Megan Basham, Richard Nixon, and Billy Graham

Just a few of the names you'll come across as I resume my (hopefully) daily writing discipline

A few days ago, I got a Facebook notification that said, “An administrator approved your post in Anglicans for the Gospel.” I was a bit confused since I could not recall having submitted any posts of recent vintage to that group, at least not within the time frame that is usually required between submission and approval. Well, it turned out that my article, “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” which I had written way back in May, had finally been approved. Better late than never, I suppose, and I assume the delay was just an oversight since the same article had long since been approved on similar sites with overlapping administrative personnel.

I also assumed most members of the group had seen the article when it first appeared, so I was pleasantly surprised when I saw several of my Facebook acquaintances sharing it via their own pages. With this newfound life, the article spawned a number of new subscribers to my Substack which, to my shame, has been dormant for the past few weeks. So, with a new band of readers eagerly anticipating my next contribution to the national conversation, I thought it best to shake the cobwebs from my brain and get over my extended case of writer’s block.

Now, before anyone accuses me of just being lazy, I will quickly point out that, over the last few weeks, much of the time I could have spent writing has been devoted, instead, to reading. Most significantly (and, to some lesser minds, scandalously), I have been focused on Megan Basham’s blockbuster exposé of the Evangelical Industrial Complex (affectionately known as “Big Eva”), Shepherds for Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded the Truth for a Leftist Agenda. This well-written and well-documented book has been a source of much belly-aching by those who say it is poorly written and poorly documented. Such persons are mostly the Big Eva leaders, or their sycophant followers, who bear the brunt of Basham’s critique. Establishment evangelicals, in recent years, have become easy pawns for wealthy left-of-center donors who have used their financial resources to influence them in a more “progressive” direction on moral and social issues while maintaining the facade of being “Gospel-centered” and “Gospel-focused.” Basham has exposed the masquerade, thus incurring the wrath of the Big Eva establishment.

Much of the spectacle, which is largely being played out on social media, is hilarious to behold but, at the same time, deeply saddening. I was reminded of this in an odd way after I had finished Basham’s book and began reading Daniel Silliman’s One Lost Soul: Richard Nixon’s Search for Salvation. Silliman is news editor for Christianity Today, the flagship publication of Big Eva and a primary target of Basham’s critique. That baggage notwithstanding, a spiritual biography of so vilified an historical figure as Richard Milhous Nixon promised to be a fascinating read. Nixon’s life and career have always been of interest to me, probably because he was the first president I remember while growing up. Watergate was my introduction to the sordid daily melodrama that is Washington politics but I am also just old enough to remember Nixon’s two greatest achievements, the opening of relations with China and the end of the Vietnam War. So, when I hear his name, I am more inclined to think of his accomplishments as a statesman than of his failings as a crooked politician.

Silliman hardly gives Nixon a passing grade on matters spiritual. His Quaker upbringing somehow did not instill in him any concept of grace. His was a religion of works. He had to earn his salvation just as he had to earn his father’s approval, neither of which he ever felt he did. Instead of regularly attending a church on Sunday morning, he invited well-known religious leaders to lead services at the White House during his presidency. He was a friend of Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale but, as the now infamous tapes revealed, he was a man whose everyday conversational vocabulary was laced with profanities and blasphemies.

Nixon has always been considered a multi-dimensional and complicated man. Silliman’s examination of his spiritual dimension will likely add further complications, but that is not necessarily a bad thing inasmuch as it serves as a contribution to the overall evaluation of Nixon’s legacy. In reading the book, however, I noted the number of contemporary evangelical leaders in Nixon’s orbit. His friendship with Graham spawned additional relationships with such notables as Harold Ockenga, Leighton Ford, L. Nelson Bell, and Harold Lindsell. These men are today considered giants of the faith from an era when evangelical leaders were uncompromising in their commitment to the Gospel. However, it is fair to ask just how much their friendship with Nixon, and the importance of maintaining it, influenced their looking the other way at his obvious shortcomings. Critics of Basham’s book have tried to make the argument that the main motivation for her critique of particular evangelical leaders is that they do not support Donald Trump. While many of them have that in common, that is hardly the reason they come under Basham’s scrutiny. To be fair, some lesser lights of the evangelical world have sold themselves out to Trump in ways that even Nixon’s most ardent apologists would not approve. The comparison between these two eras of American religio-political history, however, is very much an apples and oranges proposition.

However much Nixon may have exploited religion, the fact that he did so for political advantage illustrates the important place religion in general, and evangelicalism in particular, played in American life at the time. The heyday of the “Religious Right” would come during the Reagan era but its seeds were certainly being planted during Nixon’s time in the White House. Even Watergate bore the splendid fruit of Charles Colson, one of Nixon’s closest confidantes, being “born again” and becoming a leading voice in evangelicalism (including as a contributor to Christianity Today) for nearly four decades.

The establishment evangelicals critiqued by Basham might like to see themselves as the successors of the evangelical leaders who once carried the water for a less than devout Richard Nixon. Yet, while they look down their noses at those who are, today, carrying the water for an equally less than devout Donald Trump, it is impossible to avoid the devastating reality of their own moral and spiritual compromises that have now borne the bitter fruit of “Evangelicals for Harris” and a myriad of other organizations and movements that claim to march under the banner of the Gospel of Jesus Christ while advocating for causes diametrically opposed to it.