John Fea > Quotes

“Evangelicals can do better than Donald Trump. His campaign and presidency have drawn on a troubling pattern of American evangelicalism that is willing to yield to old habits grounded in fear, nostalgia, and the search for power. Too many of its leaders (and their followers) have traded their Christian witness for a mess of political pottage and a few federal judges. It should not surprise us that people are leaving evangelicalism or no longer associating themselves with that label—or, in some cases, leaving the church altogether.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“History reminds us of the inherent weakness in the human condition and the very real possibility that our fellow human beings are capable of horrendous things. This should humble us, for “there but for the grace of God, go I.”
― John Fea, Why Study History?: Reflecting on the Importance of the Past

“Nothing Trump could say or do would deter his diehard white evangelical supporters. This is still the case. Most evangelicals were willing to ignore his moral lapses because he had, to their way of thinking, the correct policy proposals.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“The only way to get around Trump’s flaws was to somehow Christianize him. Paula White claimed that she had led Trump to accept Jesus Christ as his savior. Jerry Falwell Jr. said that Trump’s moral life had changed since he had become a born-again Christian. James Dobson told his followers to be patient with Trump, whom he declared to be a “baby Christian.” The kind of forgiveness and understanding that was never given to Bill Clinton was now available in seemingly endless supply to Donald Trump.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“our natural inclination—our “psychological condition at rest”—is to consume the past for our own purposes or try to remake the past in our own images.”
― John Fea, Why Study History?: Reflecting on the Importance of the Past

“Despite the biblical passages exhorting followers of Christ to “fear not,” it is possible to write an entire history of American evangelicalism as the story of Christians who have failed to overcome fear.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“By trying to understand the past on its own terms, the historian treats it with integrity rather than manipulating it or superimposing his or her values on it to advance an agenda in the present. Practicing good history in this regard is not easy. Humans tend to be present-minded when it comes to confronting the past. The discipline of history was never meant to function as a means of getting one’s political point across or convincing people to join a cause.”
― John Fea, Why Study History?: Reflecting on the Importance of the Past

“Humility, on the other hand, is always centered on the cross of Jesus Christ, a political act that ushered in a new kind of political entity—the kingdom of God. Humility thus requires listening, debate, conversation, and dialogue that respects the dignity of all of God’s human creation. What would it take to replace the pursuit of power with humility?”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“We are operating more out of fear than out of trust in God. We are afraid, and there is no good result from engaging the world from a place of fear. . . . It causes us to trust in the wrong people and the wrong things to protect us. I see it in us. We are turning to the wrong saviors. We think our salvation lies somewhere where it does not. [We are] grasping at power in our current cultural atmosphere and trying to maintain influence. By the way, that’s not the way to get influence—to continue grasping at it desperately. . . . The person who is afraid long enough will always turn angry. Fear never leads to peace. Fear never leads to joy. It always leads to anger, usually anger at those who are not like you.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“The Tea Party movement and other libertarians have convinced millions of Americans that they have to answer to no authority but themselves. Many in our culture have come to define freedom to mean the liberty to do whatever one wants as long as it is within the bounds of the law. In a consumer-driven society, we as individuals have become empowered like never before. The wild growth of capitalism in the United States means that everything is a commodity—something to satisfy our every want and desire. We have been created for something more than this. Yet we continue to deride any quest for the common good as something akin to socialism or anti-Americanism.”
― John Fea, Why Study History?: Reflecting on the Importance of the Past

“First, the past can inspire us. Second, the familiarity of the past helps us to see our common humanity with others who have lived before us. Third, the past gives us a better understanding of our civic identity.”
― John Fea, Was America Founded As a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction

“The South had been called “to conserve and to perpetuate the institution of slavery as now existing.” It was a duty to “ourselves, to our slaves, to the world, and to Almighty God.” No one was more forceful in promoting this view than Robert Dabney. Reflecting on the Civil War, he argued that slaveholders were doing the will of God by lifting the nation’s four million slaves “out of idolatrous debasement.” By Christianizing slaves the South had brought “more than a half million adult communicants in Christian churches!”
― John Fea, Was America Founded as a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction

