I’ve been thinking a lot lately about frogs and soup pots.
You know the old illustration—the one preachers have used for decades about the frog in the kettle. Drop a frog into boiling water, the story goes, and it will jump out immediately. But place that same frog in lukewarm water and raise the temperature gradually, and it will sit there, adjusting, accommodating, until it’s too late.
The illustration isn’t actually true, biologically speaking. Real frogs aren’t that passive. But we are. Human beings, it turns out, are far more susceptible to incremental heat than amphibians.
I’ve been revisiting some research on how ordinary German Christians—people who loved their families, served their communities, and sang hymns on Sunday morning—became, step by step, complicit in unimaginable horror. It is a part of the German church story I knew little about prior to all the research for our audio documentary on the life and resistance of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. This has me asking myself an uncomfortable question: What if we’re the frogs now? What if the water has been warming for nearly a decade, and we’ve been adjusting so gradually that we can no longer feel how hot it’s become?
Or perhaps more unsettling: What if the water started warming long before we realized we were in the kettle at all?
I should say at the outset that I’m not writing as an outsider. I grew up as a Baptist church planter’s kid, and I loved it. From my oldest memories, the church was a community where I was convinced that God knew me completely and loved me. I was introduced to Jesus and his kingdom—what some of us learned to call his kin-dom—and I wanted to be his disciple and walk in his way.
I came to trust Jesus and love the Bible. I didn’t know people went to bed without reading Scripture and talking to Jesus. That practice has never really wavered, even now. The faith I received in those pews and Sunday school rooms remains the most important thing in my life.
Which is precisely why what has happened to white evangelicalism feels less like a political disappointment and more like a profound betrayal.
The Mechanism We’d Rather Not Name
There’s a concept that historians use when studying how ordinary people become complicit in extraordinary evil. They call it sequential complicity. The idea is deceptively simple and profoundly unsettling.
Here’s how it worked in Nazi Germany: the regime implemented its radical agenda not all at once but in small, manageable increments. The persecution of Jews developed over several years, starting with civil disabilities—losing jobs, restrictions on movement, social ostracism—and only later culminating in genocide. Because the horror unfolded gradually, many individuals found themselves locked into the system by the time its full nature became apparent.
The key insight is this: once a person took an initial step of compliance—something as seemingly mundane as registering their ancestry or joining a professional organization that excluded Jews—they entered a new psychological situation. The pressure to continue was powerful, and disengagement became increasingly difficult.
Each step didn’t simply add to previous steps. Each step changed the person taking it. It created new psychological needs—to justify what they’d already done, to protect their previous investment, to avoid the social cost of reversal. The person who had defended yesterday’s compromise was no longer in a position to clearly evaluate today’s demand.
I want to suggest—carefully, but clearly—that something similar has been happening in white American evangelicalism. And I want to suggest it not as an outsider throwing stones, but as someone formed by this tradition, someone who owes it the most important things in my life, and someone who believes that naming this pattern honestly may be the only way to break it.
But to understand where we are, we need to understand where we’ve been. The sequence didn’t start in 2016. The water started warming long before Donald Trump descended that golden escalator.
The Longer Sequence
There’s a story white evangelicals tell about their entry into politics. It goes like this: In 1973, the Supreme Court legalized abortion in Roe v. Wade. Evangelical Christians, motivated by their deep commitment to the sanctity of life, rose up to defend the unborn. The Religious Right was born from moral conviction.
It’s a clean story. A righteous story. It’s also not quite true.
The historical record tells a more complicated tale. Throughout the nineteenth century, American evangelicalism was frequently aligned with progressive social reform—the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, the creation of public schools. Postmillennial theology encouraged believers to build a kingdom of righteousness on earth. Evangelicals were often on the leading edge of justice movements.
But something shifted. By the early twentieth century, a militant reaction against modernism and biological evolution led many evangelicals to view the world as a wrecked vessel that could only be saved through individual conversion rather than social reform. After the public ridicule of the 1925 Scopes Trial, evangelicals largely retreated from broader culture into a self-contained subculture of their own institutions—their own schools, their own radio stations, their own publishing houses.
For decades, the one issue that maintained evangelical engagement with the public square was the specter of godless communism, viewed as a satanic threat to Christian civilization. Billy Graham emerged as a unifying figure, using his massive platform to link evangelical conversion with national identity and anti-communist patriotism.
But here’s what’s often left out of the story: during this same period, most white evangelicals remained opposed to the civil rights movement. Many used what they called the “spirituality of the church” doctrine to avoid addressing racial injustice—arguing that the church’s business was saving souls, not reforming society. The same theological move that had justified retreat from social engagement now justified silence in the face of segregation.
