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Every word that public evangelicals uttered in the 90s about the importance of integrity in leadership now serves as an indictment of their own unfitness to lead.
But more important than the rank hypocrisy of public evangelicals is the matter of how we arrived at a place where, outside of one or two causes that cost us nothing to promote, many Christians don't even pretend to integrate their faith with their politics.
In fact, such is the disarray of the evangelical political conscience, it may be helpful to comment on what integrity means and why it's important.
As individuals, we all occupy a variety of social roles--e.g., spouse, parent, colleague, citizen, etc. I have integrity when I approach each of these social roles in a way that's consistent with how I approach the others.
When I have integrity, all the different parts of my life fit together-they are *integrated*--around a single coherent identity. By contrast, I lack integrity when I inhabit one social role in a way that is inconsistent with who I am (or pretend to be) in some other social role.
The opposite of integrity is disintegration--an identity that's fragmented. My identity is fragmented when I move through the various social roles that I occupy without any real sense of the self that inhabits each role, or how those roles inform the narrative of my life.
Like an individual, a political community that lacks integrity is fragmented.
As a society, we have integrity when we share a sense of concern for what each of us deserves and what we owe to each other-which is to say, a shared concern for justice.
As a society, we have integrity when we share a sense of concern for what each of us deserves and what we owe to each other-which is to say, a shared concern for justice.
(The alternative to justice as a shared point of integration would be an ideology based in some feature identity-such as race, ethnicity or religion. But we tend to reject, e.g., white nationalism as racist, Christian nationalism as idolatrous, and so on.)
A shared concern for justice furnishes us with a common goal civic life, by reference to which it makes sense to debate and seek consensus around moral questions like what our laws ought to be and how our resources should be allocated.
By contrast, when we lack a shared horizon for deciding questions about what people deserve, our society is merely a collection of interest groups that assert their political will without regard for what we owe to each other.
And herein lies the source of much white evangelical hypocrisy in the political sphere.
Decades ago, a few self-appointed spokesmen decided that God's blessed rage for justice is best articulated by a Church that seeks to make America the sort of place where upper-middleclass Christians can await the eschaton in relative comfort.
Yet we proclaim the Lordship of Jesus Christ, who insisted over and over again that our devotion to him is measured by our regard for the interests of those most vulnerable to injustice: the orphan, the immigrant and the dispossessed.
So our conduct in the political arena serves as a public refutation of our witness. Unbelievers read the Bible, too; and they can see that we're not living out the values we claim to espouse. It's evident that we're not truly pro-life or pro-family.
The tax policies that we favor reveal what we value: "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." Instead of advocating for economic policies that are conducive to raising a family, we prefer policies that allow us to keep as much of our own money as possible.
It's important for Christian institutions to retract racist sentiments and establish scholarship funds. But mostly in the way a painkiller is important: it silences the pain momentarily but doesn't heal the underlying infirmity.
Evangelicalism's fractured identity cannot be patched up by attending to symptoms.
Evangelicalism won't have integrity while there are yet unrebuked seminary faculty who've made a cottage industry of opposing godly calls for justice, with speeches that are contrary to the sweep of Christian theology and transparently ignorant of Western intellectual history.
Our identity will remain fractured until we set aside our own interests in the interest of justice. And until then, who we vote for matters a lot less than the fact that we're voting for entirely the wrong reasons.
