The genesis of the MAGA Bible Evangelicals could decide America's election

Insofar as the evangelicalism of my childhood had any political implications, they were expressed by the parable of the Good Samaritan. In it, Jesus glosses the commandment “love your neighbour” by illustrating that your neighbour is anybody in need, including those you would normally shun. So how did so many evangelicals in America — who, after all, read the same Bible as my parents, and share with them a common theology and historical lineage — come to embrace an adulterous con man for whom the adjective “unchristian” might have been invented?

I couldn’t stop thinking about this question while reading a fascinating new book by the Yale historian Bruce Gordon. The Bible: A Global History tells the riveting tale of how the writings of a marginal sect in the ancient Near East came to be considered (together with the Jewish scriptures) the sacred texts of a new religion, before becoming — via medieval scribes, the early modern printing press and 20th-century mass production lines — the most reproduced and translated book ever.

Gordon emphasises the shapeshifting nature of the Bible: how over the centuries it has been used to justify slavery and abolitionism, genocide and the struggle against Apartheid, imperialism and socialism. But his story also shows how, among those Christians most passionately devoted to God’s Word, certain themes recur again and again. And in that story it’s possible to trace the psychology of MAGA evangelicals back to its roots in the first century.

We don’t know if Jesus of Nazareth really stormed the Temple in Jerusalem to drive out moneylenders who were operating there, but it’s revealing that this is the kind of story his followers told about him. A rabble-rousing doomsday prophet who condemned the hypocrisy and corruption of his day’s religious authorities, Jesus soon fell foul of the secular authorities too. After the Romans put him to death, his disciples became convinced he had come back to life to save the world, and began spreading that wild idea first around Judea and then the port cities of the eastern Mediterranean.

The leaders of this growing sect wrote letters to the churches they founded, arguing about theology, morals and church organisation; then, when living memory of Jesus was beginning to die out, they wrote accounts of his life to preserve oral traditions about his deeds and teachings. These texts reflected the communities that produced them: fringe sects with eccentric notions that, despite ridicule and oppression, held fast to their belief that they, and they alone, knew the way to salvation.

The early Christians were radical sectarians, distinguished by their fanatical rejection of religious norms, whether Jewish laws or Roman rites. They gloried in their status as outsiders, recalling that Jesus — who had been executed for sedition — had said: “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account.” In their letters they reminded each other that “all who want to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted”. In the face of these trials, single-minded devotion was prized above all else: “Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will affliction or distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or sword?”

Their sense of themselves as “children of God”, set apart from the world, led at times to a sweeping rejection of earthly power and hierarchy. They formed tightly knit communities where ordinary social distinctions were subverted, their most prolific early author stipulating that among them there should be “neither man nor woman . . . neither slave nor free”. But as time went on and they faced the constant threat of violent suppression, some of them began to nurture fantasies of a coming apocalypse where God would wreak violent retribution on their enemies. The book we now know as Revelations, written some half a century after the earliest New Testament letters, reflects an insular and paranoid Christianity that saw itself as locked in combat with dark forces, and that lusted after a cataclysmic showdown between good and evil.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that, as Bruce Gordon shows, for most of Christian history Church authorities were wary of allowing the Bible into the hands of ordinary believers. From time to time, devoted students of the scriptures, provoked by the militant mood of the New Testament they read in Latin, would reject the authority of Rome and attempt to rouse the masses against it. Even after Luther’s Reformation — supercharged by the printing press and new vernacular translations — shook the Catholic Church’s foundations, zealous Christians believed their Bibles taught that the revolution needed to go further.

The Puritans who drove the early settlement of America were sure the English Crown was beholden to a Catholic Deep State, and that the authorities were PINOS: Protestants in Name Only. In place of maps of the New World, they had Bibles that told them they were a new Israel and that America was their Promised Land. Bruce Gordon shows just how integral the Bible was to 17th-century New England: literacy rates were remarkably high; there was a King James Version in most homes; and in 1663 the settlers briefly paused from killing the indigenous people to translate the scriptures into their language.

But by the mid-18th century, the New England Puritans had become the establishment and, just as their forebears once denounced the English Reformation for its sterile traditionalism, they came under attack from firebrand preachers convinced that only they practiced true, biblical Christianity. The so-called “evangelicals” of the Great Awakening helped make a nation out of the American colonies by spreading their faith across colonial boundaries and the disparate communities living in them. Evangelicalism became the characteristic American religion, and its New Testament spirit — restless, fervent, nonconformist, happiest when fomenting revival or rebellion — underwrote the democratic individualism that informed the new republic’s constitution.

Bruce Gordon ends his account of the Bible in America in 1945, with evangelicalism in retreat following the Scopes Trial, which pitted Darwinism against literal interpretations of Genesis. You wonder what he would make of MAGA evangelicalism and the God Bless the USA Bible. It’s easy to forget that, before the Eighties, the rise of a bellicose, revanchist Christian Right did not seem inevitable: the passing of Roe v Wade was a matter of no great concern to most evangelical leaders in 1973, and in 1980 white evangelical voters narrowly split for the Southern Baptist Sunday School teacher, Jimmy Carter. With conservative ideologues such as Jerry Falwell poised to assume leadership of the movement, it would be the last time evangelicals and the Democratic Party would find themselves on the same side of a presidential election.

Trump’s victory in 2016 gave his evangelical supporters at least some of what they had long been campaigning for. His Supreme Court led to the overturning of Roe v Wade, an outcome for which many had fervently prayed since the Eighties. And the 2018 relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem was marked by prayers from particularly fundamentalist pastors who, based on madcap interpretations of New Testament prophecies, support an expansionist Israel in the cheerful hope that war in the Middle East will trigger the End Times.

And yet MAGA evangelicalism today is a movement rooted in weakness, not strength. Just 7% of Gen Z Americans identify as white evangelical Protestants (compared with 35% who are “religiously unaffiliated”), and among those both church attendance and biblical literacy is down. Like the early Christians who wrote the New Testament, the evangelicals are again an embattled sect, increasingly marginal, fearful of persecution. In a sense, this is where they are always most comfortable. As secular liberalism continues its creeping takeover of American culture, Trump looks like a strong man who can keep the darkness at bay.

Trump is not the first US president to produce his own edition of the Bible. In 1820, Thomas Jefferson created a version of the New Testament with razor and glue, omitting the supernatural and keeping only what he saw as Jesus’s essential teachings of compassion for the poor and outcast. The MAGA Bible is a different kind of cut-and-paste job. Although it retains the rebellious, iconoclastic mood of the New Testament, its vision of Jesus is less the saviour of the gospels than the Christ of Revelations: a blood-soaked warrior-king set set for an imminent showdown with the forces of evil. As polling day nears and Trump prepares to contest the result if he loses, many hardcore fringe worshippers believe a battle is coming, and they explicitly identify the Washington establishment with the armies of Satan. It remains to be seen whether the book that helped create American democracy will come to play a role in its downfall.