“Evangelical social critic Ronald Sider has said that too many evangelicals believe “life begins at conception and ends at birth.”15”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“Hunter argues that evangelical Christian attempts to “change the world” through politics—electing the right candidates, who will then pass the right laws and approve the right justices for the Supreme Court—have largely failed.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“Despite God’s commands to trust him in times of despair, evangelicals have always been very fearful people, and they have built their understanding of political engagement around the anxiety they have felt amid times of social and cultural change.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“They saw that those who retaliated violently or with anger against injustice were only propagating injustices of their own. Instead, the spiritual discipline against resentment unleashed a different kind of power—the power of the cross and the resurrection.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“As we saw in chapter 5, many African Americans find American nostalgia troubling because they recognize that there is little in our nation’s history to yearn for. The leaders of the civil rights movement could not make appeals to a golden age. They could only look forward with hope. Those in the movement thus had a clear understanding about the differences between history and nostalgia. When they did turn to the past, it was often an appeal to ideals such as liberty, freedom, or justice, ideals written down in our nation’s sacred documents that had yet to be applied to them completely. History was a means by which they challenged white Americans to collectively come face to face with the moral contradiction at the heart of their republic.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“Parker Palmer puts it, “Democracy gives us the right to disagree and is designed to use the energy of creative conflict to drive positive social change. Partisanship is not a problem. Demonizing the other side is.”
― John Fea, Why Study History?: Reflecting on the Importance of the Past

“Writing in 1855, church historian Philip Schaff quoted an Austrian writer who observed, “The United States are by far the most religious and Christian country in the world . . . because religion is there most free.”
― John Fea, Was America Founded As a Christian Nation?: A Historical Introduction

“As I listened to the veterans of the civil rights movement tell their stories, I was surprised how often I heard them describe America as a “Christian nation.” But this was not the Christian nationalist nostalgia of David Barton, Robert Jeffress, or the court evangelicals. It was a gesture to what they hoped the United States might become.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“For too long, white evangelical Christians have engaged in public life through a strategy defined by the politics of fear, the pursuit of worldly power, and a nostalgic longing for a national past that may have never existed in the first place. Fear. Power. Nostalgia. These ideas are at the heart of this book, and I believe that they best explain that 81 percent.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“Nostalgia freezes the past in images of timeless, childlike innocence.” 6 It fails to recognize change over time. So, instead of doing the hard work necessary for engaging a more diverse society with the claims of Christian orthodoxy, evangelicals have become intellectually lazy, preferring to respond to cultural change by trying to reclaim a world that is rapidly disappearing and has little chance of ever coming back. This backward-looking approach to politics can be seen no more clearly than in the evangelicals’ embrace of Trump’s campaign slogan: “Make America great again.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“The French visitor to America Alexis de Tocqueville, writing in the 1830s, described the connection between American individualism and historical amnesia: Not only does democracy make men forget their ancestors, but also clouds their view of their descendants and isolates them from their contemporaries. Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”
― John Fea, Why Study History?: Reflecting on the Importance of the Past

“It’s time to take a long hard look at what we have become. Believe me, we have a lot of work to do. Believe me.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“The playbook was clear on this point: character simply didn’t matter as much as the opportunity to seize a seat on the Supreme Court.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“Trump, on the other hand, was appealing to a different kind of evangelical voter. His business success and wealth made him attractive to those Christians sympathetic to the gospel of prosperity, or the “health and wealth gospel” movement.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump

“Historians should be in the business of practicing hospitality, and in the Christian tradition “hospitality” and “exclusion” are incompatible terms.[”
― John Fea, Why Study History?: Reflecting on the Importance of the Past

“As we celebrate the 150th anniversary of this tragic event in the American past, democracy is no longer being threatened by secession, slavery, or a bloody civil war, but it is being threatened by our failure to resolve our differences in a civil fashion, work for the common good, and develop the kinds of social virtues necessary for our republic to continue to function.”
― John Fea, Why Study History?: Reflecting on the Importance of the Past

“the late historian and cultural critic Christopher Lasch in his book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. His description of the mechanics of democratic conversation is worth citing in full: The attempt to bring others around to our point of view carries the risk, of course, that we may adopt their point of view instead. We have to enter imaginatively into our opponent’s arguments, if only for the purpose of refuting them, and we may end up being persuaded by those we sought to persuade. Argument is risky and unpredictable, therefore educational. Most of us tend to think of it . . . as a clash of rival dogmas, a shouting match in which neither side gives any ground. But arguments are not won by shouting down opponents. They are won by changing opponents’ minds—something that can only happen if we give opposing arguments a respectful hearing and still persuade their advocates that there is something wrong with those arguments. In the course of this activity, we may well decide that there is something wrong with our own.”
― John Fea, Why Study History?: Reflecting on the Importance of the Past

“To win the evangelical vote, these political candidates knew that they would have to convince the faithful that the Christian fabric of the country was unraveling, the nation’s evangelical moorings were loosening, and the barbarians were amassing at the borders—ready for a violent takeover. Fear is the political language conservative evangelicals know best.”
― John Fea, Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump