Pared To Truth

Fox News Christianity, MAGA zeal, and the neighbors left as collateral damage

Mike McCready recently wrote a sharp reflection on the MAGA mindset — not merely as a set of political opinions, but as a story people have been taught to inhabit.

His point, in essence, is that many die-hard MAGA supporters are not unreachable because they cannot reason. They are difficult to reach because they have lived for years inside a narrative in which “liberals” are not ordinary political opponents, neighbors, family members, or fellow citizens. They are cast as existential enemies: people who want to destroy America, corrupt children, erase borders, abolish order, and replace reality with ideology.

Mike does not address evangelicals by name, but the implication is hard to miss.

I have been warning about “Fox News Christianity” and “Fox News Christians” for years.

Politics has always had the tendency to demonize opponents. That is not uniquely American, nor uniquely modern. Human beings habitually find it easier to defeat a caricature than to love a neighbor. But when Christians — and here I mean American evangelicals in particular — absorb that habit so easily, one would hope some alarms would have started ringing long ago.

Because “the Left” no longer means a specific doctrine, policy platform, or even the actual positions of Democratic leaders. In the Fox News imagination, “the Left” becomes an all-purpose moral category. Any opinion outside the approved narrative becomes “leftist propaganda.” Any neighbor, coworker, relative, or fellow citizen who leans Democratic is quietly folded into the same demonized mass — and this, almost without saying so, includes millions of Black voters and other minorities as well.

And nowhere is this sport of “shooting down the Left” more popular than on social media.

The result is simple: slogans replace discernment; political zeal replaces Christian witness; and contempt starts passing for conviction.

That last part matters most.

A Christian can disagree politically. A Christian can believe certain policies are foolish, unjust, destructive, or morally confused. None of that is the issue.

The issue is what happens when political opposition becomes contempt. The issue is what happens when a Christian’s public posture toward his neighbor is no longer grief, patience, persuasion, truth-telling, and love — but mockery, suspicion, and tribal signaling.

It is what happens when political disagreement is flattened into a simple good-versus-evil narrative, dragging with it, for good measure, the old “they hate America” dagger.

The New Testament does not leave us much room to pretend this is a small matter.

Christ does not command His people merely to be correct. He commands them to love their neighbors. He commands them to pray for their enemies. He commands them to speak truth without bearing false witness. He tells His disciples that the world will know them by their love for one another, not by the sharpness of their partisan instincts.

That does not mean Christians must become politically timid. It does not mean truth should be softened into sentimental mush. But it does mean that truth severed from charity becomes something ugly. And when contempt becomes habitual — especially when it becomes public — Christian neighbor-love has long since slipped out of reach.

So the question I keep asking myself about my “Fox News evangelical” brothers and sisters is this:

I see how proudly you wave your MAGA flag on every platform, and I sincerely wonder about the last time you invited your Democratic neighbor, coworker, or aunt to church with you.

I suspect I know their answer.

And that is the tragedy.

Not that Christians have political convictions. They should.

Not that Christians care about the future of the country. They may.

Not that Christians believe some ideas are dangerous. Some are.

The tragedy is that many have become more eager to defeat their political neighbor than to win him. More eager to mock him than to reach him. More eager to expose him as part of “the Left” than to speak to him as a person made in the image of God. [Substitute “the immigrant” or “the Muslim” for “the Left,” and the same contradiction appears: Christian love is shouted down by the politics of resentment.]

And this has consequences.

Your political conquests have done very little for your neighbor, and even less for the Church. In fact, the movement you have so zealously served has wounded the Church in ways that will take generations to repair.

The Church was never commissioned to disciple the nations into cable-news outrage. It was not sent into the world to baptize partisan contempt. It was not called to trade the offense of the cross for the thrill of owning the libs.

The Christian witness is not helped when unbelieving neighbors look at evangelicals and see, not a people marked by holiness and love, but a voting bloc trained to sneer.

That is not courage.

That is not discernment.

That is not faithfulness.

It is narrative discipline dressed up as conviction.

And it is ugly.

And it has maligned the Church before our neighbors and before the world — deeply.

___

Attribution

This essay was prompted by Mike McCready’s Facebook post on the MAGA mindset. The quote-card image used in my original Facebook post paraphrased one portion of his argument, and I linked to his full post there.