Today we look at the compassionate conservatism and its relevance in today's political climate with historian John Fea. We examine the origins of this movement, rooted in social justice and faith-based initiatives, and its initial implementation during the George W. Bush administration, particularly through programs like PEPFAR. John highlights how the philosophy has deteriorated under the Trump administration, which marked a shift towards isolationism and away from collective responsibility. We explore the evangelical community's surprising loyalty to Trump, despite contradictions with compassionate conservatism, and reflect on the need for a revitalization of these principles through education and dialogue.
Articles by John Fea:
The Big Beautiful Bill is the 'final burial of compassionate conservatism'
The Big Beautiful Bill will pass the House as Christians turn a blind eye.
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[0:44] On July 4th, President Trump signed a spending bill passed by Congress called the Big Beautiful Bill. Marvin Alasky, the executive editor of Christianity Today, opined on X that the passage of this bill was, quote, the final burial of compassionate conservatism, unquote.
[1:05] Alasky should know, since he sort of helped coin the term that became the benchmark in then-Texas Governor George W. Bush's 2000 presidential campaign. Bush saw this as an effort to move away from the GOP's mostly libertarian economic agenda. He wanted to use the power of the federal government to work, to kind of partner with faith-based charities to help the poor. It was kind of an energetic but limited way of using the government. A little bit different from the Democrats, but still a way of using the federal government. The hallmark of Compassionate Conservatism was PEPFAR, which stood for the Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, which worked wonders in alleviating the crisis of HIV AIDS in Africa. It dramatically reduced the problem of HIV AIDS in Africa.
[2:10] A lot of that hope that took place in Compassionate Conservatism actually continued. It didn't stop when George W. Bush left office in 2009. It actually continued. Many of the programs, many of the initiatives, some of the push actually continued throughout the Obama years and through the first Trump administration and into the Biden administration.
[2:38] But a lot of it all ended when President Trump returned this year. And it especially ended with the big, beautiful bill. PEPFAR, in many cases, was slashed, along with a lot of other programs that were meant to help the poor, both here and abroad. And a lot of that happened with the blessing of many evangelicals. The question is, why? Why were some of the same people who voted for George W. Bush twice and supported many of the programs that he pushed, such as the expansion of Medicare, for example, were willing to support a man such as Trump who did away with some of these same programs that did such good?
[3:28] My guest today is going to try to explain why this all happened. John Fia is a distinguished professor of American history at Messiah University in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, where he's taught since 2002. He's also currently a distinguished fellow at the Lumen Center in Madison, Wisconsin, and also an executive editor and co-founder of Current, an online magazine of opinion and commentary. His most recent book is Believe Me, The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, and he's currently working on a three-volume history of evangelicals and politics in the 21st century. I think that you will really enjoy this conversation about evangelicals and the rise and fall of compassionate conservatives. So, I hope that you will listen in on this conversation with John Fia.
[4:47] Well, I want to thank you for joining me this afternoon, and I wanted to start off by just kind of introducing, if you can introduce yourself to people, kind of telling people a little bit about who you are. Sure, sure. My name is John Fia. I, for 23 years, taught American history and continue to be on the faculty at Messiah College, now Messiah University. That happened in the last couple of years. This is a Christian college just outside of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, rooted in the Anabaptist Brethren tradition, the Church of the Brethren.
[5:25] So it's been a really interesting place to work, and I've enjoyed it. I'm coming to you today, though, from Madison, Wisconsin, where I am a fellow at a new initiative, a think tank known as the Lumen Center, which is associated with the Christian Study Center here at University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Upper House. I think just Upper House, not the article they tell me not to use. But I'm an American historian. I've written six books on everything from the 18th century and the American Revolution to 21st century history, if you could call it that. And I am really interested in most of my books deal with the intersection of Christianity.
[6:15] Particularly American evangelicalism and politics, although I'm also very interested in the kind of discipline and practice of history. So I wrote a book in, I want to say, 2015 called Why Study History, which is a textbook that's often used in colleges for introductory history courses. So I spent 23 years teaching, writing, thinking about American history, American politics, American religion, all those things, except for the history part, politics and religion, right? All those things that, as you know, you're not supposed to talk about in polite company. Yeah.
[6:55] One of the reasons to have you on is because you wrote a really good article for a religion news service in July. It was talking about the recent passage of the Big Beautiful Bill. And the headline has it as the final burial of compassionate conservatism.
