In the fall of 2016, Albert Mohler, the head of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and one of the most prominent evangelical thinkers in the United States, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post in which he described Donald Trump as a “crisis of conscience” for religious conservatives, and an “excruciating” one, at that. Mohler, who has long been vocal about his opposition to same-sex marriage, abortion rights, divorce, and other tenets of secular liberalism, described Hillary Clinton as “a threat to values and causes we see as vital to human flourishing,” but argued that his fellow evangelical leaders were wrong “to serve as apologists for Donald Trump.” Mohler called Trump a “sexual predator” and asked, “How could ‘family values voters’ support a man who had, among other things, stated openly that no man’s wife was safe with him in the room? A casino titan who posed for the cover of Playboy magazine? A man who boasted that he did not repent of his (well-documented) sins and would not?” Mohler has said that he did not vote for Trump or Clinton.
In 2016, Mohler said that the “marriage of convenience” between evangelicals and the Republican Party was over. In April, 2020, however, he announced that he planned to vote for Trump this fall. In a video released by the seminary, he said that he still has concerns about Trump’s character, but that the two parties have diverged to the point that he is choosing to support the Republican candidate. Mohler’s latest book, “The Gathering Storm: Secularism, Culture, and the Church,” borrows the title of Winston Churchill’s account of the lead-up to the Second World War to describe the urgent threat of “the dechristianization of society.” Mohler and I recently spoke by phone. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed his views of modernity, why he has decided to vote for Trump, and whether Trump is speeding up the secularization of American society.
I once heard you say that you would like to live in a Victorian house, but not with Victorian medicine. Do you think the fact that we don’t have Victorian medicine has to do with changes brought about in part by these waves of secularization that you don’t like?
I appreciate the question. I’m trying to be intellectually honest. I think one temptation for conservatives is always to try to point to some golden era to which we want to return. That’s a misreading of history. There are certain realities of previous eras that we may wish to retain, and certain truths that we continue to cherish. But there is no golden moment that, judged adequately and honestly, would mean that we would want to return there.
I believe in the sovereignty of God. I don’t believe it was an accident that I was born in 1959. I believe the life that I was called to live is grounded in my birth, in 1959, because the sovereign God of the universe determined that it would be so. So believing in the sovereignty of God means that I believe this is the time in which I am called to live. It would thus be an insult to God to suggest that I should’ve lived in some other time, past or future.
And there are achievements of modernity. In just about every major intellectual or historical epoch, there are genuine gains—gains of prosperity in a market economy, gains of science and modern medicine. I’m very thankful for antibiotics and anesthesia and MRI technology. If those had not been available, I probably wouldn’t be alive to have this conversation. I’m also thankful for some of the moral achievements of the modern age, which include expanding our affirmation of human dignity in a way that includes many human beings made in the image of God whose dignity had been denied, often violently so, in previous centuries.
In your book, you talk about Churchill and the glories of Western civilization. But the places that conservatives especially tend to celebrate as having thrived are in many ways the places that have secularized the most. Can one occur without the other?
You raise a host of issues in that question, and that’s a huge puzzle and challenge. Can you have any of the aspects of modernity without setting loose the acids of modernity? There’s a sense in which cultural conservatives are increasingly pessimistic that modernity can be a limited project. And, by the way, that doesn’t mean just a concern about any particular aspect of modernity, because Marx’s statement was “All that is solid melts into air.” If you’re a modern secularist, you can say, “Well, that’s great. There goes theism.” But the problem is, a generation from now, I hope we’re not looking back and saying, “Oh, there it went, human dignity.” Because if all that is solid melts into air, then there is no stop to modernity’s erosion of truth claims and settled ways of life. And society cannot exist without truth claims and settled ways of life.
I’m a Christian, so I hold to a Biblical understanding of human sinfulness, so I’m not surprised to see it. Every civilization is made up of human beings who are tainted by sin and whose ambitions and motivations are often not what they should’ve been. But Western, European, and North American civilization has produced notions of liberty that have survived longer than such truths have survived anywhere else. And with an expansion of logic, that has actually served to undermine the faults of the nations involved in Western civilization. Even as Western nations and Western civilization, with expansion and imperialism and colonialism and all the rest—even though it involved the slave trade, the internal logic of Western civilization produced not only the opportunity for a counter voice but, eventually, an abolition movement that was more powerful than the argument for slavery. It has been a very difficult task, but, decade by decade, sometimes with two steps forward and one step back, you see the cultures of Western civilization grappling with issues of human dignity, human rights, moral responsibility, that you just do not see in other experiments in human ordering. It’s not an accident that so much of the debate right now is within what remains of Western civilization or those regions heavily influenced by Western civilization, because this is the only place that discourse can even take place.
