Pulse
14 October 2024
One of the most interesting developments in the current intense race for the White House by former President Donald Trump and vice-President Kamala Harris is the emergence of a group called ‘Evangelicals for Harris’. Speaking to Fox News, one of its key spokespersons, Rev Lee Scott said:
We all want people to think more deeply about their civic participation and their faith, and how faith engages with their politics. [F]rankly, I believe that President Trump has used Christian voters to further his own ends at the expense of the faithful witness of those same voters. Behaviour that would be unacceptable in toddlers is promoted as strengthened leadership. And that’s gotta change.
The group is using the media to urge evangelicals to reconsider their support for Trump. In a video ad, the group explicitly cited 1 John 4 which urged Christians to ‘test the spirit to see if they are from God’. The implication is that they want evangelicals to pause and reflect on whether Trump displays the characteristics of a false prophet.
The goal of Evangelicals for Harris is clearly to sway Christians who are undecided about whom they should vote to seriously consider sending Kamala Harris to the White House. They do this by calling to question almost every positive claim made by MAGA (‘Make America Great Again’) evangelicals about Trump.
The key leaders of Evangelicals for Harris (which is a rebranded version of Evangelicals for Biden set up in 2020) – Rob Schenck, Sarah Klooster, Carolyn Yoder, Josh Dickson, and Shane Claiborne – are progressive evangelicals. This is an ever-growing group of evangelicals – comprising pastors and lay people – who embrace progressive ideologies and politics while still identifying as evangelicals.
The purpose of this article is not to weigh in on the intricacies of the upcoming U.S. Presidential Elections. It is to try to delineate what progressive evangelicalism stands for and how it differs from traditional evangelicalism.
Many Christian commentators have pointed out that the label ‘evangelical’ has become quite amorphous. This means that it is not enough to accept the claim of a group that identifies as ‘evangelical’. It is important to interrogate the content of the label with which it has chosen to associate itself.
As Rev Rob Schenck, one of the members of Evangelicals for Harris, said to The New York Times, ‘We’re not your grandfather’s evangelicals … We are a new generation of evangelicals who are more concerned about the planet, about the poor, about racial justice.’
In 2022, I wrote a series of articles on progressive Christianity for this website, examining its origins and its beliefs. Progressive evangelicalism can be described as a sub-set of this wider movement that shares many of its beliefs and convictions, but that is also distinguished from it in some ways.
Like progressive Christianity, progressive evangelicalism adopts a revisionist approach to understanding and interpreting the Bible, and to the great doctrines of the Christian Faith. While still believing that the Bible is inspired by God, progressive evangelicals are also of the view that much of what it says is confined to its original historical context, and may not be wholly relevant today.
Progressive Christianity has routinely devalued the significance of doctrine and creed, and presented itself as more concerned with orthopraxis than with orthodoxy. Progressive evangelicalism has in many ways followed suit, making the question what would Jesus do their fundamental focus, and not so much who he claims to be.
As already hinted in the quote by Rob Schenck above, progressive evangelicalism – very much like progressive Christianity – is concerned with issues related to social justice, gender equality, and climate change. In fact, progressive evangelicalism has in various ways embraced the new understanding of social justice (inspired by Marx and the Frankfurt School) and Critical Race Theory.
In a similar vein, the new evangelical left is supportive of LGBT rights and inclusion. And while there is some ambivalence with regard to the group’s view on abortion (often cosmeticized as ‘reproductive rights’), many of its members do support the pro-choice agenda. For example, Rob Schenck, who was once a famous anti-abortion activist, is now a pro-choice advocate.
This explains why the leaders of Evangelicals for Harris believe that Kamala Harris and her policies represent Christian values. For example, Doug Pagitt, the prominent leader of the movement, states:
Kamala Harris exemplifies the Christian values of love, justice and service. Her policies reflect a commitment for uplifting the marginalised and ensuring that everyone is treated with dignity and respect, which are core tenets of the Christian faith.
Another prominent leader of the movement, Jim Ball, believes that:
Kamala Harris demonstrates the qualities of leadership that are rooted in the Christian faith – compassion, integrity, and a commitment to justice. These are the values that Evangelicals for Harris believe should guide our nation, and they see Harris as a leader who embodies these principles.
In reality, however, it is not that Harris’ policies are consistent with the Christian Faith. It is rather that Evangelicals for Harris is aligned with the progressive ideology of the Democrats, including social justice, LGBTQ+ rights, racial equality and healthcare.
To be sure, traditional evangelicals are also profoundly concerned about these things. The difference is that they have a more robust understanding of the authority of the Bible, and believe that the latter has the resources to enable the Church to address these issues without resorting to secular ideologies.
This is why traditional evangelicals and, indeed, conservative Christians from different ecclesiological backgrounds, have a radically different moral assessment of Harris’ policies. For example, the evangelical New Testament scholar Robert Gagnon, could write scathingly that:
The two greatest idols of the Democratic Party are abortion and oppressive trans and gay policy, amounting to state-sponsored child abuse. Two of the most extreme proponents of these twin idols are Harris and Walz, high priestess and priest of these cults.
CBN reported Gagnon’s (characteristically acid-tongued) comment in which he describes Evangelicals for Harris ‘an oxymoron, indeed an insult to our intelligence.’
This is also the reason why the Roman Catholic moral theologian, Kenneth Craycraft, in an article in First Things, could state that
The Harris-Walz ticket is the most extreme in American presidential political history. They both reside in the farthest fringes of leftist policies and politics and are abortion and gender ideology fanatics.
It is worth repeating that the purpose of this article is not to comment on the upcoming presidential election in the United States, much less to suggest who might be a better candidate. The purpose of the article is to discuss progressive evangelicalism, what it stands for, and how it is different from traditional evangelicalism.
But the discussion has also made it glaringly clear that our understanding of Christianity will also invariably shape our political vision and inform our moral commitments.
Dr Roland Chia is Chew Hock Hin Professor at Trinity Theological College (Singapore) and Theological and Research Advisor of the Ethos Institute for Public Christianity.