[7:16] And I know you didn't write those headlines, but I found that was a compelling headline. And I think it would be first, it would be interesting to talk about what was compassionate conservatism. Sure. Yeah, the headline actually comes from a quote from one of the theorists, philosophers, person who technically came up with the phrase compassionate conservatism. This was a University of Texas journalism professor, Texas at Austin journalism professor named Marvin Olasky, who's still around. He still writes. He's still an editor at the magazine Christianity Today. But he wrote a book called Compassionate Conservatism, and Marvin Olasky had a great kind of burden for the poor.
[8:09] Those who were the downtrodden, the oppressed in society. But he also upheld certain kind of conservative political principles, you know, and social principles, you know, free markets, and on the social issues, you know, he was pro-life, he was, he was, you know, traditional on marriage, although that wasn't much of a debate going on at the time while he was writing this book. It came out in the 1990s, and this book kind of, got the attention of then-Texas governor George W. Bush, who was contemplating a presidential run in 2000. The argument of compassionate conservatism and the way it was kind of put out there by Bush on the campaign trail in 2000 when he ran against Al Gore for president.
[9:04] Was, you know, conservatism had this kind of, on one hand, it was a very kind of selfish philosophy, you know, capitalism, the free market, you know, all of these old kind of Milton Friedman, conservative, economic conservatism, where it was all about, you know, self-interest, making as much money as you can, you know, stock markets and so forth. And Bush clearly believed – I think it's fair to say whatever – however compassionate conservative turned out as a policy issue, that's a whole other question. But I think at the time, Bush, who had recently had a conversion to Christianity, to at least an evangelical form of Christianity, Billy Graham, was actually influential in that, really wanted to change conservatism to make it more aware of the plight of poverty, the poor, and so forth in society. Make it more compassionate, right, is the word. You know, Bush also held traditional conservative social views, you know, on all of those moral issues that conservatives tend to embrace even today. But, you know, what would the Republican Party and the conservative movement look like if it was focused on this idea of compassion? So he called Marvin Olasky in for a meeting.
[10:30] They really hit it off. Bush was completely convinced by the argument of the book, as were members of Congress. Believe it or not, Newt Gingrich was excited about this. And some of these other conservative figures about how can we reshape conservatism, because the big Democratic Party's critique of the Republican Party was that they didn't care about the poor, they didn't care about, have compassion for the needy, and so forth. So basically Bush ran on this platform of compassionate conservatism. And what he wanted to do was he wanted to use federal money, which was anathema for certain conservatives, spending.
[11:16] Spend money on compassionate programs that were not necessarily the old Lyndon Johnson kind of welfare programs where the money went straight into the bank accounts and the pockets of those who were on welfare. But what he wanted to do was funnel that money, government money, into nonprofits, church-related organizations, nonprofit ministries, and so forth, so that they would be empowered to serve the poor and so forth. Now, he wasn't wanting to get rid of welfare, traditional welfare completely, but he wanted to use some of that money because he believed that churches – really, Olasky believed, and Bush came along, that churches were vital players. The Salvation Army, Catholic Social Services, the Mennonite Central Committee, even conservative groups. Even people like Pat Robertson had an organization called Operation Blessing, which served the needs. So what would we do if we brought that federal money? We put federal money aside to give to these faith-based charities. So that essentially was it, at least in principle.
[12:39] And so we kind of see that going through and you know not all of it you know became yeah reality but some of it did yeah and one of it that did actually become reality was pepfar yeah um can you talk a little bit about about that one yeah just real quick the reason why compassionate conservatism never worked was because Trump couldn't win over the Christian right because they didn't want government and church mingling together. There were a lot of liberal Baptists who did not like the idea. Barry Lynn of the separation for church and state, Churches United for the Separation of Church and State didn't like government and the church, government money going to churches. Most of the support for compassionate conservatism came from sort of mainline Protestant denominations and the black church, which was very, very active. Now.
[13:46] Congress could not get a bill passed because of these divisions. I think that's what happened to it.
[13:52] But that's a completely other story. I don't know if you want to get into the weeds in that. But PEPFAR was framed as part of the compassionate conservative agenda. The compassionate conservatism kind of took a backseat. It almost disappeared after September 11 because the focus was now on spending money for military and Bush got kind of – the whole compassion agenda got hijacked by that. It's very similar to Lyndon Johnson in the 60s, the guns or money situation, right? Do you put these welfare programs and spending programs for the country to the side, which he ended up doing to spend money for Vietnam?
