Hypothesis #2: Understanding our religious family history helps us understand why we’re here, where we want to go, and how to get there.

Like most of you, I spent 2016 watching white evangelicals—my people—with dread and grief. To the tune of 81%, they exuberantly voted for a candidate who, though odious, promised to increase Christianity's power. (1)

I wanted to know how my “religious family of origin” had gotten to this point, so I read and read and read. In that process I realized: the Christianity that marinated me in the 80s and 90s wasn’t concerned only with capital-T Truth. It was very much of its place and time, and it had particular, historically contextualized goals—including an unprecedented consolidation of political power for evangelical Christians.

Yes, I met Jesus and experienced the deep love of God through people in that culture; this was profoundly True.

And also.

Many, many of the culture’s leaders were singularly focused on political power, and that focus both (A) trickled down into the Christianity I received and (B) paved the road to our current situation. Understanding (A) is critical for my mental health, so I don’t go totally stark raving mad when I see Jesus/Trump flags. Understanding (B) is critical for my faith; it engenders humility and a desire to learn Christian ways outside of my power-hungry tradition.

It turns out that not everyone wants to read thousands of pages of American religious history…but I do! So here I’ll share some of what I’m learning, thematized.

First theme, unsurprisingly: a tale of two tables. (CW: homophobia; abortion)

* * * * *

It was 1979, and evangelical leaders had had it up to here.

They’d spent fifty years telling Christians to stay out of national politics, and look where it had gotten them: Civil rights! Women’s liberation!! Gay liberation!!! Even the current U.S. president, a Baptist Sunday school teacher, was spouting social-justice nonsense, refusing to seek first the priorities of white evangelicals.

The predictable American pie—the one Lady Liberty had baked just for them and theirs—had gotten sliced into so many slivers, they worried they would starve. So the nation’s most powerful conservative white Christians—pastors, evangelists, campus ministry leaders—organized themselves to prod their people out of the pews and into the halls of power.

In the fall of 1979, a few of them met in a Dallas airport hotel to discuss America’s recent social shifts and plan a counteroffensive.

Oh, have you not heard of this meeting? Odd, since James Robison (now a multimillionaire televangelist) calls it “one of the most significant things that ever happened in the life of our country.” Robison describes the meeting’s climactic scene around the hotel’s conference table, beginning with a startling prophecy:

“Billy Graham said, ‘I believe God has shown me that unless we have a change in America, we have a thousand days as a free nation…three years.’

Bill Bright [founder of Campus Crusade, now “Cru”] said, ‘I know…I do not believe we’ll survive more than three years a free nation. It’s that serious.’

And Pat Robertson said, ‘I believe the same thing.’

Charles Stanley was standing there and I can just remember so well, he put his hand down on the table with resolve and said, ‘I’ll give my life to stop this. I’ll give everything I’ve got to turn this country.’” (2)

Hm.

Then a year later, just before I was born, another startling statement. This time it was candidate Ronald Reagan, addressing a stadium packed with conservative Christians and news cameras. Having been prepped with a perfect evangelical-style testimony, and having been reminded that technically churches couldn’t publicly support him without losing their tax-exempt status, Reagan started his speech with an unprecedented declaration. “I know you can’t endorse me [wink WIIIINK],” he told the crowd—“but…I endorse you” (3).

The stadium went bonkers. Political operatives all over the country gawked. Evangelicals swarmed to Reagan’s side. And the Religious Right was off to the races.

The Reagan years were heady stuff for a bunch of pastors who had always avoided politics like the plague. Having decided to take back the American pie, they found it plated for them on fine china in the fanciest DC dining rooms. Ed Dobson, an assistant to Jerry Falwell, reflected on this change:

“One of the things that drove fundamentalists to get [politically] involved was the feeling that they were a disenfranchised people. They didn’t belong in the mainstream. No one invited them to the banquets in the public square...Then Ronald Reagan and others recognized that we had made a difference, so we were affirmed as legitimate partners in the democratic experiment. We were invited to the table for the first time. And that was a great feeling. I remember the first time I went to the White House with Jerry Falwell and ate at the mess hall with two key people in the president’s inner circle, and I’m thinking, ‘Wow, I am sitting here at the White House.’ Now all of a sudden the gatekeepers of culture had invited us in.” (4)

Hm.