This matters because it establishes a pattern. Long before Trump, white evangelicals had developed a theology that allowed them to separate their private piety from public injustice. The two-spheres thinking that would later enable accommodation to authoritarianism was already being practiced.
And then came the real catalyst—the event that actually sparked the Religious Right as we know it. It wasn’t Roe v. Wade.
In the mid-1970s, the federal government began challenging the tax-exempt status of private Christian schools that practiced racial segregation—most notably Bob Jones University. Conservative activist Paul Weyrich recognized an opportunity. He successfully mobilized evangelical leaders by characterizing the IRS actions as a secular assault on religious institutions. Here was a threat that could unite a movement: the government was coming after Christian schools.
There was just one problem. Defending segregation wasn’t a winning message for building a broad coalition. The movement needed a more respectable rallying point.
Opposition to abortion was discovered as a political tool only in the late 1970s—years after Roe—to serve precisely this purpose. The evangelical rank and file, who had shown little interest in abortion as a political issue in the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court decision, were gradually taught to see it as the defining moral issue of the age.
I don’t say this to diminish the sincerity of pro-life conviction among many evangelicals today. I say it because the history matters. The Religious Right was not born from pure moral conviction about the unborn. It was born from a complex mixture of racial resentment, anti-government grievance, and shrewd political organizing—with abortion retrofitted as the public face of the movement.
This was an early step into the kettle. And it made later steps possible.
The Reagan Rehearsal
The 1980 election provided a dress rehearsal for what would happen in 2016.
The incumbent president was Jimmy Carter—a born-again Southern Baptist who taught Sunday school, spoke openly about his faith, and embodied the personal morality that evangelicals claimed to value. His challenger was Ronald Reagan—a divorced Hollywood actor who had signed one of the most liberal abortion laws in the country as governor of California, who rarely attended church, and whose personal life bore little resemblance to evangelical ideals.
By any measure of the “character counts” ethic, Carter should have been the obvious choice.
Instead, white evangelicals abandoned the fellow believer for the movie star. At the 1980 National Affairs Briefing in Dallas, Reagan signaled his total alignment with the Religious Right’s political agenda. “I know you can’t endorse me,” he told the assembled pastors, “but I want you to know that I endorse you.” The political transaction was explicit. Personal character mattered less than political utility.
Reagan won white evangelical voters decisively. And in the years that followed, evangelicals adopted what might be called selective literalism—focusing intensely on “external” sins like abortion and homosexuality while quietly de-emphasizing biblical injunctions against divorce, the accumulation of wealth, and the treatment of immigrants and the poor.
The ethical framework was already being selectively applied. The seeds of the 42-point shift that PRRI would later document were planted here, in the choice to prioritize political power over consistent moral witness.
The Purge
One more development from this era deserves attention, because it established the template for how evangelical institutions would handle dissent.
In 1979, the same year the Moral Majority was founded, conservatives executed a systematic takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention—the largest Protestant denomination in America and the one I grew up in. Over the following decade, moderates were purged from leadership positions, seminary faculties were reshaped, and the denomination was remade in the image of the Religious Right.
The takeover was methodical and effective. Those who resisted were marginalized, pushed out, or simply worn down. By the time it was complete, the SBC had been transformed from a denomination with genuine theological and political diversity into something far more monolithic.
This matters because it shows that the exile of dissenters we’ve witnessed in recent years—Russell Moore forced out of the SBC, Beth Moore leaving the denomination she’d served for decades, David French vilified by former allies—is not new. It’s a repeated pattern. The movement has long known how to identify and remove those who threaten the consensus.
The sorting and purifying of communities until dissent becomes unthinkable? White evangelicals have been practicing that for over forty years.
The Shift We Can Actually Measure
Which brings us back to the present—and to the data that reveals just how far the journey has gone.
We don’t have to speculate about whether evangelical ethics shifted to accommodate Donald Trump. We can measure it.
The Public Religion Research Institute has been tracking American attitudes about the relationship between personal morality and public leadership since 2011. That year, they asked a simple question: “Do you think an elected official who commits an immoral act in their personal life can still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life?”
In 2011, only 30 percent of white evangelicals agreed with that statement. This made sense—at least on the surface. For decades, evangelicals had insisted that character counts, that personal morality was inseparable from public leadership. During the Clinton years, this conviction was thundered from pulpits and plastered on voter guides. White evangelicals were, in fact, the least likely religious group in America to separate private morality from public fitness for office—less likely even than the religiously unaffiliated.
Then came 2016.