[14:34] There wasn't enough money to go around for both programs. And I think Bush became so focused on Iraq and Afghanistan that it never took place. But there are some examples. So in 2003, I believe it was, through the influence of his speech writer who became a senior advisor, named Michael Gerson. Some of you might be familiar also with Gerson. He recently passed away a few years ago, but he was a columnist for the Washington Post after he got out of the office. He was a Wheaton College, Evangelical College in Chicago graduate with a deep, deep concern for fighting disease in Africa, for the poor, for social justice issues, which is very unusual for any conservative.
[15:24] Self-described conservative at that time. He was really – along with Olasky, Gerson was the one who kind of carried through the compassionate conservative agenda. And the crowning achievement, I think, was PEPFARC. This was a program to basically throw billions of dollars into the distribution of AIDS medicine into Africa, which was suffering immensely. Tens of thousands of lives were being lost every year because of AIDS in Africa and AIDS patients that had not had medicines. Whatever clinics were there had very limited resources. and through Gerson's pressing, and also through popular culture. Bono, the lead singer of U2, made several visits to the White House and urged Bush to do this. And Bush was convinced. As a matter of fact, he even convinced some really right-wing conservatives in Congress to come along. Jesse Helms, a name some of your listeners might know, from North Carolina, basically a white supremacist in his earlier days. There's a great story about when –.
[16:44] Bill Frist, who was a senator from Tennessee, he was the majority leader of the Senate, and I believe it was Bono, brought a young African mother with a baby into Helms' office. And Helms, seeing how he had opposed funding for these kinds of things his entire career, broke down in tears and had this kind of complete conversion to funding. He still never funded – he still didn't like funding it in the United States, but he was willing to do it in Africa. So he was able to swing over some of the stalwart conservatives to vote for this $15 billion package, which really had been going strong since the early 2000s until recently.
[17:34] And how did the evangelical churches respond to compassionate conservatism and especially for PEPFAR at the time? Yeah, that's a really interesting question because you had moderate and sort of what we might call progressive evangelicals. So the moderates I'm thinking of, they would have been conservative on a lot of social issues. But people like Gerson, say, people in the National Association of Evangelicals or people associated with Christianity Today magazine, they were all in on PEPFAR. The progressive evangelicals, people like Jim Wallace, for example, of the Sojourners community, people like Tony Campolo, a name that your listeners might know, social justice activist and self-described evangelical. There was another man named Ron Sider. All these men have recently, except for Wallace, both Sider and Campolo recently passed. They were all for it as well. The resistance within the evangelical community came from conservatives like Jerry Falwell, James Dobson.
[18:50] They were not opposed to PEPFAR in principle, but what they opposed was the money going to non-profits, social servants agencies, medical clinics in Africa that also performed abortions. So it all came down back to the Christian right with their one or two issue politics. Uh, they, they were saying, you know, we won't support PEPFAR, uh, unless it's clear that, um, you know, abortions are not being funded.
[19:24] Um, and, uh, you know, they wanted, they wanted, um, abstinence programs also to be taught in, uh, in, um, Africa. There was a, there was a, uh, uh, a few, a few African nations that instituted abstinence programs and the Christian rights seemed to think that they were working. They definitely did not want the distribution of condoms to prevent AIDS, which some who supported PEPFAR wanted to use. So there was a debate there that caused many on the so-called Christian right not to give their wholehearted support or not to rally their followers in support of PEPFAR, although they kind of stayed neutral. They didn't oppose it per se, although if you read between the lines and read some of their concerns, it was largely about abortion and it was largely about the distribution of condoms versus abstinence programs.
[20:21] Uganda was the big model they used. Uganda had instituted an abstinence program. And the data about how effective it was, it depends who you read. It's really hard to tell just how effective it was. Of course, the Christian right said it was very effective, and the defenders of PEPFAR said it was somewhat effective, but it needs to be, you know, condoms need to be involved too to help the spread of AIDS, stop the spread of AIDS. And so, we kind of come to now, and especially with PEPFAR and some other things, we see kind of the evisceration of that.