I wouldn’t want to tell people in countries, specifically in countries where they live under a dictator that perhaps the West has supported or funded, that they don’t care about human freedom and flourishing and liberty, and—
You mean the individuals?
Yeah. I wouldn’t want to say that to those individuals.
Sure. That’s not what I’m saying. It’s an institutional project.
I understand. But it seems to me that people who embrace “Western civilization” as a concept want to view the struggle as having ended and don’t want to push any further, which seems too convenient to me. Do you think that is unfair?
No, I think that’s a very interesting conversation, but it also points out the fact that there are different arguments being made here. I think the self-corrective nature of Western civilization—it’s a project, imperfect, always imperfect, never utopian—is evident from the fact that the United States, right now, in the midst of unrest after the killing of George Floyd and other events, has a massive cultural consensus, reported in just about every major media source and backed up by survey data, about the mandate of the extension of full dignity and corrective measures in society to protect that dignity for African-Americans. And, of course, there’s particular historical context for that in the United States. The United States has shown over the course of its national history a pattern of dealing badly with people who are considered different when they arrive, and then incorporating them into the American experiment such that latter generations would never have known they could have been controversial.
You said, in 2016, “Perhaps the best we can hope for in this sad election cycle with these two unsupportable candidates is that we do not allow a national disgrace to become the Great Evangelical Embarrassment.” Trump is now supported by a huge majority of American evangelicals. Has it been an embarrassment?
Yes. President Trump is a huge embarrassment. And it’s an embarrassment to evangelical Christianity that there appear to be so many who will celebrate precisely the aspects that I see Biblically as most lamentable and embarrassing. So I have to make a distinction between voting for a candidate and rationalizing for a candidate, much less being enthusiastic about what I would see as the character faults of a candidate. I intend to vote for Donald Trump in 2020, but my shift is from reluctantly not voting for him in 2016 to what you might call reluctantly voting for him in 2020, and hoping for his reëlection, because the alternative is increasingly unthinkable. But I will not become an apologist for the misbehavior of the President and for what I see as glaring deficiencies in his private and public character.
There will be a good many evangelicals angry with me for stating what I just said to you.
You are someone who does not like President Trump, but how do you understand his appeal? What did you misjudge, or what did we all misjudge?
Well, one of the difficulties for a classical conservative is whether or not conservatism and populism are implacable enemies. For most of the twentieth century, the assumption was that conservatism and populism, or popular support maybe defined as populism, are un-unitable, incommensurate. But the election of Ronald Reagan as President, in 1980, was a counter to that argument. Reagan became the refutation of a conservative assumption that to have that level of popular support meant that you could not truly be a conservative. Evangelicals really became politically activated in the Reagan campaign in 1980. That’s a crucial moment. So I think many observers, perhaps like at The New Yorker, fail to understand that a certain instinct became an intuition in American evangelicalism, which is that the candidate that would be most attractive would be one that would combine a conservative political philosophy and genuine populist support.
Now, Trump is very different than Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was elegant and genial, the total package. But there was enormous personal pride on the part of conservatives in Ronald Reagan’s statesmanship on the world scene. The period between Reagan and Trump was one of evangelical frustration, you could even say conservative frustration. That’s not to say that there was no appreciation for either George H. W. Bush or George W. Bush. There was. I was among those that had a great deal of admiration for both, but there was still frustration. I think we now know there was a lot more frustration at the grassroots level than any of the élites.
In a sense, given my leadership in the S.B.C., I did not sense some of that energy and unrest that exploded onto the scene, which was, frankly, far more populist than conservative. It clearly gained the support of millions and millions of those who had more conservative instincts but were driven by a real populist outrage at the political orders as they were. But I don’t see any evidence that would say evangelicals as a bloc produced Donald Trump as the nominee of the Republican Party in 2016. The evangelical vote was split all over the place. But, when it became a binary choice, and it became Donald Trump versus Hillary Clinton, that entire equation changed.
But Trump could’ve been impeached and removed, and Mike Pence could’ve become President and given conservatives the same judicial appointments. There could’ve been a Republican-primary challenge of real seriousness from a true conservative this year.
Well, you switched the categories on me a little bit. Because we started talking about evangelicals, and now you’re talking about conservatives. I don’t equate the two.
I just meant there could’ve been an evangelical-led, or conservative-led, movement to have a Republican Party that was as committed to its platform on issues of abortion and on issues of judges and so on, but without Trump.
That’s an interesting—but to me not very interesting for long—hypothetical. In 2016, you’re actually making my point. In 2016, there was enormous, enormous evangelical support for other candidates. But it was spread among those candidates. You had many evangelicals who supported Marco Rubio. You had perhaps an even larger number, certainly in the end of the primary process, who supported Ted Cruz. But when it became binary, evangelicals followed their instinct and their vehement opposition to the platform of the Democratic Party and the candidacy of Hillary Clinton and helped put Donald Trump in the White House. And I believe they will do so again in 2020.