By October of that year—just weeks after the Access Hollywood tape surfaced, in which Donald Trump bragged about sexual assault—PRRI asked the same question again. This time, 72 percent of white evangelicals agreed that personal immorality was compatible with ethical public leadership. In the span of five years, white evangelicals had gone from being the least likely to the most likely religious group to hold this view—a 42-point reversal that represents the most dramatic ethical shift of any religious group in modern polling history.
Let that sink in. The community that had built its political identity on values voting and moral character had, in half a decade, completely reorganized its ethical framework. And the timing was not coincidental. The shift tracked precisely with the need to accommodate a political commitment already made.
But here’s what the longer history reveals: this wasn’t a sudden break. It was an acceleration. The willingness to overlook Reagan’s divorces, to focus on some sins while ignoring others, to purge dissenters and enforce conformity—all of it laid the groundwork. The ethical flexibility had been developing for decades. Trump simply revealed how far it could stretch.
How We Got Into the Kettle
Let me take you back to 2016 for a moment. Remember the mood in evangelical circles when Donald Trump emerged as the Republican nominee? For many leaders, it was deeply uncomfortable. Here was a man who had been married three times, who had bragged about sexual assault, who had built casinos and appeared on the cover of Playboy, who seemed unable to name a single Bible verse that had shaped his life.
The initial evangelical response was not enthusiasm. It was damage control.
Leaders who had spent decades insisting that character counts now faced a choice. And the choice they made—the choice many of us made or watched others make—was to frame the election as a binary choice. Trump was flawed, yes, but the alternative was worse. We weren’t electing a pastor. The Supreme Court hung in the balance. Religious liberty was at stake.
Was there some truth in these concerns? Of course. Many people had legitimate worries about abortion policy and judicial philosophy. But here’s what I want us to notice: that initial framing—we’re holding our noses but the stakes are too high—was another step into the kettle. It was a moment of compliance that would create a new psychological situation.
It was also, in a sense, familiar. Evangelicals had made this move before. They had chosen Reagan over Carter, trading character for political alignment. The muscle memory was already there.
Because here’s what happens when you publicly endorse someone: you stake your credibility on the outcome. You now have something to protect. You’ve invested social capital that you can’t easily recover.
Trump received 78 percent of the white evangelical vote in 2016. That’s a landslide by any measure. But notice: it was framed, at least by many, as a reluctant, transactional choice. The character concerns were acknowledged, even if they were ultimately set aside.
And so when the Access Hollywood tape surfaced—”grab them by the p***y”—the leaders who had already endorsed couldn’t simply say, “We were wrong. This is disqualifying.” They had too much invested. Instead, they found new language: locker room talk, he’s changed, God uses flawed vessels.
The water had warmed by a few degrees. And we adjusted.
The Escalation
What happened next followed a pattern that would have been instantly recognizable to anyone who has studied how complicity works in authoritarian contexts.
After the 2016 election, when the Gorsuch nomination validated the Supreme Court justification, it became even harder to question the bargain. See? It worked. We got what we needed. The compromise paid off.
By 2020, Trump’s share of the white evangelical vote had climbed to 81 percent. The reluctant support of 2016 had become something more consolidated, more confident. The nose-holding had stopped. The justifications had become celebrations.
But then came new tests. Charlottesville, where the President was morally blind after a white supremacist murdered a counter-protester. Family separations at the border, where children were taken from their parents as a deliberate policy of deterrence. The first impeachment. The response to the pandemic. And at each point, the choice was the same: speak out and risk everything you’d already invested, or find a way to accommodate, explain, minimize, deflect.
Most chose accommodation. Not because they were evil people. Not because they didn’t have genuine moral concerns. But because they were in a new psychological situation where disengagement had become progressively more costly.
Then came 2024. By now, Trump had been twice impeached, had incited an insurrection at the Capitol, had spent four years spreading lies about election fraud, and had been convicted on 34 felony counts. By any measure of the character counts ethic that evangelicals had championed for decades, this should have been disqualifying many times over.
Instead, white evangelical support reached its highest level ever: 83 percent. Among white evangelicals who attended church multiple times per week—the most devout, the most committed—support hit 90 percent.
The trajectory tells the story: 78 percent, then 81 percent, then 83 percent. Each cycle, the support didn’t waver or decline as the violations accumulated. It increased. The lock-in was working exactly as the sequential complicity model would predict.
The Devout Are Not the Exception
At this point, I need to address an objection that has become a kind of comfort blanket for those who want to believe the evangelical church itself isn’t the problem.
