Brett Kavanaugh was officially appointed to the Supreme Court on Monday. One of the “evangelical” representatives present at the White House 
ceremony was Robert Jeffress, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas. Jeffress is one of the president’s “spiritual counselors.”
Remember, Kavanaugh’s Senate hearings offered us the opportunity to watch a woman named Christine Blasey Ford expose her private humiliation to the American public as she retold the ugly story of her sexual assault. Afterwards, the American president publicly vilified Dr. Ford. He laughed and ridiculed her at a campaign rally in Mississippi, turning a woman’s trauma into his own personal burlesque comedy act.
Her family continues to hide in an undisclosed location because of the torrent of death threats they receive.
In the aftermath of all this, Robert Jeffress’ went on Fox News to describe Kavanaugh’s appointment as a sign that “good had triumphed over evil.”
Jeffress added, “I think, in many ways, the confirmation of Justice Kavanaugh represents conservatives finally standing up and saying, to quote the movie: ‘We’re as mad as hell and we’re not going to take this any longer.’'”
Robert Jeffress and I do not inhabit the same moral universe.
The following excerpt is from pages 107-109 of my book I Pledge Allegiance: A Believers Guide to Kingdom Citizenship in 21st Century America (Eerdmans
2018). I discuss Nazi Germany as one example of the ways different societies construct their own “moral universes” and the challenges these different social universes present to citizens of the kingdom of God.
The two books I refer to are:
David Gushee, The Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust: A Christian Interpretation (Fortress, 1994)
Peter J. Haas, Morality after Auschwitz: The Radical Challenge of the Nazi Ethic (Fortress, 1988)
“Although the decision to break the law by rescuing Jews may seem an obvious choice to us today, we should not forget that only a few in Germany actually made that difficult decision. The majority of German Christians offered no outward objections to Nazi policies. For instance, not a single public protest was ever launched by a Protestant church leader against Germany’s euthanasia laws when they were implemented. When push came to shove, bad theology, fear, rationalizing, and self-preservation all trumped actualizing the gospel message, which leads us to Gushee’s second, tragic observation.
“Christian rescuers were few and far between. Rescuers, in general, were the exception to the rule in World War II; but rescuers claiming to be motivated by their Christian faith were rare even among this small group of heroes. This lamentable fact (at least lamentable for me as a Christian) requires a deeper analysis than we can give to it here, but it certainly illustrates just how difficult and unusual it is for self-professed Christians to give themselves over completely to the thoroughgoing, inside-out transformation desired by Christ. The widespread nature of this spiritual challenge is illustrated time and again by the historians who study the Christian church in Nazi Germany. For example, Richard Steigmann-Gall’s research on Nazi views of Christianity concludes: “Christianity, in the final analysis, did not constitute a barrier to Nazism. Quite the opposite: For many . . . the battles waged against Germany’s enemies constituted a war in the name of Christianity. . . . Nearly all the Nazis surveyed here believed they were defending good by waging war against evil, fighting for God against the Devil, for German against Jew.”
“This is a chilling conclusion for anyone who loves Jesus.
“My point in turning our attention to Nazi Germany is not to single out the German church or to suggest that the Third Reich was the only disastrous political movement that has co-opted Christianity and bastardized the gospel. I have chosen these examples from the history of Nazi Germany because this is one of the few episodes in modern history that is relatively free of partisan wrangling. Almost everyone, regardless of nationality, political persuasion, or religion, will agree that Adolf Hitler and his Nazi doctrine were a consummate evil. I am confident that the majority of my readers will agree—whether their politics are Republican, Democratic, independent, socialist, Green Party, libertarian, or anarchist—that the bulk of the German church, both Protestant and Catholic, allowed the rules of this-worldly citizenship to smother their responsibilities as citizens of God’s kingdom. No one in a church composed of true pilgrims, strangers, and aliens in this world could ever uniformly adhere to the policies of the Nazi Party.
“From this shared starting point, let me go on to say something that is perhaps more provocative: There is a close analogy to be made between the behavior of the American church today and that of the German church in 1933. No, America may not face the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler or National Socialism (whatever the current administration’s political opponents may say). But, like the people of Germany, we all live within a shared moral universe that defines both good and evil and then brings various forces to bear in pressuring us to conform. The Nazis managed to create a moral universe where racism and brutality were approved, even encouraged. The German people behaved accordingly. Anti-Semitism and eugenics were morally good, while racial integration and opposition to the state were morally evil. Peter Haas rightly insists that ‘the Holocaust was not the incarnation of evil but instead reflected the human power to reconceive good and evil and then to shape society in the light of the new conception.’
“Haas offers a crucial insight. Whether we recognize it or not, we all live within analogous ethical systems, where we blithely accept cultural definitions of good and evil without exercising any critical thinking. The issue is not the particular guise adopted by evil—whether it wears the face of Nazism, communism, consumerism, capitalism, imperialism, racism, or the class system—but the fact that evil always exists without always being self-evident to us. The moral universe created by twenty-first- century America is not identical with the moral universe envisioned by the gospel of Jesus Christ. But that will be shocking news to many members of the church in America. This confusion makes the American church typical. The bulk of the German church did not fail because it was German but because it was human. The burdensome millstone hanging from the neck of world history is sinful human nature, a human nature that would rather create its own moral universe than live obediently in God’s. When given a choice, human nature always prefers to cling to its own precious, self-serving ideologies (no matter how idiotic, uninformed, xenophobic, or grotesque) over the self-renunciation, self-sacrifice, and servanthood demanded by the gospel of Jesus Christ. Therefore, all Christians of every nation must ask themselves in a spirit of repentance, humility, and self-examination: What kind of moral universe is the church inhabiting today? What redefinitions of good and evil have we accepted for our own cultural convenience? What kinds of immorality are we ignoring, or even heartily endorsing, because we are more heavily invested in partisan politics, nationalism, capitalism, consumerism, discrimination, and the many other idolatrous ephemera born of the kingdom of this world than we are in following Jesus Christ?”