[21:07] What happened? What happened with what had been seen to be a long support among at least some evangelicals that—, And I think that there are still some support, so it's not like it has not been supported.
[21:25] But what do you think has changed? I think the same constituency today that supported PEPFAR 25 years ago, 20 years ago, still supports PEPFAR. You know, Barack Obama was a champion of PEPFAR, you know, who, you know, he was demonized by many, many on the white evangelicals. But, you know, he's he came right out and said, like, this is probably the greatest achievement of the Bush administration. I'd be stupid not to continue this. Right. And of course, the president's following him, even Trump in his first term, didn't touch PEPFAR, and of course, Biden as well. It was really 2024 when Trump got his second term that he brought in Elon Musk.
[22:17] The Tesla founder, billionaire, and created this – I can't remember what the acronym stands for, but DOGE. Department on Government Efficiency. Thank you. The Department on Government Efficiency, that really was, you know, he empowered Musk to just start cutting programs, government programs. And, you know, the USAID, which is the organization that distributed the medicine through PEPFAR and administered PEPFAR, was drastically reduced to only, you know, a few handful of employees, which essentially, you know, meant that... PEPFAR was, for all intents and purposes, over. Now, I think you have to be careful to say that. Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State, has said that PEPFAR will now come under his jurisdiction in some smaller capacity. But the money for these programs was immediately slashed.
[23:27] Some of the money is still there, but there are no people anymore to administer the program. So this is, again, back to Marvin Olasky's title, or Marvin Olasky's famous statement, right? This is the end of compassionate conservatism. And it shows you, we were talking a little bit earlier about the way in which, it may have been off camera, but the way in which the world has so drastically changed in terms of America's role in the world, the so-called soft power that America embodies to be able to serve the needs of populations that are suffering around the world. How much has changed in 25 years. No matter what your listeners or whatever you think about George W. Bush's presidency, and there is a lot, I think, to critique in that presidency, particularly, I would argue, in relationship to the war in Iraq.
[24:34] We can have our debates about some of the social marriage issues, those things. I think people might come down on different sides on that. So whatever you think about George W. Bush, he looks a lot better in light of the cuts to PEPFAR that Trump has made. So, I mean, this is a major kind of humanitarian crisis, the fact that the United States is no longer running this program. And again, you know, compassionate conservatism has essentially now been replaced by America first, right? We'll care about ourselves first before we worry about other nations, or maybe we don't worry about other nations at all, right, in that kind of soft power type way.
[25:26] Why do you think that we haven't seen or why do you think that the president or anyone in his administration even thought this is important that we want to keep this or even thought even with the rest of the rest of the big, beautiful bill about some of the other aspects of slashing of Medicaid?
[25:48] But this is kind of totally opposite of what I think George W. Bush, how he would have operated. And so…, Why is this administration so different? Well, I think you're seeing two fundamentally different kind of philosophies. I think Donald Trump is a populist, but not just a populist. He would probably disagree if I called him an isolationist. But the whole idea of America first means that America is essentially selfish. It takes care of its own interests before it takes care of others. There's no responsibility as the world's greatest power, superpower, whatever you want to call it, the world's largest democracy. There's no sense of the kind of longstanding humanitarian intervention that has really embodied the United States foreign policy since maybe World War I and definitely since the Marshall Plan at the end of – end of World War II.
[26:58] So when you are driven by, when you're guiding principles, and this is what's different from Trump in second term. I don't think Trump had many guiding principles at all in the first term. I don't think he knew what he was doing. I don't think he even expected to be president. But 2024, he comes in with a well-crafted, maybe that's too generous, but a well-crafted intellectual agenda that's being associated with various think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the Claremont Institute. J.D. Vance comes out of this kind of America first mentality. He really came in with a plan this time. And, you know.
[27:46] He believes, or at least he's been told, that PEPFAR somehow had some problems. They had too many employees. They were spending money recklessly. Maybe that's true. I don't know. I'm not an expert on that. But I think you take your philosophy of foreign policy, America first, and any other than issue, whether they be moral issues, whether they be issues about helping the poor, right? They are going to be all sacrificed to that small government populist, raise your taxes – lower taxes to help ordinary American citizens and with the big, beautiful bill, right? Get rid of – take people off of welfare, take away their health insurance in some cases because we want to lower taxes. I mean, so the PEPFAR is definitely connected with those domestic cuts in the big, beautiful bill. Yeah, so I think this is just the operating philosophy.