The argument goes like this: The evangelicals supporting Trump aren’t the real churchgoers. They’re cultural Christians, nominal believers, people who check the evangelical box on surveys but rarely darken the door of a sanctuary. The faithful core—the people in the pews every Sunday—they’re different.
It’s a comforting story. It would mean that the institution itself is healthy, that the problem is at the margins rather than the center, that higher engagement with the church leads to more moral clarity rather than less.
The data says otherwise.
Pew Research has tracked the relationship between church attendance and Trump support among white evangelicals across multiple election cycles. What they’ve found is consistent and uncomfortable: among white evangelicals, those who attend church more frequently are more supportive of Trump, not less. In 2020, 85 percent of white evangelical voters who attended church frequently voted for Trump, compared to 81 percent of those who attended less often.
Robert P. Jones, founder of PRRI and author of White Too Long, examined this pattern in depth. His conclusion is stark: “Among white evangelicals, higher church attendance is positively correlated with core Trump impulses such as denials of structural racism, even when controlling for a range of other factors like education, gender, region, party affiliation.” He adds: “There is no evidence that higher church attendance has any mitigating effect on racist attitudes; if anything, the opposite is true.”
PRRI’s research on Christian nationalism confirms the same pattern. Among Americans who attend religious services weekly or more, a majority—52 percent—qualify as Christian nationalism adherents or sympathizers. Among those who seldom or never attend, only 18 percent do. The most frequent churchgoers are nearly three times more likely to embrace an ideology that functions as anti-democratic.
This matters because it removes the escape hatch. We cannot comfort ourselves with the belief that real Christianity is somehow separate from what’s happening politically. The data suggests that the most institutionally committed white evangelicals—the ones showing up every Sunday, the ones in Bible studies and small groups, the ones tithing and serving—are the most captured, not the least.
The church is not the antidote. For white evangelicals, it appears to be the incubator.
The Identity Transformation
In Nazi Germany, ordinary citizens maintained their role as bystanders by retreating into private life—what some called internal emigration. They continued shopping, working, raising families, going to church, while their neighbors were being deported. By compartmentalizing their lives, they convinced themselves they were powerless as long as their private world remained orderly.
But something even more profound has happened in American evangelicalism. It’s not just compartmentalization. It’s fusion.
Ryan Burge, a political scientist who has become one of the foremost analysts of American religious data, has documented this transformation using data from the General Social Survey and the Cooperative Election Study. He’s tracked how white evangelicals position themselves ideologically relative to the two major parties.
His finding: “White evangelicals see no space between them and the Republican Party.”
Most religious groups—even conservative ones—see themselves as somewhere between the two parties ideologically. White evangelicals are the exception. They have come to view their own positions and the Republican Party’s positions as essentially identical. The gap has closed completely.
This represents something more than political alignment. It’s identity fusion. What began as evangelicals who support Republicans has become something in which the religious and political identities are no longer separable.
Burge puts it bluntly: the term evangelical is increasingly “becoming associated with politics, particularly that of conservatism, rather than its traditional association with adherence to evangelical theology.” The label is being claimed by people who rarely or never attend church but who identify with the cultural and political tribe. In 2008, only 16 percent of self-identified evangelicals reported never or seldom attending church. By 2020, that number had jumped to 27 percent. Among those non-attending evangelicals, the share identifying as politically conservative rose from about a third in 2008 to roughly half by 2019.
People aren’t becoming evangelical because they’ve had a conversion experience or embrace evangelical theology. They’re adopting the label because it signals membership in a political tribe.
As Burge observes: “Instead of theological affinity for Jesus Christ, millions of Americans are being drawn to the evangelical label because of its association with the G.O.P.” Oddly enough, this even includes members of other religious traditions.
The Disappearance of the Evangelical Democrat
To understand how complete this transformation has become, it helps to take a longer view.
Before 1970, white evangelical Democrats actually outnumbered white evangelical Republicans. The evangelical world was politically diverse—not evenly split, but genuinely pluralistic. You could find evangelicals across the political spectrum, and partisan affiliation was not a reliable predictor of theological conviction.
That world is gone.
By the 2020 election, Republicans made up 78 percent of white evangelicals. Democrats had shrunk to just 16 percent. And the voting patterns are even more stark than the identification numbers suggest: regardless of how they identify, white evangelicals vote overwhelmingly Republican. In 2008, 80 percent voted for McCain. In 2012, 80 percent voted for Romney. In 2016, 2020, and 2024, roughly 80 percent or more voted for Trump.
