Hilton Head Island, SC – September 15, 2024
The Chapel Without Walls
John 3:1-8; John 3:9-16
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – Jesus answered him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born anew he cannot see the kingdom of God.” – John 3:3 (RSV)
The sermon I originally planned to preach today was entitled Must We Be “Born Again” to Be Born Again? I will address that theme in the first part of this sermon, but the focus will be on the revised title, The American Evangelical Abandonment of Christianity.
During the 1970s and beyond, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and other evangelical television preachers became widely known as what came to be universally called “Born-Again Christianity.” To my knowledge, that term had never before been widely used.
This term originated from a story told only in the Gospel of John, which is the favorite of most evangelicals. The story refers to a Pharisee named Nicodemus who came to Jesus at night to engage in a theological discussion with him. New Testament commentators speculate that he came to see Jesus at night because he feared that if he came during the day, people might see him and think he was a follower of Jesus. That may be correct, but it is impossible to be certain of it, because John says nothing about such a conclusion.
Nicodemus began the conversation by saying, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do the signs that you do unless God is with him.” Presumably the Pharisee was sincere when he made that very complimentary statement. Instead of responding to it, though, Jesus said something that seems completely unrelated: “Unless one is born anew, he cannot see the kingdom of God.”
Nicodemus apparently did not catch the drift of what Jesus was talking about, for he said, “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter again a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?” Obviously Jesus was not talking about obstetrics, but about theological nuances. In order to enter and to comprehend God’s kingdom, Jesus said, we must perceive reality from God’s perspective, and the way Jesus chose to express that truth was to say that we must be born anew. For whatever it is worth, at no point in this episode is the term “born again” ever used, but that is what many contemporary evangelicals say to describe themselves.
After this deep and elliptical conversation, we do not hear anything else about Nicodemus until Jesus’ crucifixion, where John tells us that he provided the tomb in which Jesus was buried. From this we may infer that he at least kept track of Jesus during his Galilean ministry, and that Nicodemus also may have kept in touch with him. Whether or not Jesus would consider Nicodemus sufficiently born anew we cannot be certain, but Nicodemus may have been present at the crucifixion, and John says he made provisions for a proper burial for the man he had met three years before.
Being “born again” has become a personal necessity to most evangelical Christians. It means having a recognizable “conversion experience,” and a public declaration of it. An “altar call” has long been a part of evangelical culture, but it is quite foreign to most Mainline Protestants as well as Roman Catholics.
In 1902, the psychologist Willam James gave a series of twenty lectures at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Collectively they were called “The Varieties of Religious Experience.” Later his lectures were published as a book that has been in print ever since. He cited numerous individuals who were influenced religiously in many different ways, and with varying levels of clarity and intensity. Thus it affects the behavior of people in a great variety of ways.
Traditionally, evangelical Christians tend to be more overtly pious and rules-oriented than other Christians. They view life essentially as a battle between right and wrong, good and evil. Therefore they frown on what the Bible calls evildoers, and they strive to associate only with those whom they believe to be morally upright and scrupulously honest.
The former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump has become the political champion of evangelicals and the Religious Right. In light of his personal history for most of his life, this has created widespread astonishment among millions of other Americans, including innumerable pundits and journalists. They are mystified at how evangelicals, of all people, are so drawn to such an obviously disreputable man.
Donald Trump says that Kamala Harris is far too inexperienced to be president, but his complete lack of holding any political office made him far less experienced to be president. In four years as president he certainly illustrated that glaring fact. Yet he shows no hesitation to disparage Ms. Harris, even though she spent years as an elected district attorney, state attorney general, United States Senator, and Vice President.
President Trump claims to be a Presbyterian, but he has never been a member of any Presbyterian church. Besides, in the last century most traditional Presbyterians have never seen themselves nor has anyone else perceived them to be evangelicals. So then, why is Donald Trump the darling of American evangelical Christians?
Trump has filed for bankruptcy several times. Is that praiseworthy evangelical behavior? He has the reputation of not paying contractors everything he owed them for constructing his development projects. Is that evangelical behavior? He has been married three times, and openly boasts that he has had dalliances with numerous women. He has been found guilty of sexual assault and fined eighty million dollars for that crime, with seemingly little damage to his reputation in the eyes of evangelicals. A jury found him guilty of thirty-four criminal counts, but he has managed to stave off his sentencing until after the election. How can evangelicals ignore a guilty verdict in two criminal trials, the nullification of two others by the Supreme Court, and the allegations against him in a fifth trial? Have they no respect for the rule of law? Can anyone who is truly a patriot ignore the obvious criminal failings of a presidential candidate?
Their unbending devotion to Mr. Trump demonstrates that far too many evangelicals have abandoned their Christianity. There was an article in USA Today that said 25% of Republicans are more likely than every other political grouping of Americans tp say that political violence is sometimes acceptable. (By the way, in case anyone is unaware of this, USA Today is a newspaper. A newspaper is a printed media publication which has far more carefully-vetted news stories than talk-radio, television, podcasts, websites, or other politically-slanted media have. Coincidentally, at the end of this month, The Island Packet will no longer come out in a print edition. It will be found only on the internet or maybe on smartphones, which are the only media by which some smart and many not-so-smart people get their news. If it seems like I am getting many grievances off my chest in these last few months of my sixty-year homiletical odyssey, it is true; I am. You few folks are the victims of an old guy’s final spoken grousings.)