[28:49] Former conservatives, for all their talk about the free market, for all their talk about trickle-down economics, whatever you want to say, give tax breaks to the wealthy so that the money will trickle down and will stimulate the economy. I mean, for all of that, there was still this kind of bipartisan, it was, responsibility that the nation had to the world. And I think that's the fundamental difference here in terms of Trump. Now, it's not always consistent. I mean, why did we bomb Iraq? I mean, that's if we don't. So I think there's a lot of inconsistencies. There's not a lot of kind of packaged, kind of consistent theories here. It almost seems like Trump does things on a whim. But I think when it comes to this America first, I think he now has kind of so-called intellectuals in his corner who are justifying these decisions. Do you think that this reflects badly on American evangelicals at all? Well, I mean, we're switching gears a little bit, right? I mean, I've been talking here as a kind of historian and objective observer, although maybe some people can figure out where I stand on this.
[30:10] But, you know, I'm also an evangelical Christian myself. I don't shy away from that label. I identify with that label. I'm horrified what happens in many cases under that label. But I'm still not at the point where I'm willing to surrender it or become a kind of exevangelical or whatever you might want to call that. But yeah, it disturbs me greatly.
[30:43] I think that the United States has the kind of power, such power that it can do such good in the world with its kind of so-called soft engagement, soft humanitarian engagement.
[30:59] What bothers me, I don't put a lot of faith in government to kind of advance my understanding of the gospel or my witness in the world. So, you know, I expect governments to, you know, be either corrupt or fail or, you know. But what bothers me the most is how some of my fellow evangelicals, especially those who are more conservative than me, are able to just, in some cases, defend the cuts. It almost seems like a cult, because Trump can do anything, even if it goes against the teachings of Jesus. And because it's Trump, it's got to be good because somehow Trump's anointed or God is working through him or something like that. So I often get bothered by my fellow evangelicals who are willing to support or remain silent when this kind of aid is being taken away, whether it be PEPFAR or whether it be the big, beautiful bill cutting people off of welfare. And in some cases, even cheering this as a great political victory.
[32:18] You know, that's where I kind of, you know, the hair in the back of my neck gets up. And I'm, you know, incredibly disappointed with, in my view, the failure of my fellow evangelicals to even think about their commitment to, say, supporting something like the Sermon on the Mount or, you know, some teachings of Jesus.
[32:48] And why do you think that that's happened? I mean, again, it just seems.
[32:55] Very odd to me to see, you know, kind of where things were 25 years ago to now. And there was at least, even among more conservative evangelicals, at least a concern for the poor, to an almost kind of now it's kind of almost kind of everything is on the libs to what happened. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, I wrote a book about this in 2018 called Believe Me, The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, in which I tried to explain, you know, why all of this happened. I think it's the natural outgrowth of the emergence of the Christian right in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I think what you saw during that time was not only conservative evangelicals getting more politically engaged on these issues like abortion and marriage
[34:00] and stem cell research and whatever it happened to be, these so-called life issues. But it was really in the late 70s, and especially in the 80s with the Reagan era, that that rising movement also fused with this idea of free market capitalism, liberty.
[34:23] Almost unconstrained liberty, right? Now, many Christians would say, no, we want to put moral conditions on liberty, right? We don't want people to be pro-choice, right? We don't want to allow them to have freedom to abort a baby. But in some ways, the idea of liberty that has come about, a freedom that has emerged within certain forms of conservative Christianity, tends to celebrate the so-called God-given rights. And they're right. Thomas Jefferson did say that our rights came from our creator. I find it fascinating that there's very little about individual rights in the Bible.
[35:05] But Thomas Jefferson, they'll quote. We're endowed with certain inalienable rights. But I think what's happened is that political commitment to individual rights, and when you baptize it and say they come from God, has now become so dominant within a certain form of conservative evangelicalism. That the idea of duty, or the idea of our responsibility to others, or the idea of somehow occasionally sacrificing those rights for the greater good of the republic, or the greater good of the community, or the greater good of the nation. Which I think, if you don't like that political, governmental kind of term about nation, sacrificing your individual rights for your neighbor, right? Let's talk about it in terms of how Jesus talked about it. I think that has.