The evangelical Democrat has become, statistically speaking, an endangered species approaching extinction. And with that disappearance has come the loss of internal friction, internal debate, internal challenge. Burge issued a warning about what this means: “When a religious movement becomes overwhelmingly a political monoculture, that’s bad not just for the people in the pews, but for democracy as a whole. We need to be around people who are different than us, and whatever church you’re in, if everyone you sit next to on Sunday mornings votes the same way that you do, then you’re failing what it means to be a kingdom-centered church.” He unpacks this in detail in his new book, The Vanishing Church.
This is what sequential complicity produces over time. It doesn’t just change individual positions. It sorts and purifies communities until dissent becomes unthinkable—not because it’s forbidden, but because there’s no one left to voice it.
When the Spell Broke for Me
I should tell you when I first felt the water getting hot.
It wasn’t 2016. It was 2001.
Growing up as a church planter’s kid, I hadn’t been suspicious of the assumptions we made about what God’s love looks like in public and politics. I could be found praying at the pole before school. During lunch, I ran a Bonhoeffer reading group—yes, the irony is not lost on me now. I read The Cost of Discipleship and Life Together with my classmates, never imagining that the community that had formed me was walking toward the very patterns Bonhoeffer had warned against.
Then came September 11th. And then came the church’s response.
When evangelical leaders led the way to war in Iraq—with rampant nationalism, militarism, and Islamophobia—I couldn’t see how any of it made sense for followers of Jesus. If we learned we had enemies on 9/11, then we learned who we needed to pray for. Not kill. Not bear false witness against. Not demonize an entire religion to justify a war built on lies.
Jesus had been fairly clear about enemies. Love them. Pray for those who persecute you. Do good to those who hate you. I had memorized these verses in Sunday school, in the same rooms where I now heard justifications for shock and awe.
It cost me friendships. It cost me vocational opportunities within evangelical institutions. But mostly, it felt like a deep betrayal. How could the same people who introduced me to the love of God in Christ be so blind to the basic commands he gave his disciples? When did we decide that the Way, the Truth, and the Life was wrong about how to relate to our enemies? When did bearing false witness become acceptable if the target was Muslim? When did we decide that the ends—security, victory, American dominance—justified means that Jesus had explicitly forbidden?
I tell you this because I want you to understand: I’m not writing from a place of superiority. I’m writing from a place of grief. The tradition that gave me everything—my faith, my love of Scripture, my relationship with Jesus—has become something I barely recognize. And the transformation didn’t happen overnight. It happened step by step, compromise by compromise, rationalization by rationalization.
I saw it happening in 2003. Many didn’t see it until 2016, or 2020, or January 6th. Some still don’t see it. But the pattern is the same. The water keeps warming. And we keep adjusting.
Christianity Today and the Cost of Dissent
When Christianity Today—hardly a radical progressive outlet—published an editorial calling for Trump’s removal after the first impeachment, the backlash from evangelical leaders was immediate and ferocious. The magazine that Billy Graham had founded was accused of betraying the faith. Nearly two hundred evangelical leaders signed a letter of rebuke.
Think about what that reveals. The editorial hadn’t questioned the authority of Scripture. It hadn’t denied the resurrection or abandoned historic Christian doctrine. It had simply said that a President who had been impeached for abuse of power should be removed from office. And for that, it was treated as an enemy of the evangelical movement.
The fusion was complete. The lock-in had happened. To question Trump was to question the faith community itself.
Those who did dissent paid a price—just as moderates had paid a price during the SBC takeover of the 1980s. Russell Moore, who had served as president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, became a target of sustained attacks for his criticism of Trump and eventually left the SBC. David French, an evangelical writer and attorney, has been vilified by former allies for his opposition to Trump. Beth Moore, one of the most influential Bible teachers in evangelical history, left the Southern Baptist Convention in 2021, citing the denomination’s drift.
The pattern is consistent across decades: dissent is possible, but it costs you your community. And for most people, that cost is simply too high. So they stay silent. They accommodate. They adjust.
The social sorting that has already occurred makes future dissent even less likely. The evangelicals most troubled by the trajectory have disproportionately left—either leaving evangelicalism entirely or migrating to other traditions. Those who remain are increasingly those for whom the fusion feels natural rather than troubling.
And Then Came January 6th
On the night of January 6th, 2021, I was in Edinburgh, Scotland, working on a post-doctoral fellowship at the University’s Divinity School. I stayed up late into the Scottish night, watching the horror unfold at the Capitol—the mob storming the building, the gallows erected on the lawn, the Confederate flags in the rotunda, the zip ties and tactical gear, the violence against police officers.
And I watched the Jesus signs. “Jesus Saves” banners waving alongside QAnon flags. A man in a horned headdress offering a prayer of thanks in the Senate chamber. The cross and the coup, fused into a single image broadcast around the world.
