I’m a big fan of the New York Times’ The Daily podcast, which (rightfully so) also happens to be one of the most subscribed-to podcasts on the planet. In the months before the midterm elections, they’ve included a series called The Run-Up hosted by Astead Herndon. The third full-length episode this week, The Guardrails, dove into the political dynamics within evangelical Christianity, starting with a discussion with NYT’s excellent religion reporter, Ruth Graham.
The episode has a lot going for it. I think it correctly identifies the dynamic that pastors have experienced. Many pastors are seminary-educated and are appropriate nuanced or apolitical in the views they share from the pulpit. The momentum for the Trumpist turn we’re seeing in churches comes from the grassroots. Here’s Graham:
It’s so parallel to what’s happening in the Republican Party because it’s the grassroots getting ahead of the leadership and then the leadership scrambling to either adapt, keep up, or be left behind.
And churchgoers are consumers. They get to choose where they go and who they listen to. So they’re the ones driving the bus of American evangelicalism, I guess. They’re in charge. And when so they went all in with Trump, the old institutional leaders had to figure out how to keep up.
So you have someone like Al Mohler, who I’m really interested in. He’s a big Southern Baptist convention voice, kind of like a lion of the denomination. He’s the president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He opposes Trump in 2016 quite overtly, distinctly. He says it clearly.
And then by 2020, he’s come around. And then even since then, very recently, just within the last few weeks, you have him saying anyone who votes the wrong way is unfaithful to God. And so you can see him following the people, following the grassroots, rather than leading that conversation.
Then the remarkable thing is that at the end of the episode, they bring Mohler himself on to discuss these very dynamics. The interview is excellent, both respectful and probing, giving Mohler the chance to respond to the words of Lauren Boebert, capitol rioters, the term “Christian nationalism,” and where he would draw a line at supporting someone who agrees with him on the traditional topics of abortion and marriage.
It was so good, I wanted to whole-heartedly recommend the episode to everyone trying to understand these dynamics. But I just couldn’t do it.
At the very beginning of the discussion, Herndon and Graham recalled the moment in 2016 when Trump visited Liberty University. Given the verse that gives the school its name to riff on, Trump quoted the second half of 2 Corinthians 3:17: “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.”
No one remembers the verse, though — they remember how Trump read the reference: “Two Corinthians.”
Herndon: Please tell me you remember that moment.
Graham: I do. Well, it was like, an instant — it was sort of hilarious to anyone who knows the Bible. It was a shocking moment. And it felt, at the time, maybe like, oh, this is the end. It shows that he hasn’t — not only not read the Bible, but hasn’t talked about it.
Herndon: Can we slow this down? Maybe people would not know why that moment is so ridiculous and kind of funny. Can you explain that?
Graham: Well, you would call it second Corinthians. If you’ve been to one Sunday school class, you know it’s second Corinthians. So — and I think there was a little bit — I remember some revisionist interpretations of that, of people saying, well, I call it two Corinthians. But no American evangelical — it just instantly just clangs in the ear in a way that just betrays a complete lack of fluency with even just — this is like ABCs of being an American evangelical or Christian. But it also didn’t stop people from falling in love with him.
Herndon would later weave this moment into the most “gotcha”-type question he asks Mohler in the whole interview:
Mohler: My first responsibility is to make sure [pastors] understand the difference between Genesis and 1 Kings, to train them how to teach and preach the word of God, to make sure that they know the doctrines of the Christian faith.
Herndon: I’ve got to say it’s hard for me to hear that when you have backed someone who didn’t know second Corinthians from 2 Corinthians. How do we square those two things?
Mohler: Well, yeah, that was clever, by the way. That was a good job.
I understand the temptation to laugh alongside Herndon and Graham. Trump indeed sounded to an American ear like he had never studied the Bible. And Trump’s explanation at the time — that he learned the names of the books of the Bible from his Scottish mother, who taught him “Two Corinthians” — indeed seemed suspicious.
But as far as we know, it’s the truth. In the UK and the broader Commonwealth, plenty of people indeed refer to the book as “Two Corinthians.” Just today at my church here in Singapore, one of our pastors, from New Zealand, referred to another book of the Bible as “One Peter” and no one batted an eye.
It’s only in an American-only context that “Two Corinthians” clangs in the ear. And yes, American Christians are notorious for experiencing their faith exclusively in that American-only context. I’ve railed against that very parochialism in the past, and it remains the case that many of those instances reflect the right side of the political spectrum. But it’s just as wrong when exhibited by those criticizing the right.
Let’s steelman the argument a bit, though. Clearly if Trump had been actually going to church or Sunday school in the US at any point in his entire adult life, he would have heard the book referred to as “Second Corinthians”, right? This shows that he never did so, or at least never listened that closely when he did, one might argue.
No, it doesn’t show that. Hearing someone refer to the book as “Second Corinthians” doesn’t make “Two Corinthians” automatically wrong. Both pronunciations can be valid, sort of like regional accents, and even within the same person. In fact, the same pastor who referred to “One Peter” in today’s service also referred to “Second Thessalonians” later on. With this topic already on my mind, I noticed, but I doubt anyone else did.
It certainly isn’t common in American churches to be explicitly instructed that “Second Corinthians” is the right pronunciation and “Two Corinthians” is wrong. And absent such an explicit pronouncement, someone who has heard both won’t even think much of the distinction, like how “the twenty-third psalm” and “psalm twenty-three” are both completely valid and interchangeable spoken references.
Now, I happen to agree that there is ample reason to believe that Trump in fact was indeed not morally formed by the churches that he attended in his younger days, or at least that he interpreted the messages he received in ways that are at best unrelated to the gospel. But that argument should be made on its own terms.
I know, doing so requires diving into waters that can become theologically contested. It’s tempting, then, to reach for the criticism that “he doesn’t know how to pronounce a book of the Bible” as something objective and irrefutable. But the actual frequency of his pronunciation around the English-speaking world, along with the fact that his mother was indeed from the UK, makes it both subjective and refutable.
It’s also entirely beside the point. It makes literally no material difference whether my Christian pastor refers to the book verbally as Two Corinthians or Second Corinthians, let alone a politician. To make a big deal of that description is to fixate on the linguistic and cultural aspects of faith, not anything substantial, and further contributes to the descent of political commentary into theater criticism.
So please, just stop.
Sam, I don't know the first thing about religion, and I appreciate your blog for making stuff like this accessible to me