[36:02] In many ways disappeared. Now, there are some who are much more nuanced than that, right? Some would say, I still want to love my neighbor. I still want to sacrifice myself for people around me, but I don't want the government. That's not a government position. That's something I'll do for myself, in my neighborhood, and so forth. But those are much more nuanced positions, although sometimes people who make those nuanced positions are still trusting in the government, Donald Trump's government, to carry out their agenda. So I think this shift in – Trump accessed that. Trump managed Trump more than any other president, right? You had Ronald Reagan, you had the George Bushes, right? Even candidates that lost, like you had Mitt Romney, you had John McCain.
[37:00] These kinds of people still understood this idea of self-sacrifice, laying aside rights at times for the greater good. Donald Trump was able to, I think, be the first president to tap into this individualism of American evangelicalism and say, here we are, here's your rights, God gave you these rights, and we want to celebrate those rights and protect those rights at all costs and why should I why should my taxpayer money help you know.
[37:46] The poor, right? Why should I give up some of my wealth? Socialism! They'll yell out, and suddenly Marxism and socialism becomes this kind of boogeyman. So I think Trump tapped into something latent within the evangelical movement that other presidents and other GOP figures couldn't. So I think that has a lot to do with, you know, what happened. Moreover, Trump, you know, Trump promised to deliver. He delivered for the Christian right, you know, in terms of the Supreme Court, in terms of trying to get, you know, religious liberty as they define it.
[38:33] You know, so I think there's a history there that Trump was able to see and tap in better than any other presidential candidate prior to him. I do wonder, though, if it's not as much that the other candidates couldn't tap in, it's that they wouldn't tap into that. Yeah. What's fascinating about that, that's a great point, because what's fascinating about that is one of the things, I have a new book coming out next year on the Bush administration and evangelicals. One of the things with Bush was, Bush 2, this is, George W. Bush.
[39:08] And George W. Bush was constantly being pushed by the Christian right to be more active, to be a fighter would be the word, for their views. James Dobson, who just passed away yesterday from Focus on the Family, was always in the ear of Karl Rove, telling, you know, this is what my constituency wants this. We want you to declare a federal marriage amendment, right?
[39:40] Making one man and one woman the official position and having a constitutional amendment affirming that. Well, Bush was kind of theologically, I think ideologically, you know, believed that marriage was between one man and one woman.
[39:57] But he was not willing to fight for that because he believed even amidst his conservatism, he believed in a certain kind of understanding of pluralism. That I'm the president of all people. And there are people who, whether it be the LGBTQ community or others, that also live in the United States. And he was very cautious. In fact, he would be criticized endlessly by the Christian right for not going out there harder and fighting for that amendment, which never got any traction, never passed. Well, then along comes someone like Donald Trump.
[40:37] And what's the first thing that some of these Christian right people say about him? Robert Jeffress, the pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, one of the early, early supporters of Trump, one of the first evangelicals, along with Jerry Falwell Jr., to come out in support of Trump in 2016. What does he say? I like Trump. I'm going to paraphrase here. I don't remember the exact quote, but I like Trump. He's the best darn fighter that we can you know, that we can have. He's going to go to the mat for our views, right? And when you think about that in the context of history, indeed, Bush, I mean, Mitt Romney, you know, he had to convince the Christian right that he was pro-life. You know, he had passed the universal health care bill when he was governor of Massachusetts. John McCain had all kinds of bad history with the Christian right, where he attacked them.
[41:38] When you hear these people like Jeffress and Franklin Graham and others say that Donald Trump is the most pro-life, most pro-faith president that we've ever had, you know.
[41:55] Some of us would just go, are you kidding me? I mean, he's a prolific womanizer. He's a reality television star, right? But when it comes to the agenda of those conservative evangelicals who support him, that makes perfect sense, that label. Because their brand of how to engage the world politically is really centered around one or two issues. It's centered around power. It's centered around a nostalgic longing for a past that, if it ever did exist, it's never coming back or in a golden age.
[42:36] And it's centered around a certain degree of fear about the way the country is moving. And Trump, I think, tapped in all those things. uh and and thus he is he's not only just the kind of for many conservative evangelicals he's not just a person that you know you you you hold your nose and swallow you know i can't believe i voted for this guy but there's a lot of evangelicals i think who did that um because they just couldn't see themselves voting for hillary clinton or or or um or harris but um i think i think there's a lot of evangelicals that are, you know, saying, no, this is, he is a positive candidate. He is, he is delivering for us. I mean, how can we not vote for this guy? You know, it's, it's fascinating, Dennis, you know, back to those previous presidents.