The next morning, in the Divinity School faculty lounge, I sat with other American Christian professors who shared my devastation. We talked about what we had witnessed. And we naively assumed—all of us—that this would finally break the spell Trump had over the white evangelical church.
How could it not? This was a blatant betrayal of the faith—a violent attempt to overturn an election, wrapped in Christian imagery and language. It was an undermining of our country’s integrity. Surely the evangelical leaders who had made the bargain would now recognize what they had enabled. Surely the fusion of Christian identity with political violence would be too obvious to ignore. Surely this was the line that couldn’t be rationalized away.
We were wrong.
The same pattern played out in both the GOP and evangelical institutions. Do you remember how, on January 7th, there were critics of Donald Trump, but now some of those same people serve in his administration? Rather quickly, they started falling back in line, rewriting their own history, and competing for his favor. Within months, the rehabilitation had begun. And the evangelical church wasn’t just going along with it. The church was leading the charge.
It was Antifa. It was a false flag. It was a legitimate protest that got out of hand. The real problem was the media coverage. The real victims were the patriots who were persecuted for being there that day.
By that point, acknowledging what had happened on January 6th would have meant acknowledging what the whole trajectory had been leading toward. It would have meant admitting that the bargain had been a catastrophic mistake from the beginning. It would have meant facing not just a single bad decision but decades of accumulated compromise—from the defense of segregated schools to the abandonment of Carter to the takeover of the SBC to the cheerleading for Iraq to every rationalization since.
The psychological cost of that recognition was simply too high. So the accommodation continued. The rationalization deepened. The identity fusion held.
I think sometimes about that morning in Edinburgh, about the colleagues who shared my grief and my hope. We had assumed that seeing clearly would be enough. We had assumed that the sheer weight of evidence would matter.
We underestimated the power of sequential complicity. We underestimated how much had already been invested, how high the cost of reversal had become, how completely the identity fusion had taken hold.
The water didn’t just stay hot after January 6th. It got hotter still.
The Just World and the Vanishing Victims
There’s another mechanism at work in sequential complicity that I find particularly haunting as a Christian: just-world thinking.
In Nazi Germany, bystanders justified the exclusion and persecution of Jews by convincing themselves that the suffering was somehow deserved or at least part of a larger order that made sense. Jewish suffering became, for many Christians, a mystery of God or even divine judgment—not a human crime demanding action, but a cosmic reality to be accepted.
I see echoes of this in how many evangelicals have come to view the victims of the policies they support.
Immigrants separated from their children at the border? They shouldn’t have broken the law. Refugees fleeing violence? They should have come the right way. The poor without healthcare? They should have made better choices. The vulnerable swept up in mass deportations? They should have thought about the consequences. A Mother killed by the State protesting ICE? She was a domestic terrorist.
In each case, the suffering of real human beings—people made in the image of God, people Jesus called us to welcome and serve—is reframed as the natural consequence of their own failures. The just world remains intact. Our consciences remain clean. The victims become, in a strange but powerful psychological move, responsible for their own victimization.
This is what happens when the universe of obligation contracts—when the circle of people toward whom we feel moral responsibility shrinks. When certain groups are defined as them rather than us, we can witness their suffering with what Bonhoeffer called “abysmal indifference.” They become not neighbors to be loved but problems to be solved, threats to be contained, examples to be made.
The pattern has deep roots in white evangelical history. The same spirituality of the church doctrine that allowed white evangelicals to remain silent during the civil rights movement—the insistence that the church’s business was souls, not society—functions today to separate faith from responsibility for political harm. The theology of avoidance was practiced long before Trump. He simply gave it new applications.
I watched it happen with Muslims after 9/11. I watched people I loved—people who had taught me to love my neighbor—dehumanize an entire religion to justify a war. The circle of moral obligation contracted, and those outside it became acceptable targets for violence, surveillance, and discrimination.
And the most troubling part? This contraction usually happens so gradually that we don’t notice it’s occurring. We don’t wake up one morning and decide to stop caring about immigrant children. We simply... adjust. We accommodate the new normal. We let the temperature rise by another degree.
The Sociological Stupidity
Dietrich Bonhoeffer identified something during the Nazi years that I find more illuminating than almost anything else I’ve read on this subject. He called it stupidity—but he was careful to explain that he didn’t mean intellectual deficiency.
The stupidity Bonhoeffer described was not an intellectual defect but a sociological one. It was what happened to human beings “during strong upsurges of political or religious power.” Under certain conditions, people were “deprived of their inner independence” and became “mindless tools under a spell of slogans and catchwords.”
