An Evangelical Guide to Populism

Last year, I composed a brief survey, asking my website readers to suggest which types of content they are most interested in reading at my website. I gained valuable insights from the survey, foremost of which is the fact that most of my readers want me to provide an evangelical evaluation of emerging social movements and political trends.

For that reason, I published a number of evangelical evaluations of social movements and political trends, including articles and series about nationalism, the Alt-Right, Black Lives Matter, and Antifa.

I now offer “An Evangelical Guide to Populism,” which includes:

One of my desires in addressing today’s social movements and political trends is to facilitate civil discussion and thoughtful debate. Regretfully, today’s “American way,” it seems, is to treat all people on the other side of a divide as morally reprehensible people in whom nothing good can be found; to identify all of the vices ever displayed by people on the other side of an issue, and then to stereotype all of the people in an opposing movement with each of those vices. Most of us have succumbed to the temptation at one time or another.

This new “American way” is both foolish and bad—and, historically speaking, not very American. It is foolish, because our vitriol and disdain for the truth poisons our politics and undercuts the good things we want to achieve. It is bad, because we are morally wrong to have disdain for people and contempt for the truth. Therefore, we must resist the temptation to demonize, degrade, lie, or tell-half-truths about those with whom we disagree. We need to recover the lost virtue of decency.

Most treatments of populism that I have found are either blind affirmations of it, on the one hand, or sweeping dismissals of its opponents, on the other hand. My hope is that this series is light rather than heat.