You once said, “Let’s consider the importance of those words, ‘a utilitarian worldview.’ What does that mean? A utilitarian worldview is widely celebrated by secular elites in the United States. . . . But we also need to note, and note very carefully, that when an objective morality of right and wrong is abandoned, inevitably something like pragmatism and utilitarianism is all that will come in to play.”
It seems to me that your argument for Trump is essentially a utilitarian one. You’re saying, I don’t like this guy. He’s not a good person. He’s really bad. But the issues before us are too important to vote for someone else.
Well, there is certainly a pragmatic, utilitarian dimension to it, but that’s not how I approach moral questions fundamentally. A political question is a bit different in that I’m presented with a binary choice between two candidates, and, even if there are third-party candidates, or you can write in your cat, the reality is that, given the Electoral College, the result is going to be one of those two candidates elected as President of the United States. So, in that situation, we’re forced into a calculus of greater loss, greater gain in the measurements of making a political decision. And, in that sense, once you’re into procedural democracy, you have to enter into some kind of utilitarian calculus, but you have to do so in such a way you keep your soul.
But it feels like conservative evangelicals, as one element of the Republican coalition, could have tried to make it so that Donald Trump would not be the only choice for Republicans or conservatives or pro-life voters in 2020, if they really disliked him and wanted other options. And they did not choose to do that. They’re basically happy.
Yeah, but I’m evidently not communicating well one distinction, which is that I’m not arguing that Trump does not have widespread affection on the part of many evangelicals. I’m not making that argument. But there are a couple of huge problems in how evangelicalism is defined in the national discourse. As a theologian and as a churchman, when I define evangelical, I’m really talking about a self-consciously orthodox classic Protestantism that is deeply connected to the church and deeply committed to the gospel of Jesus Christ. And then you have the media definition of evangelicals, which means anybody who isn’t Catholic or Jewish or something else and, especially as demographers look at the white population, identifies as some kind of conservative Protestant. They just are called evangelicals. That’s the problem. If you look at evangelical leadership in the United States, you see a tremendous reticence to enter into the Make America Great Again euphoria. But, with the populist base of the Republican Party, and the populist base of American evangelicalism defined the way that especially the media defines evangelical, you do. They’re not co-extensive, but they overlap considerably.
But is electing people like Trump only going to further the trends that you are concerned about? Every day, people can correctly say, “The guy in the White House is making statements that are outrageous about women,” or he’s calling Obama’s birthplace into question, and so on. So it seems like it just keeps the cycle going to choose someone who is this inflammatory, when, if what conservative Christians really want is to slow down various trends, this is exactly the wrong idea.
I think I get what you mean. I think that, if Donald Trump is a permanent fact of American politics, it will become very difficult for American conservatism to survive. I don’t believe that Donald Trump is a permanent fact of American politics. It’s difficult to imagine someone of his temperament and background being elected President of the United States. But it happened in 2016, and there’s at least good evidence that he was among those most surprised. He certainly has a good chance of being reëlected President in 2020, but our constitutional order continues along with term limits for President. And the real test for the Republican Party, and by extension the real test for conservatives, including conservative Christians, is going to come with what follows Donald Trump, either after 2020 or 2024.
So you’re asking very live and relevant questions, but none of these questions can be answered in a vacuum. I don’t know anyone in the leadership of the Republican Party, or anyone in the leadership of American evangelicalism, who thought it plausible that Donald Trump would be the nominee in January or February of 2016. So the binary choice that American voters have faced in 2016 and in 2020 will be replaced by a very different choice in 2024, one way or the other.
On a podcast, you said that you were pessimistic about American conservatives ever having a true majority in the near future, which does make me wonder whether Trump-like options are going to become more popular in the future, rather than less.
I will simply say that I think most thoughtful conservatives recognize that the culture is moving away from us at the most fundamental level, and also by demographics. And that’s one of the reasons why I continually look at reality. We’ve got to face the fact that even just demography matters to the extent that the closer people live to coasts, the closer they live to cities, the closer they live to campuses, the more liberal they tend to become. And, by any estimation, those are demographic trends that show no sign of slowing.
And the intellectual class replicates itself as it can do, and in some ways only it can do, by means of the process of higher education. And you’ve got the other major centers of cultural production, whether it be Hollywood or the media, even major corporate leadership, in the very same situation. So the grounds for conservative hope are always local. The grounds for conservative hope are always families, communities, and the structures that Edmund Burke called the little platoons. The conservative hopes are always invested in a more Tocquevillian vision of America, and, as America becomes a more urbanized and progressive culture, the entire experiment is called into question.
Populism is driven, to at least some extent, by panic and outrage. And panic and outrage are understandable, but they are not the pillars of a stable, long-term cultural or political strategy. I hope that makes sense.
