Songs of Experience: White Christianity Paved the Way for a Trump Presidency
By: Molly Wilcox
Tags: Evangelicals, Personal Essay, White Christianity, 2020 Presidential Race, Evangelicals And Trump

(Scott McIntyre/The Washington Post via Getty Images)

In 1994, Friends premiered on TV, the World Series was canceled because the MLB was on strike, Hillary Clinton was gaining an equal amount of traction and hate from the public, and I was born. From a young age, the foothills of Mount Diablo were my sanctuary. Growing up, we’d put on our hiking shoes and head for the hills as a family, talking about mundane things like the state of the world, and interesting things like what we would do if we won the lottery. Sometimes we really didn’t talk much at all. My dad called those hills his church. As I grew, the dusty pathways with their squirrels and snakes and deer and occasional turkey acted as my therapists. Naturally, the morning after the 2016 election, my swollen, red eyes and I set out for the hills.

For me, 2016 was my loss of innocence. It was as though Wordsworth’s poems from Song of Innocence were the ballads of my undergraduate English literature major and badge of youth, until I graduated and my real life began. My syllabus for life became less white, less male, and less straight. After being smothered in conservative Christianity for four years at Westmont College and seeing how the white Christian tradition paved the way for a Trump presidency, I knew I had many things to reckon with. Was this tradition something I wanted to be a part of? Was it something I needed? Were these Christian friends my people? Did it bring me joy? Did it help me love my neighbor better? Overwhelmingly, and scarily, the answers were no.

At age 18, I got my first tattoo: Romans 12: 1–2 in between my shoulder blades in type-writer font. The verse reads, “Offer your body as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God. Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve God’s perfect and pleasing will.” As an 18-year-old, that verse meant largely the same thing to me that it does now: don’t jump off a bridge just because your friends are and don’t blindly believe something without putting in the work. Get the facts, don’t conform, transform your mind.

When I was very young, my mom sang on the worship team at our Presbyterian church, and my dad was my Sunday school teacher, if only to help me overcome the crippling shyness I felt among peers as a youngster. As a family, we went to church together every Sunday for the first 10 years of my life, sitting with my grandparents in the pews as I got older and making friends with kids from Sunday school. But Christianity was never quite embedded in my family as much as it was a cultural aspect of who we are: we prayed before Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas dinner, we went to church on Sunday, then we went on with our lives. My parents never tried to convert someone to Christianity, alternatively they made a huge point of respecting all people, no matter their religion, sexual orientation, lifestyle, etc. We’re from the Bay Area after all. When it comes down to why we went to church, it’s pretty simple: my parents grew up with organized religion, so they passed it on to us. However, as my brother and I got older, they wanted us to choose for ourselves.

The late teens and early twenties are a faulty, insecure, and overwhelming period of time marked with desperately trying to figure out who you are. Do you believe in what your parents stand for? Do you know what you stand for? Who do you want to be friends with? When applying for college, I had two requirements for prospective colleges: a Christian school and great study abroad programs. Interestingly and thankfully, my parents never forced religion onto me. Instead, it was my choice to join a middle school youth group, my choice to get baptized at age 13, my choice to become a student leader in high school, and it was my choice to continue to pursue my faith through college. From my experience of church in my youth, Christianity brought me structure, genuine friendships, and peace knowing there’s so much more to life than me and my problems. It gave me both a broader worldview and a sturdy foundation.

But there’s something different about how a Christian community works in a college setting. There are thousands of students and faculty and investors who come from every kind of belief system: fundamentalists, conservatives, evangelicals, and even atheists. They all bring a different set of opinions to the classroom. But when a freshman, white, straight boy in my world history class said, “I think all women should be subservient to their husbands, their role is to be in the house,” he wasn’t reprimanded by other students or the professor. In fact, some agreed with him. But what has always stayed with me all these years later is that I didn’t reprimand him either. Me, the self-proclaimed feminist, the proud liberal from the Bay Area, the champion of civil rights. Ultimately, I look back at that moment and blame shock: how could these archaic ideologies have a place in a classroom?

In 2016, the election made me come to terms with my reality: I am not that feminist nor that champion if I continue to let myself be silenced by a tradition that has long since favored elite, cis-gendered, white, men. So, it wasn’t until I went to a predominantly white Christian college that I realized an institution that once brought me so much confidence and peace in my youth, held multitudes of oppression. I graduated from Westmont, and I haven’t been to church since.

I did not denounce Christianity in my personal life and I find spirituality and prayer to be a beautiful and useful part of my life and growth as a human. But I’ve learned that I can do without attending the institution that is “church.” Why spend time debating whether the LGBTQ community should have the right to marry when I could be dancing in a rainbow onesie at San Francisco Pride instead? Why debate whether women can lead, when I could, at 24 and working at Wells Fargo, travel alone across the country to give speeches about elevating the culture of innovation within the company? Why debate whether Donald Trump was just participating in “locker room talk” when I could be joining women’s groups and learning from sexual assault survivors? Why debate whether Black Lives Matter, when I can stand in solidarity and protest to prove they do?

The white evangelical church has failed me. It chose apathy and debates over love and wisdom. It lost sight of the fundamental teachings of Jesus. It coddled white, straight, male members and silenced others. It failed me personally when it allowed me to feel insecure for 4 years, leaving me the decision to debate my way through every class or stay silent and internally fume. It failed women when it chose Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. It failed miserably when they called him “the Chosen One.” It failed all of us, because some of the most marginalized want nothing to do with it. While we wait jadedly for the conclusive results of the 2020 election, it’s hard to believe that evangelicals failed to denounce, and in fact embraced, the xenophobia, blatant racism and sexism, continuous lies, and overwhelming corruption of Trump.

It’s a hard thing to come to terms with the realization that something that was once your strongest identity, you now feel completely demoralized by, and something that was created for good, became so insidious. Now when I’m in need of wisdom I retreat back to the sanctuary of my youth. I think of my dad and his church of choice, and I head for the hills.