Historian John Fea claims the faith leads people "to live better lives." He refuses to acknowledge what that means for everyone else.

Are we being unfair to white evangelical Christians by focusing primarily on people like Speaker Mike Johnson, pseudo-historian David Barton, or promoters of child abuse like James Dobson?

Men like them get an outsized amount of attention from the media and commentators online, but I would argue that’s for good reason. They have an enormous amount of influence—with politicians and civic leaders as well as regular people who attend church every week.

But John Fea, a professor of American history at Messiah University, says it’s wrong to focus only on the bad. In an article for The Atlantic, he attempted to explain the appeal of evangelical Christianity despite all those bad actors:

… For all the bad that’s come out of this movement, there are still countless stories of personal transformation leading people to become better parents, better spouses, and better members of their communities. Seeing the good in evangelicalism is essential to understanding its appeal to millions of Americans.

…

Yet for all their value, books such as [Jesus and John Wayne by Kristin Kobes Du Mez and Beth Allison Barr’s], as works of evangelical history, are woefully flat and do not explain historically the story of my father and, I imagine, millions of other men and women who learned from Dobson how to love their families as Jesus loves his church.

If you need to learn how to love your family from a man whose idea of love involves hitting your kids, lying about gay people, promoting violence against trans people, then your life has already taken a tragic turn. If some of those parents turned out to be decent, it’s only because they didn’t listen to Dobson’s advice.

That includes Fea himself, because here he is describing his own parenting style:

When it came to our two daughters, now well-adjusted adults, my wife and I did not take James Dobson’s approach to child-rearing. There were no purity balls or regular spankings to protect their salvation. Nor did we listen to much of his marriage advice, especially as it related to male headship and female submission. We have found other Christian approaches to marriage and family more helpful and, perhaps, less harmful.

Sounds great! Fea understands (though he doesn’t say it directly) that Dobson’s advice was horrible. He says his own approach is “less harmful” but refuses to spell out why Dobson’s methods were, therefore, harmful. Just because some people found value in his principles doesn’t mean any of it is worth admiring.

Fea writes that we need a fuller account of Christian life rather than the apparently one-sided, anti-evangelical positions we tend to see in popular books and articles.

The problem with that argument is that the typical white evangelical these days holds plenty of beliefs that are, in fact, abominable. We’re not unfairly focusing on a few bad apples. We’re correctly pointing out the rot that’s infesting the entire orchard.

Just consider how Fea spins this in his conclusion:

Du Mez’s and Barr’s work is part of a narrative—perpetuated by scholars, memoirists, and journalists—that evangelicalism is bad for America. Christian nationalism, white supremacy, and sexual abuse have given the “good news” of the Gospel a bad name. Some of this criticism is necessary…

But some of it is unfair or disproportionate. Journalists don’t sufficiently distinguish Christian nationalists from conservative evangelicals who simply and reasonably want to bring their faith to bear on public life.

It’s telling that he never elaborates on that last part.

What does it mean when conservative evangelicals “want to bring their faith to bear on public life”?

I’ll tell you what it means: It means preventing women from accessing reproductive health care, falsely telling gay kids they can change their sexual orientation, denying trans kids access to tools that will help them grow up, rejecting expertise in science and medicine in lieu of conspiracy theories, pushing harmful myths about sex in the name of “purity,” demanding that their religion (and only their religion) enter public schools, calling for taxpayer dollars to fund their own private religious schools, etc. And all of that is before we get into the racism.

That’s what the rank and file want to do. Just because they don’t necessarily have the power of Christian Nationalists in elected office doesn’t mean we should give them a free pass as merely good neighbors with different ideas.

The fact that roughly 80% of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020 is the clearest indication we have that they failed the simplest morality test of our time, choosing as our nation’s leader an unrepentant sex predator who doesn’t take the job seriously and whose entire life flies in the face of their supposed values.

Sure, there are white evangelicals who do very good things. We can say that about damn near every subgroup imaginable. But the country as a whole is worse off whenever white evangelicals have enough power to make decisions for others.

Much like it’s impossible to tell the story of American history without centering it around slavery, it’s impossible to “tell the whole story” of modern evangelical Christianity (as Fea wants us to do) without centering it around the awful beliefs those evangelicals hold.

Whatever positive traits they have doesn’t make up for the harm they’ve caused.

That’s the argument made by Sarah Jones at New York magazine. Jones grew up in an evangelical family, and her father was also influenced by Dobson:

In practice, this meant corporal punishment — a lot of it. Because I was homeschooled for my early childhood and had no extracurricular activities, my parents could not meaningfully ground me. But my father could spank me, and shove me, and threaten me with belts, and he did. I still have physical scars from his efforts at discipline. My parents didn’t always follow Dobson’s advice, but his books and broadcasts gave abuse a Christian imprimatur.

That doesn’t prevent Jones from admitting what we all know: There are evangelicals who do plenty of good. They want to help people. Still, if white evangelical Christians ever got an comprehensive accounting of their faith, it wouldn’t look pretty. Because the bottom line is that living out their faith has, in practice, meant hurting the marginalized.

Jones writes:

Most white Evangelicals are Trump voters. Their church may run a food pantry and host Mike Flynn, or someone like him, the following week. Fea admits as much. “Many of them will hold their nose and vote for Donald Trump,” he writes, adding, “Others might even attend churches that occasionally hold patriotic Sunday services. But they are also doing the Lord’s work.” A “patriotic Sunday service” is a vague euphemism. What does it mean to do the Lord’s work for the needy and then vote for a champion of the wealthy? Surely the needy deserve better than Trump.

When it comes down to it, if you say you love children but make it harder for gay couples to adopt, demonize kids who are LGBTQ, push for looser gun regulations so that mass shootings continue unabated, spread lies about vaccines, and teach kids that all forms of sex before marriage are inherently sinful, you’re lying to yourself.

(And I haven’t even mentioned the fact that their core religious beliefs are just plain untrue. It’s fascinating how many articles about the most famous white evangelicals in the country can be written without ever once mentioning Jesus. He’s practically irrelevant when it comes to how they act.)

Kristin Kobes Du Mez points out that, despite Christian media networks and Christian bookstores and Christian radio all propagating the same message about the faith, books like hers became bestsellers because a whole bunch of Christians identified with what she was saying.

Jesus and John Wayne and The Making of Biblical Womanhood became bestsellers not because a secular public couldn’t get enough of “evangelicals behaving badly.” They became bestsellers because evangelical readers themselves found them and said, “this is true.” After decades of being fed only one narrative—all of the positive stories and celebrations of how they, more than anyone else, were “doing the Lord’s work,” tens of thousands of evangelical readers found in our books accounts that resonated with their own experiences. Fea’s dad’s story might not take center stage in my book, but other people’s stories do. 

It’s ridiculously easy to find positive portrayals of Christianity because that’s the narrative Christians love to tell themselves. Hell, they created their own parallel universes—record labels, movie studios, publishing outlets—to tell those stories.

What they have a much harder time doing is seeing themselves through the eyes of everyone outside their bubble. For decades, they have refused to reckon with the consequences of their misguided and unhealthy beliefs. Just because more people are talking about those issues out loud, courageously confronting faith-based abuse in all its forms, doesn’t mean we’re getting a skewed image of evangelicalism.

It means we’re finally getting an accurate one.