Axis Daily Brief | How to Be a Good Christian and Still Support Cruelty

How White evangelicalism perfected the art of personal kindness and systemic harm

Two stories, side by side, tell you almost everything you need to know about how White evangelicalism squares its conscience.

A Trans Officer, a Vice President, a Relationship Built on Respect

The first belongs to my friend and former CIA colleague Julia Curlee, the first openly serving trans officer in the agency’s history. You may have seen the piece she published last week in The Atlantic detailing her time working in both Trump administrations. She was dismissed from this Trump White House after being targeted by right-wing influencer Laura Loomer, and she ultimately had to resign from the CIA due to the overall hostile climate against trans people in government.

But in the first Trump administration, Julia very improbably served Mike Pence as his intelligence briefer. She details her hesitation in accepting the job to brief one of the most anti-LGBTQ politicians there is. Pence pushed for the transgender ban in the military, advocated stripping trans people of workplace protections, and has called for a nationwide ban on gender-affirming care, without specifying whether he meant it for children, adults, or both.

And yet he always treated Julia with respect and dignity. When he met Julia’s mother, he told her she must be very proud of her daughter — something that meant a lot to Julia, because her mother had had a hard time accepting Julia’s transition.

Sixty Churches, No Comment

The second vignette starts with a decision I made after the Trump administration ended temporary protected status for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and other refugees, and began deporting them back to a very dangerous country. I decided to start contacting predominantly White evangelical churches to ask what they are doing to stand up against this and other cruel policies aimed at refugees.

I did this because I know for a fact that most of these churches have ministries for refugees. They help with housing, food, language skills, employment, all kinds of things. And in fact, as I went to many of the church websites, I saw these ministries detailed and highlighted. As a missionary kid, I also know they love their missions to other non-White, poor countries that Trump calls s-holes, including Haiti. Before Haiti got so dangerous, it was a very popular destination for evangelical mission trips.

I also know that if White evangelicals rose up en masse and demanded the administration end its racist, inhumane refugee policies, things might very well change. These Americans are pretty much the only constituency who has that kind of power, because they statistically overwhelmingly support Donald Trump — and they support his immigration policies far more than other faith groups do.

I couldn’t find data relating specifically to refugees or to these particular recent policies. But per PRRI data, White evangelicals are outliers on immigration policy more broadly. They are the most supportive religious group of restrictive immigration policy generally, with 85% in favor. Sixty-nine percent approve of Trump’s handling of immigration, again the highest of any religious group. They are also the only group with majority support — 51% — for detaining and relocating undocumented immigrants without due process.

I’m up to about 60 churches now that I’ve contacted. I’ve received no comment from any of them as of yet.

This Isn’t Hypocrisy. It’s a Belief System.

Some people might call this hypocrisy, but hypocrisy involves acting against your beliefs. Bifurcating how you respond to people personally from how you approach issues systemically is a core White evangelical belief. All of us humans compartmentalize to some degree, and we all have inconsistencies in our positions. It’s a complicated world out there. But in White evangelicalism, this split is literally baked into the cake. Experiencing the world and other people in compartmentalized form has been a routine expression of White evangelicalism for hundreds of years.

So where does it come from?

The Roots: Revival, Individualism, and the South

A focus on individual faith, morality, and salvation is a foundational tenet of evangelicalism, which began with the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries. Revivalist Christianity spiritually elevated the individual just as the Enlightenment did politically and socially, and both were happening at the same time — the beginning of concepts like democracy and human rights, with genuinely radical implications.

Evangelical Christianity has indeed had radical impulses in various places and times, most notably within the Black American church, where evangelical faith has fueled the fight for social justice. But in the White American context, especially in the South, revivalist Christianity was molded into a conservative movement to combat social change. Social ills and their solutions were defined in purely personal terms, thereby preserving basic structures and institutions like slavery. This recasting of revivalism was an important precursor for the spread of evangelicalism in the South — it really wasn’t very popular before it evolved into this shape — and it remains a feature of White evangelicalism in America to this day.

