Christian scholar urges evangelicals to abandon church as it's lost 'moral credibility'

A leading religious scholar said Tuesday he was using his faith to halt the "manifest surrender" of American Christians to Trump — and the fascism he expects him to bring.

Dr. David P. Gushee, a distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at Georgia's Mercer University and chair of Christian social ethics at the Free University of Amsterdam, spoke with Salon's Chauncey Devega about what he says is a crisis in "White Christianity" as it slowly submits to Donald Trump.

Gushee began by saying that the political divisions in Christianity began in the 1960s with the culture wars, money in politics and the Christian right's slide into GOP devotion.

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"For me, evangelicalism as a 'movement' in the U.S. needs to be abandoned because it has lost its religious and moral credibility and is a source of more harm than good," he explained.

"I abandoned it in the 2015-2018 period. I write about that in my memoir Still Christian and my book After Evangelicalism. I fear that what 'evangelical' has come to mean is an authoritarian, reactionary white conservative population whose religion has become indistinguishable from radical right-wing politics."

For those who still identify as being "evangelical," he explained, "and do not want their movement to mean what I just called it, have the responsibility to wrestle it back in a different direction."

Gushee confessed he feels a sense of "dread" as he thinks about Donald Trump winning the 2024 election.

"He is like one of those horror-movie villains who you think has been defeated or destroyed but keeps showing up to terrorize the neighborhood," he said.

"While the polling results are mixed, there are plenty of polls that show him leading in most or all of the swing states. The fact that this person in 2024 might well create a constitutional crisis, and that he doesn’t care at all about that — and that his followers are fine with it — is appalling beyond words. The weakness of Joe Biden’s candidacy in this context only raises the sense of vulnerability."

Ultimately, he said he views 2024 "like a person who is facing a grave spiritual, emotional and moral challenge, with a very limited sense of agency and no control over the outcome, but with responsibilities that I am trying to discharge faithfully."

Read the full interview here.