which ones stacked their lineups with non-tithing ringers. But FloodGate? I had never heard of FloodGate. And neither had most of the people sitting around me, until recently.<\/p>\n

For a decade, Bolin preached to a crowd of about 100 on a typical Sunday. Then came Easter 2020, when Bolin announced<\/a> that he would hold indoor worship services in defiance of Michigan\u2019s emergency shutdown orders. As word got around the conservative suburbs of Detroit, Bolin became a minor celebrity. Local politicians and activists borrowed his pulpit to promote right-wing interests. FloodGate\u2019s attendance soared as members of other congregations defected to the small roadside church. By Easter 2021, FloodGate was hosting 1,500 people every weekend.<\/p>\n

On this particular fall Sunday, Bolin riffs on everything from California forcing vaccines on schoolchildren to the IRS proposing more oversight of personal banking accounts. He promotes a new book that tells of \u201chow the left has done a power grab to systematically dismantle religion and banish God from the lips, minds, and hearts of believers,\u201d prompting the couple in front of me to make a one-click Amazon purchase. He suggests there is mounting evidence of a stolen election, concluding, \u201cWith the information that\u2019s coming out in Arizona and Georgia and other places, I think it\u2019s time for there to be a full audit of all 50 states to find out the level of cheating and the level of manipulation that actually took place.\u201d The people around me cheer.<\/p>\n

At one point, Bolin looks up from his notes.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe had a visitor this morning who said, \u2018You know, it\u2019s really refreshing to hear a pastor talk about issues like this.\u2019\u200a\u201d Basking in the ovation he\u2019s just invited, Bolin adds: \u201cI\u2019m okay talking about these things.\u201d<\/p>\n

He asks if he can keep going. The crowd answers with more applause.<\/p>\n

Listening to Bolin that morning, I kept thinking about another pastor nearby, one who approached his job very differently: Ken Brown.<\/p>\n

Brown leads his own ministry, Community Bible Church, in the Detroit suburb of Trenton. I got to know him during the 2020 presidential campaign, when I was writing dispatches from around the country and asking readers about the stories and trends they thought weren\u2019t receiving enough attention. Brown wrote to me explaining the combustible dynamics within the evangelical Church and describing his own efforts\u2014as the conservative pastor of a conservative congregation\u2014to keep his members from being radicalized by the lies of right-wing politicians and media figures.<\/p>\n

From the April 2018 issue: Michael Gerson\u2019s cover story on Trump and the evangelical temptation<\/a><\/p>\n

When we finally met, in the spring of 2021, Brown told me his alarm had only grown. \u201cThe crisis for the Church is a crisis of discernment,\u201d he said over lunch. \u201cDiscernment\u201d\u2014one\u2019s basic ability to separate truth from untruth\u2014\u201cis a core biblical discipline. And many Christians are not practicing it.\u201d A stocky man with steely blue eyes and a subdued, matter-of-fact tone, Brown struck me as thoroughly disheartened. The pastor said his concern was not simply for his congregation of 300, but for the millions of American evangelicals who had come to value power over integrity, the ephemeral over the eternal, moral relativism over bright lines of right and wrong.<\/p>\n

He made a compelling case. So I began checking out his sermons, podcasts, and blog posts.<\/p>\n

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Brown (right)<\/em> in February. When COVID arrived, he launched a podcast to combat misinformation among his congregants. (Jonno Rattman for The Atlantic)<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Every time I heard Bolin preach, I could also hear Brown, the pastors\u2019 voices dueling inside my brain. Brown is polished and buttoned-down; Bolin is ostentatious and loud. Brown pastors a traditional church where people wear sweaters and sing softly; Bolin leads a charismatic church where people dress for a barbecue and speak in tongues. Brown is a pastor\u2019s kid and lifelong conservative who\u2019s never had a sip of alcohol; Bolin is an erstwhile \u201cradical liberal\u201d who once got \u201cso high on LSD\u201d that he jumped onstage and grabbed a guitar at a Tom Petty concert.<\/p>\n

But in leading their predominantly white, Republican congregations, Brown and Bolin have come to agree on one important thing: Both pastors believe there is a war for the soul of the American Church\u2014and both have decided they cannot stand on the sidelines. They aren\u2019t alone. To many evangelicals today, the enemy is no longer secular America, but their fellow Christians, people who hold the same faith but different beliefs.<\/p>\n

How did this happen? For generations, white evangelicals have cultivated a narrative pitting courageous, God-fearing Christians against a wicked society that wants to expunge the Almighty from public life. Having convinced so many evangelicals that the next election could trigger the nation\u2019s demise, Christian leaders effectively turned thousands of churches into unwitting cells in a loosely organized, hazily defined, existentially urgent movement\u2014the types of places where paranoia and falsehoods flourish and people turn on one another.<\/p>\n

\u201cHands down, the biggest challenge facing the Church right now is the misinformation and disinformation coming in from the outside,\u201d Brown said.<\/p>\n

Because of this, the pastor told me, he can no longer justify a passive approach from the pulpit. The Church is becoming radicalized\u2014and pastors who don\u2019t address this fact head-on are only contributing to the problem. He understands their reluctance. They would rather keep the peace than risk alienating anyone. The irony, Brown said, is that by pretending that a clash of Christian worldviews isn\u2019t happening, these pastors risk losing credibility with members who can see it unfolding inside their own church.<\/p>\n

There is one person Pastor Brown doesn\u2019t have to convince of this: Pastor Bolin.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe battle lines have been drawn,\u201d Bolin told me, sitting in the back of his darkened sanctuary. \u201cIf you\u2019re not taking a side, you\u2019re on the wrong side.\u201d<\/p>\n

If this is a tale of two churches, it is also the tale of churches everywhere. It\u2019s the story of millions of American Christians who, after a lifetime spent considering their political affiliations in the context of their faith, are now considering their faith affiliations in the context of their politics.<\/p>\n

The first piece of scripture I memorized as a child\u2014the verse that continues to guide my own imperfect walk\u2014is from Paul\u2019s second letter to the early Church in Corinth, Greece. As with most of his letters, the apostle was addressing dysfunction and breakage in the community of believers. \u201cWe fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen,\u201d Paul wrote. \u201cSince what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paul\u2019s admonishment of the early Church contains no real ambiguity. Followers of Jesus are to orient themselves toward his enduring promise of salvation, and away from the fleeting troubles of humanity.<\/p>\n