[43:28] Prior to Trump, right, there was this sense that the presidents who advanced the Christian, who wanted to, you know, were conservative and were favorable to the Christian right, were always also, whatever you think about them, but from the perspective of Christians, were also men of character, they believed. Whatever you think about Ronald Reagan, McCain, Romney, the Bushes, evangelical Christians viewed them as men of character for the most part. McCain, a war hero, and so forth.
[44:03] Trump is the first president in which you have a man who they all know does not uphold the character, but he's delivering on the agenda. So you have a choice, character or the agenda. And really, the Christian right has to choose for the first time. Between character and agenda, and they choose agenda, right? So again, an agenda, again, I should say deeply rooted in fear, power, nostalgia, and a couple of social and moral issues, which are all connected to fear, power, and nostalgia. So I think that's what happens, right? And if Trump is delivering on those one or two issues, he's overturning the Supreme Court, He's changing the Supreme Court, I should say. He's fighting to end the Johnson Amendment, which now the IRS has apparently done, which allows preachers to endorse candidates from their pulpit. He's delivering on the LGBTQ transgender stuff in schools. He's changing what can be taught in terms of American history. If he's delivering on all of that stuff, there's no need to – why would you oppose this guy? God works in mysterious ways. God uses flawed beings. Again, that's them.
[45:32] Talking. So in some ways, it all makes perfect sense in a lot of cases. Do you see at some point, I don't want to say a swing back, but any type of flowering of some type of a counter movement, something like compassionate conservatism that would run against what we're seeing now? Well, of course, of course, you know, there's a... Resistance, right? Or Twitter, right? Hashtag resistance. I just don't think – I think if there's going to be some kind of counter-movement within evangelicalism, it's not going to come through these kinds of hard-scale, resistant movements. People who engage this way are probably morally correct, right? They're probably prophetically right when they call out Trump. I'm talking about politically, right? I think at the beginning, everybody was just appalled, myself included. And we just kind of said, what is going on here? This is immoral. This guy is blah, blah, blah.
[46:49] And I think there was a backlash to that, especially you saw it in the 2024 election, right? Even certain people of color are supporting Trump in greater numbers. Still not the majority, but greater numbers. I'm just not convinced anymore that the prophetic stance, right, where you're just a voice crying in the wilderness, you know, I think there's a place for that. Don't get me wrong. But in terms of advancing some kind of political counter-movement that is going to attract the majority of the American people, I don't think that, I don't think, it's now proven after 10 years or so, you know, I don't think that's going to work anymore. I think, and again, I speak about this as kind of someone who studied politics, but also sort of as a Christian, I realize that there's some Christians who are going to continue to use that prophetic voice um and i that's great uh but just expect to i would say just expect to lose you know the next the next election because you're just alienating uh sort of moderates who who are who might you might be able to win over with um you know uh uh.
[48:08] Sort of some type of attempt to reconcile or at least try to find common ground. Now, back in the early days, I was saying, how do you find common ground with sin, right? How do you find common ground with all this? And I think we have to be careful not to do that. But there's got to be some kind of common ground between your neighbor who has a make America great side on his lawn and you. What can you find, even though you have very, very strong differences about politics and maybe about the world in general, about faith, right? What are some ways that we need to move beyond this? So I see a lot of people who were energized to oppose Trump back in 2016, and they're still doing the exact same thing. Their Twitter feeds, their social media feeds, their speaking engagements, they're going to the choir, I mean, figuratively, right? They're going to all these people who everyone in the room agrees with them and they're saying how bad trump is who's who's you know who's engaging with working people you know who white working people who's engaging with the other trump supporters you know who's trying to to to uh to to present as best as they can again sometimes you're just not going to be able to do it right i mean it's just it's you know but but who's trying to kind of be a reconciler in this day and age uh in a responsible way in a way that doesn't force you to give up some of your, you know, deeply held convictions.