Here’s the part that haunts me: Bonhoeffer observed that people in this condition were “capable of any evil while simultaneously being incapable of recognizing that it was evil.”
Having surrendered their autonomous judgment to the movement, to the leader, to the tribe, they lost the capacity for independent moral reasoning. Facts that contradicted the narrative were dismissed. Concerns raised by outsiders only confirmed the persecution narrative. The very act of criticism became evidence of the critic’s corruption.
I don’t know how to read that description without thinking about what I’ve witnessed in evangelical spaces over the past several years and even more the video rorschach test that was Renee Good’s death. The refusal to engage with factual corrections. The instant dismissal of any critical voice as liberal media or Trump derangement syndrome. The way that every scandal, every indictment, every conviction only deepens loyalty rather than prompting reflection.
This isn’t intellectual failure. These are often intelligent, educated people. It’s something else—something that happens when identity becomes so fused with a movement that questioning the movement feels like annihilating the self.
The turn toward a kind of spiritual warfare rhetoric has only intensified this dynamic. When political opponents are identified not merely as wrong but as demonic forces to be vanquished, the possibility of self-examination disappears entirely. You cannot compromise with Satan. You cannot admit that those fighting Satan (or protesting a policy) might have a point. The framing forecloses reflection by design.
PRRI’s data on Christian nationalism confirms this pattern. Among Christian nationalism adherents and sympathizers, support for Trump approaches near-unanimity. At the state level, support for Christian nationalism is nearly perfectly correlated with votes for Trump. The ideology and the candidate have become inseparable—two expressions of the same identity.
Bonhoeffer said the only remedy for this kind of stupidity was “an act of liberation, not instruction.” You couldn’t argue people out of it. You could only love them and wait and pray for something to break the spell.
I think about those lunch-hour Bonhoeffer reading groups sometimes. I think about how we underlined passages about costly discipleship and the dangers of cheap grace. I think about how confident we were that we understood what he was warning against. And I think about how the very community that encouraged me to read Bonhoeffer was walking, step by step, into the patterns he described.
We read about the German church and thought: How could they not see it?
Now I understand. They couldn’t see it because each step seemed small. Because each compromise had a reasonable justification. Because the people around them were making the same compromises. Because the cost of seeing clearly was the loss of everything familiar.
They couldn’t see it for the same reasons we can’t.
What the Neutral Middle Gets Wrong
One more insight from the German church that I think speaks directly to our moment.
Bonhoeffer identified the real enemy of faithful resistance not as the obvious extremists but as those in the middle—the neutral, moderate officials who believed they could hold things together through compromise and reasonable accommodation. These leaders outmaneuvered the radicals but were willing to make deals with the regime to avoid conflict.
They were the reasonable people who “failed because they naively believed they could patch up a structure that had come out of joint through mere reason or compromise.” By trying to do justice to all sides, they were “eventually crushed by the clashing forces of evil, often falling victim to the stronger party while achieving nothing.”
I think about this when I encounter the principled middle in contemporary evangelicalism—leaders who privately express dismay but publicly stay silent, who offer gentle corrections but refuse to name what is happening clearly, who hope that by maintaining relationships and avoiding confrontation they can somehow moderate the extremes.
I understand the impulse. I’ve felt it myself. The desire to hold things together, to not burn bridges, to believe that patient presence will accomplish more than prophetic confrontation.
But in situations of escalating complicity, the neutral middle doesn’t moderate the extremes. It provides cover for them. It legitimizes the trajectory by refusing to name it. It allows the temperature to keep rising while counseling patience and calm.
The Confessing Church in Germany learned this too late. It began with bold theological stands—the Barmen Declaration, the Dahlem Synod—but was eventually undermined by moderate officials who prioritized institutional preservation over moral witness. When the regime offered neutral committees and paths to legalization, many leaders took them, shattering the movement’s unity. By 1938, when clergy were ordered to swear a personal oath of loyalty to Hitler, the overwhelming majority complied—including most Confessing Church pastors.
At a certain point, neutrality becomes its own form of complicity. The moderate position becomes the enabler of the radical outcome.
Breaking the Sequence
So where does this leave us? Is the pattern inevitable? Once a community starts down the path of sequential complicity, is there any way back?
The historical record offers one crucial piece of hope: Le Chambon-sur-Lignon.
During the Nazi occupation of France, this small village in the mountains became a center of rescue. Led by Pastor André Trocmé and his wife Magda, the community saved thousands of Jewish refugees, mostly children. They hid them in homes, forged documents, guided them to safety across the Swiss border.