Morality was defined purely as how an individual treats another person, and love toward others was expressed through seeking their salvation. In this framework, slavery and Christianity could coexist comfortably as long as the slaveholder treated his slaves well and exposed them to the gospel. Later, segregation and racial discrimination coexisted just fine, as long as good White Christians treated the Black people around them with personal kindness. Sometimes they didn’t even do that — but that was the idea. A fantastic book detailing how the Southern context and slavery shaped White American evangelicalism is Robert P. Jones’s White Too Long. It’s absolutely essential reading, and it will blow your mind.

Missionaries, Empire, and the Same Old Split

This dynamic gets really absurd when you examine the American evangelical obsession with foreign missions, beginning in the 19th century. I detail this in my own book, The Missionary Kids. The same Christians who were energetically sending missionaries to Africa were also supporting things like the KKK’s efforts to “re-establish racial order.” The same people sending missionaries to China supported the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Beginning in the late 19th century, the evangelical rejection of social reform became explicit in the fundamentalist-modernist theological divide. More liberal Christians advocated something known as the social gospel, which combined personal faith with a mandate to work for social justice and humanitarianism. Conservative White Christians, then and now, labeled that heresy, arguing that such work distracts from what really matters: converting as many souls as possible to evangelical Christianity.

No Paradox, No Hypocrisy

That’s a very brief history of evangelical compartmentalization. If you define love for your neighbor purely in terms of saving their soul, and if you define your own morality purely in terms of how you treat the person right in front of you, then there’s no paradox in a vice president, an evangelical Christian, backing policies harmful to his staffer while treating her with dignity and respect. There’s no hypocrisy in running a refugee ministry while backing a government that is actively harming refugees. You can comfortably regard yourself as a good Christian while pursuing the politics that benefit your group’s needs.

A Parallel Culture That Protects the Split

The other mechanism that sustains this way of thinking is the tendency among White evangelicals to compartmentalize themselves away from the rest of society. In the last 30 to 40 years especially, White evangelicals have built an entire parallel culture, with their own books, music, movies, businesses, schools, colleges, news, sources of information, and experts in almost every field. Living like that sets up a strong us-versus-them mentality, where our side is always and everywhere the good guys, and it makes it highly unlikely that people in that culture will ever have sustained, meaningful relationships with anyone outside it. Certainly not with a trans person — unless, like Mike Pence, you go into a profession that doesn’t shield you from that.

But if you do happen to encounter someone who counters your worldview, you’ve already been instilled with a mental framework that turns that person into a pitiable object in need of your ministry, rather than a fully formed human being of equal value who might have something to teach you, and whose experience you should actually listen to.

What I Once Was

I have no doubt Pence viewed Julia this way, because this is exactly how I once viewed non-evangelicals. I didn’t have a single real non-evangelical friend — not just someone I was trying to help or convert — until I was in my mid-20s. I know many evangelicals who have gone their entire lives never living outside that world, moving from Christian school to Christian college to Christian ministry or a Christian organization.

If you live like that, it’s easy to never be truly affected by another person, to never let their experiences move you or their pain disrupt your priors. But I think true love for others should change us and how we see the world. True caring about others’ experience should shape how we think about the policies that affect their lives and the injustices that harm them. True faith should contain the capacity for growth and learning, and true repentance should cause us to course-correct when we see how we are complicit in others’ mistreatment.

The Bottom Line

I’m glad Mike Pence was kind to my friend Julia. She’s a wonderful person. I’m glad so many churches are serving refugees — it’s certainly better than the alternative. But in the most generous interpretation, it’s not nearly enough. And less charitably, it’s a self-aggrandizing distraction from the active harm these Christians are causing on a systemic level with their political choices.

Thanks for reading. I’ll see you next time.

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