[49:37] So to me, I think that's the only way forward on this front, right? You know, you know, the compassionate conservatism is an interesting one, because I think there's great possibility if you can educate Trump voters about exactly what the cutting of PEPFAR does to, you know, like Jesse Helms, like I talked about before, right? If you can, if you can, convince, you know, Trump voters that this is a bad thing, or you can introduce them to immigrants in their community, even if they came in, perhaps, you know, without papers or something, and, you know, how they're contributing to your community and so forth. So I think education is just such an important role in all of this, not in a kind of like, we're the elite educated, and you're the rabble. But true education means kind of meeting someone where they are, listening.
[50:35] You know, not abandoning your convictions, but listening and trying to, you know, think about creatively how to get people to see that, you know, there are now people dying of AIDS at a much higher rate than before in Africa than before this was cut. I think that appeals to people's natural sense of, so maybe the tax cuts or the, don't even start with abortion or one of the hot button issues. So yeah, I'm not a theologian or a political activist, so I don't know what that, I'll leave to others to kind of craft that vision. I think if everyone just kind of does that in their own individual lives, though, it would probably make some difference yeah i think i would agree with you that the um hashtag resistance hasn't really worked out yeah um you can only do that so much and i think you know after a while people tune out and i think if you're really going to make a difference what's going to have to work is actually persuasion. And that's harder. It's not as flashy.
[51:49] But that's really what's going to have to win. It's particularly difficult within the white evangelical community, that kind of persuasion, because there's such a long history, and I'll just say this, there's such a long history there of kind of anti-intellectualism within evangelicalism. The historian Mark Knoll, who's a generation older than me, wrote this book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. And it really is true. Yeah, it really is true. I mean, so to persuade, you have to have some kind of common base of facts or a belief system or a belief that actually good thinking on issues, matters of public issues are worth your time and effort and funding to be able to pull off. So it's a challenge. I don't think it's an insurmountable challenge, but it's definitely a challenge, especially within evangelicalism because of that. I think anti-intellectualism explains a lot of the evangelical support of Trump.
[53:01] So if people want to know more about you or even to where they can read some of your past books, where can they go? I think the best way is I've had a blog for 17 years. I blog just about every day. It's called The Way of Improvement Leads Home. So if you just type that into Google, The Way of Improvement Leads Home, I could do a whole other podcast about what that name means. It actually was the title of my first book, but it's been with me for 18 years. And there I blog every day. You can see my books, what I've written in the past, my resume with links and so forth. That's really the one-stop shop. Okay. Well, John, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about this important issue. I hope maybe we can have you back to talk on some other historical issues, because I think there's a lot to talk about when it comes to history, and especially the history of evangelicalism in America, which always fascinates me.
[54:03] I'd love it. I'd love it, Dennis. Thanks for inviting me. All right.
[54:21] Thank you.
[54:40] Hey so i'd love to know your thoughts about the episode what do you think about compassionate conservatism um what do you think about the changing thoughts about changing moods about evangelicals, send me an email. You can always do that by going to churchandmain at substack.com. And I will include links to John's article that he wrote for Religion News Service that he kind of outlines kind of the history of compassionate conservatism. Um, he actually also wrote something on his own, um, website that is, uh, kind of goes into a little bit more starker detail about the big, beautiful bill and its response and response from, from other Christians, um, about it. So, um, I will put that up in the show notes as well. Um, so if you want to know more about this podcast, listen to past episodes or donate, check us out at churchinmaine.org. You can also visit churchinmaine.substack.com to read related articles. I do actually have one up. I just actually wrote something up yesterday.
[55:55] I haven't really kind of, for a long time, have not, I don't really, I used to write a lot, I mean, a lot about my having autism. And I'm on the, I guess, the lighter end of the spectrum, what used to be called Asperger's. The New York Times actually has an interesting article, because now I think there are people who are talking about should they split up that again, which I really think that they should have never put them together in the first place, but that's neither here nor there. But I wrote something about the recent thing about the Tylenol and autism. And so that is on the Substack if you want to read that. So again, that is at churchandmain.substack.com if you want to read that. To subscribe to the podcast, you can go, you can do that on your favorite podcast app.
[56:57] And please consider leaving a review or rating. When you do that, that actually helps others find the podcast. If you'd like to make a donation, there is a link in the show notes. Please consider doing that. That actually helps to help to cover the cost of producing the podcast. You can also, there's also a link if you would like to get the episode in your email inbox when it goes live. That is it for this episode of Church and Made. I'm Dennis Sanders, your host. As I always say, thank you so much for listening. Take care, everyone. Godspeed. And I will see you very soon.