Explaining the Unexplainable

AMONG THE MOST fascinating, inexplicable, and arguably disastrous trends im modern American politics has been and continues to be the emergence of the evangalical Christian community as a driving force on the far right. Since the late seventies and early eighties, commencing with the emergence of Jerry Falwell's "moral majority", American conservatism and the Republican party have become increaslingly entwnied with and dominatef by this rising evangelical political tide. How and why this came to be, and most recently how on God's green Earth this movement ended up in bed with Donald Trump and has remained there even since is perhaps the most urgently immediate question in today's American culture generally, as well as its political culture. The fact that traditional, fundamentalist, conservative Christianity and conservative economics and politics are both deeply rooted in tradition and resistant to change seems to be a starting point in understanding. Maybe a good place to gain understanding is to let someone with a scholarly, analytical, journalist bent, someone who was raised in the evangelical church and embraced conservative politics, only to abandon far right religious community after further introspection do the explaining. Fortunately, we have such a explainer. Jon Ward fills the bill in his newly published book: "Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement that Failed A Generation". Arguably the title is misleadingly narrow, and should actually be: "Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed A Nation". After all, it took more than one generation to elect Trump, to support his false claims of election victory, and his violent attempt to overthrow the U.S. governemnt. It took an angry mob of millions of religious-political Trump fanatics, far right wing pro Trump Christian zealots. Jon Ward uses his personal life story as the vehicle with which he elucidates his change of heart, his rejection of and departure from his family and community roots. In the process he evaluates and analysizes the reasons for his own behavior, both before and after his departure, and offers and ideas on how the national national conservative-christian became so egregiously disconnected from its own principles. Ward increasigly came to lament his own faith community's encroaching rejection of truth and reality, abandonment of moral character, and attraction to authoritarianism and conspiratorial thinking. What makes this reelatory book so urgently, vitally relevant is this simple fact: Conservative evangelical Christianity in America today is more virulant, more activist, and therefore more dangerous to the nation's future than ever before.