Photo by Edward Cisneros

The Trump era has provoked a flurry of popular commentary on whether the United States is currently witnessing a Christian revival, in particular among younger Americans. Recent headlines tell of record catholic conversions and ask whether Gen Z is “fueling a religious revival in America.” Others offer more sober assessments, pointing out that Gen Z remains the most secular generation of Americans, arguing that the real story is the growing divide between men and women, on religion as elsewhere. Recent years have, according to Gallup, seen a reversal of a longstanding gender gap on religion: where religion was once more important to women by a large margin, data now show that greater numbers of men say religion is very important in their lives. According to critics of the religious revival thesis, there is actually no empirical evidence of a Christian revival in the United States at scale. Just as young women have become more progressive as young men have turned to the right, so has the religion gap widened.

As Hannah Hartley writes this month for the Rumi Forum’s Center for Faith Identity & Globalization, “Christianity is not growing among Gen Z in any meaningful aggregate sense. It is consolidating, becoming smaller in total membership, more male, more politically conservative, and more legible as a vehicle for political identity.” The clickbait mirage of religious revival has obscured these very real trends for years, forestalling a more relevant and important conversation about the role Christianity plays in American politics and culture. And that conversation is worth having for several reasons, not least of which is that it underscores the deep ambivalence and ambiguity of Jesus as a figure in our cultural history. Hartley’s claim that Christianity has become a way of communicating one’s political identity tracks recent conversations on the “casinofication of the church” in the United States. To discuss this phenomenon, The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins recently interviewed theologian Russell Moore, the editor of Christianity Today and formerly president of the Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission. After reading Coppins’s story on gambling’s socially disastrous takeover of sports, Moore applied this idea of casinofication to the church, arguing that just as “the love of the sport itself was transformed by it becoming a vehicle for gambling,” the church and the gospel of Jesus have become instrumental means to some other end:

The gospel and the church become carriers for what we already care about on our own individual or tribal terms. When the gospel becomes a tool—for culture war, institutional survival, partisan politics, and personal brand—its relevance feels sharp and immediate. The things I already care about are being addressed. But the slow formation of intuitions, instincts, and affections is being hollowed out.

But during the interview, Moore drew an inapt comparison between current dynamics within the evangelical movement and the mainline Protestant churches during the civil rights era. The words of Jesus clearly carry a revolutionary social, political and economic message, just not in the sense of violent revolution. Sociologist and pastor Ryan Burge hit much closer to the mark in a recent interview when he remarked that “mainline churches have ‘long been a great mixing of American life,’ noting that in the postwar era Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives, could be found sharing a pew on Sundays.” Burge also argues that popular reports of a spiritual revival in the country are based largely on vibes: “American Christianity is losing ground, with older and whiter congregations—heavily skewed towards conservative politics—often closer to dying than experiencing long-term growth.” He says that if there is a religious upswell to be found in America, then “it’s not a blue-collar revival,” “with church attendance skewed towards upwardly mobile professionals with a conservative bent.” The interview observes that “[t]he 19th-century reform movement sparked by Protestant clergy who proclaimed the social Gospel is now labeled as heresy in many evangelical pulpits.” The ideas of that movement became integral to the causes of peace and slavery abolition.

Americans are perpetually obsessed with the connection between Christianity and political and popular culture. Even among the secular, atheists, and agnostics, there seems to be a deep and enduring sense that the political and economic system requires some kind of spiritual validation or rationalization. But our ongoing obsession with reading Christianity and Jesus himself through the lens of our country’s toxic, superficial culture functions as an impediment to encountering the more radical traditions that are far more faithful to Jesus’s teachings. This cultural overlay (of, for example, figures like John Wayne, even of Trump depicting himself as Jesus) obscures the historical Jesus. It isn’t that American Jesus is a slight twist on the real, historical one; this American Jesus functions structurally as a total replacement, a cultural and political proxy representing and serving the very systems of power and injustice opposed by the real Jesus. The real Jesus implored people to give away their wealth, to reject even self-defense, and to live in open, active love and solidarity with social outcasts, a moral system that completely inverts the religious, social, and political system of purity, power, and prestige.

America and the Two Jesuses

What is perhaps most striking about the discourse on Christianity in our country is how little any of it has to do with the actual teachings of Jesus himself. His words have arguably been the ultimate casualty of our country’s obsession with Christianity’s place in culture and politics. When we talk about Christianity in our culture and politics, Americans want to talk about everything but what Jesus taught, perhaps because what he taught is so inconvenient for mainstream political narratives. Indeed, America’s current relationship with Christianity seems to discard the real Jesus almost entirely in its fixation on purity, rules, revenge, and ritualized political violence. American evangelicals in particular seem to have created a convoluted, identity culture-driven worldview that is actively hostile to the historical and philosophical Jesus.

American culture has preserved the name of Jesus as a brand identity even as it forgets his values. The truth is that the real Jesus cannot be........

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