The Christian Coalition’s Ralph Reed similarly crowed about the Religious Right’s new power: “We have finally gained what we have always sought—a place at the table, a sense of legitimacy and a voice in the conversation” (5).

We all know the rest of the story.

“A place at the table” wasn’t enough. By the 1990s, many evangelical leaders were sick of having just a lot of political power; they wanted all of it. Anti-abortion activist Randall Terry put it best: “I don’t want a place at the table, because the table is corrupt. We don’t want equal time with baby-killers and homosexual recruiters and latex losers. [PRO TIP: DO NOT GOOGLE “LATEX LOSERS.”] We don’t want them to have one minute of time with our children in government schools. We’re tired of their table. We want a new table, with a new set of players” (6).

Fast forward to (of course) (sorry) the Trump years, when the restaurant at Trump’s DC hotel perpetually reserved his favorite table and forced its staff to memorize his every whim in mind-bending detail.  Megachurch pastors greased waiters’ palms, angling to sit closer to the president and his personal junk-food buffet (7). Turns out, the real power tables are always small, and they never guarantee you a seat.

* * * * *

The quote from Ed Dobson above ends with one of the saddest statements I have ever read. Evangelical pastors’ welcome to Washington, he says, “meant we were somebody, that we mattered...We had come home, and the home was the White House” (8).

Well. Bummer.

Because: hey, dudes? There’s another table. The table that shows up over and over throughout scripture—Christians’ real “home”—is one of excess and abundance, where God invites everyone and cooks for days and pours way too much wine.

It’s the table of Psalm 23: cups overflowing, total rest, a meadow feast Martha couldn’t dream of.

It’s the table of Isaiah 25: shade and refuge for the poorest and most hunted, “a feast of rich food for all peoples.”

It’s the table of Proverbs 9: Wisdom rings a dinner bell and invites the whole town to her house to eat and drink and have big conversation.

It’s Jesus’ food-obsessed parables and his constant, prophetic meals.

You could have this, and you’re positively giddy about a quick lunch in the White House mess hall?!

When God sees people being oppressed, God sets up an enormous table out under the sky, turns the river into the world’s best wine, and invites everyone. Conversely, when powerful white pastors “felt” “disenfranchised” (which is a technical term that absolutely didn’t apply to them) and “not invited to banquets in the public square” (which, are these real?!? I, too, have been denied an invitation but am v interested!!), they packed themselves into an airport hotel conference room—beige and smelling like old Salisbury steaks—and yell-cried about taking their country back.

No, thank you.

Here’s one table: a reliable place of laughter, abundance, provision, welcome, refuge. It’s preternaturally expansive, accommodating everyone who wants to be there. It overflows with good food and the best wine—cups so full of the latter, there’s definitely no extra space for swirling or sticking your nose in to get a whiff of the bouquet, at least not until after you’ve downed half a glass.

Here’s another table: a capricious place of power, access, exclusion. It’s small, wedged into a private “room where it happens.” There’s a huge (the hugest) steak and sterile Diet Cokes for the lunchroom bully and whatever’s left for everyone else, because the deal-making, not the joy or welcome, is the point.

Table as provision, table as power.

* * * * *

OK. So what?

The biblical table is celebratory; it’s also a major act of resistance, a big middle finger to people who think a table’s primary purpose is power-brokering. I’d venture that many of the mental habits preventing us from table-living (fear, suspicion, complacency, despair) are functions of the turn-of-the-century evangelical cultural milieu obsessed with Getting Christians Into Power. I want to know what Christianity can look like when we’re not throwing elbows for a cultural “seat at the table.”

What do you think? Does this Christian power-hunger ring a bell for you? Are you convinced that knowing our religious family history is useful? What do you want to know about it?

(1) "Christianity Will Have Power", Elizabeth Dias, NYT
(2) William Martin, With God on Our Side: The Rise of the Religious Right in America, 206
(3) Ronald Reagan’s National Affairs Campaign Address on Religious Liberty, 22 August 1980, Dallas Reunion Arena
(4) Martin 225
(5) Frances FitzGerald, The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America, 422
(6) Martin 359
(7) Trump Hotel Employees Reveal What It Was Really Like Catering to the Right Wing Elite, Washingtonian [this one is bananas]
(8) Martin 226