Anyway, to return to USA Today, the Public Religion Research Institute is a non-profit organization that reports on many different kinds of issues that involve or affect religious groups. They found that only 1 in 6 Americans support political violence, but Republicans are much more prone to support it than Democrats. Robert Jones, the president of the organization, said, “This is not just a partisan issue. It’s a Trump and MAGA issue. It’s the kind of Trumpian takeover of the Republican Party.” The study reported that 27% of Republicans and 32% of Republicans who have a favorable view of Donald Trump agreed with the statement that “patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.” Those numbers mean that 59% of Republicans polled said political violence may be or is necessary, depending on the circumstances. Only 10% of independents and 8% of Democrats agreed with that incendiary statement.
Admittedly, the way this poll was worded was meant to illustrate reliable numbers for Americans who really do favor political violence. For instance, 24% of traditional Republicans and 27% of Trump-supporters (51% of the Republicans polled) agreed with this statement in the poll: “If the 2024 election is compromised by voter fraud, everyday Americans will need to ensure that the rightful leader takes office, even if it requires taking violent actions.” Only 15% of independents and 10% of Democrats agreed with the statement, although to me it is alarming that anyone would affirm such a preposterous supposition. Many of the people polled amazingly favored armed poll watchers on November 5. To quote the article, “Twenty-four percent of Republicans supported that, compared with 28% of Trump-supporting Republicans [52% total] and 10% of independents and 8% of Democrats.
Now let us return to Donald Trump, who, as I hope you can see, is the primary focus of this sermon. In the debate last Tuesday evening, the ex-and-possibly-future-president said that he did not encourage the thousands of people who stormed the capitol on January 6, 2021. For him to say that would be like Bernie Madoff saying he did not swindle billions of dollars in a massive Ponzi scheme. It would be like the Son of Sam saying he did not wantonly kill several innocent people in cold blood. It would be like John Dillinger or Bonnie and Clyde insisting that they never robbed banks. In 2006, the then-President Trump was unquestionably the ringleader for the assault on the nation’ capitol.
Donald Trump is a master liar. He is so proficient at it that it should be one word, masterliar, like “masterpiece” or “mastersinger” or “masterwork.” Almost certainly there never would have been an attack on the capitol had he not clearly convinced the crowd who heard him earlier that day to do what they did. Various newspapers have published lists of thousands of his lies. In the debate last Tuesday he repeated yet another cornucopia of lies. He knew it, we knew it, and Kamala Harris very cogently pointed it out. Every American evangelical should also acknowledge it, although millions will never allow themselves to admit to his incessant lies.
Hundreds or thousands of books will be written about Donald Trump within the next fifty years, as scores have already been written. How anyone can claim to be a Christian and yet vote for Donald Trump will be addressed for generations to come. He represents the greatest threat to American democracy of any major political figure in our history, although it is probably too wide a stretch to say he is a genuine politician. He is an extremely successful, very persuasive, highly intelligent, ignorant, crafty, narcissistic, tragic, too-wealthy-for-our-and-his-own-good sadly warped huckster. He has called several people “enemies of the people.” No one is more an enemy of the people than Donald J. Trump is an enemy of the American and the world’s people.
You may wonder why I am preaching this sermon, and why I am preaching it in this brashly outspoken manner. I will address that indirectly but also more directly in next Sunday’s sermon, Why I Preach Political Sermons. Suffice it to say today that those who claim to be “born-again Christians” should be ashamed of themselves for even momentarily contemplating a vote for the ex-president, who never would have been president without their overwhelming support. There is nothing in the long and often laudable history of evangelical Christianity that would remotely hint such a man as Donald Tump is worthy of serious consideration for any political office, let alone president of the United States of America.
There is much to be said for what eventually came to be known since the 19trh century as “evangelical Christianity.” In the past few decades, it has become the most widely recognized and dominant force in American Protestantism. Its primary political values are no longer the values of either traditional evangelical Protestantism or what became known as Mainline Protestantism and might now be called “Sideline Christianity.” That having been said (as many people now say), I am quite sure that fifty years ago almost no evangelicals would ever consider voting for anyone like President Trump as a candidate for any public office. For the past ten years, however, at least thirty million American evangelicals have done exactly that.
This is not an indictment of historic evangelicalism. It is an indictment of the overwhelming support shown for Donald Trump by many contemporary American evangelicals. According to polls in the presidential elections of 2016 and 2000, 80 to 85% of evangelicals voted for him, and current polls indicate they will vote for the former president again in similar percentages.
Nicodemus opened his conversation with Jesus by saying, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs that you do, unless God is with him.” I am not sure that the man called Nicodemus by the writer of the Fourth Gospel even lived, or if he did, that the story in John, chapter 3, even occurred. If he did exist, and if this conversation happened as John records it, it is impossible for me and perhaps for you to understand how anyone can claim to be a born-again Chrisian and vote for Donald J. Trump.
I realize I am preaching to what I trust is a unanimous choir regarding for whom they will not vote, but I also hope that some of the people who receive my sermons and essays will also vote as we shall vote. So, in the slightly altered words of Jesus, those who have eyes to read, let them read. And, as Martin Luther said, “Here I stand; I can do no other. God help me.”