What made Le Chambon different? Several factors: a pastor who preached what he called an ethic of combat rather than comfortable accommodation; a community with a historical memory of persecution (the villagers were largely Protestant in Catholic France); and a shared conviction that obedience to God superseded obedience to the state.
But perhaps most importantly, Le Chambon refused the first step. When the Vichy government ordered a census of Jews in the village, Trocmé told his congregation to refuse. When officials came to search for refugees, villagers hid them. The community never entered the new psychological situation of initial compliance because they never complied to begin with.
This suggests something important for our moment. For those who have already taken steps down the path of complicity, the way forward isn’t simply to stop where they are. It requires something more costly: acknowledging that the previous steps were wrong, accepting the loss of the investment already made, and finding communities that can sustain the social cost of reversal.
And for those who haven’t yet been captured—for younger evangelicals, for Christians in other traditions, for anyone who still has the capacity for independent moral judgment—the lesson is equally clear: don’t take the first step. Pay attention to the small compromises, the reasonable-seeming accommodations, the binary choices that foreclose moral complexity. The sequence starts somewhere.
A Word to My Evangelical Friends
I want to end by speaking directly to those who are still inside the world I’ve been describing—those who recognize something true in what I’ve written but who also feel defensive, angry, perhaps hurt.
I understand. I know what it’s like to have your faith community questioned, to feel like outsiders are attacking something precious to you, to suspect that critiques like this one are really just partisan politics dressed up in theological language.
I’m not asking you to become a Democrat. I’m not asking you to abandon your convictions about abortion or religious liberty or any of the other issues that have shaped evangelical political engagement for decades.
I’m asking something simpler and harder: I’m asking you to consider the possibility that the sequence has carried you somewhere you never intended to go. That the bargain has cost more than you realized. That the water has gotten hotter than you’ve allowed yourself to feel.
Consider the evidence: In 2011, white evangelicals were the religious group least likely to believe that personal immorality was compatible with public leadership. Today they are the most likely. Before 1970, white evangelical Democrats outnumbered Republicans. Today, 78 percent identify as Republican and the evangelical Democrat has all but vanished. The term evangelical itself is becoming untethered from theology and attached instead to a political tribe.
These are not small shifts. They represent a fundamental transformation of what it means to be evangelical in America. And the transformation has happened so gradually, so incrementally, that many inside the community haven’t recognized how far they’ve traveled.
I’m asking you to consider that the way back—while painful—is still possible.
The people who eventually broke free from complicity in Nazi Germany almost always did so through a relationship. Someone they trusted asked them an honest question. Someone they loved showed them what they had stopped seeing. A human connection broke through the ideological fog.
I don’t think arguments will save us. But I think love might. I think friendship might. I think honest conversations between people who trust each other might.
I still read my Bible every night. I still talk to Jesus before I sleep—the same practice I learned as a child in those Baptist churches, the practice that has never wavered even as so much else has fallen away. The Jesus I meet in those pages is still the one who told us to love our enemies, to welcome the stranger, to care for the least of these, to refuse the way of violence and domination.
That Jesus is why I can’t be silent. And that Jesus is why I still have hope.
Because the gospel has always been about confession—about naming what we’ve done and who we’ve become, about accepting grace that we cannot earn, about the possibility of transformation that doesn’t depend on our ability to save ourselves.
The sequence can be broken. The kettle can be escaped. But only if we’re willing to feel the heat and acknowledge how hot it’s become.
The frogs in the kettle, I said at the beginning, aren’t actually as passive as the illustration suggests. Real frogs jump out when things get dangerous.
Maybe we can be more like real frogs.
Maybe it’s not too late.
Related Resources
For a detailed account of Bonhoeffer and the Confessing Church, check out our audio documentary The Rise of Bonhoeffer
Victoria Barnett’s Bystanders: Conscience and Complicity During the Holocaust does an amazing job explaining the mechanisms and story of German bystanders.
Ryan Burge’s new book The Vanishing Church: How the Hollowing Out of Moderate Congregations Is Hurting Democracy, Faith, and Us is clear and thorough about the political turn of evangelicalism.
Check out my interview with Randall Balmer to learn more on the rise of the religious right, Myth Busting Evangelical Activism & Its Origins
New Online Lenten Class with John Dominic Crossan!
What can we actually know about Jesus of Nazareth? And, what difference does it make?
For over five decades, Dr. John Dominic Crossan has been one of the world’s foremost scholars of the historical Jesus—rigorously reconstructing the life, teachings, and world of a first-century Jewish peasant who proclaimed God’s Rule in Roman-occupied Galilee. His work has shaped an entire generation of scholarship and transformed how millions understand the figure at the center of Christian faith.
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