Calvinism may hold key to understanding America’s white evangelical movement
Kansas Interfaith Action members participate in a demonstration on May 20, 2025, outside the federal courthouse in Topeka, where they protested Core Civic and the for-profit detention of immigrants. (Sherman Smith/Kansas Reflector)
As of late last year, more than 1,300 children torn from their parents’ arms at the U.S.–Mexico border from 2017 to 2021 had not been reunited with their parents. This figure represents nearly a third of the 4,600 children forcibly separated from their families.
Human rights organizations described this as potentially a form of torture, due to the intentional infliction of suffering and the systemic nature of the separations as an immigration deterrent.
Such measures enjoyed support and even celebration from the American Christian right, leaving many to wonder: What kind of religion endorses such cruelty, the withholding of health care, winking at racism and embracing xenophobia?
There’s little Christian about this, it seems, unless viewed through a theologically Calvinist lens.
The Rev. Robert Johnson, who leads Church of the Resurrection’s new Lee’s Summit location, said the seeming detachment from suffering, tolerance of destructive ideas like “Manifest Destiny” and more likely have Calvinist roots.
The Rev. Robert Johnson (Submitted photo)
“In their minds, God has already chosen,” said Johnson, who earlier led a United Methodist Church in Wichita. “Social justice is viewed as impudence to God’s executed will, and it’s also anti-empathy. In fact, empathy is meaningless.”
In August, PBS News published a story headlined, “Is empathy a sin? Some conservative Christians argue it can be.”
“For them, empathy is a cudgel for the left,” the article explained. “It can manipulate caring people into accepting all manner of sins according to a conservative Christian perspective, including abortion access, LGBTQ+ rights, illegal immigration and certain views on social and racial justice.”
Allie Beth Stuckey, author of “Toxic Empathy: How Progressives Exploit Christian Compassion,” was quoted as saying: “Empathy becomes toxic when it encourages you to affirm sin, validates lies or supports destructive policies.”
Christian right beliefs have buttressed political conservatism for decades, from the Confederacy’s “Lost Cause,” to Jerry Falwell’s “Moral Majority,” to today’s MAGA movement. Falwell’s Liberty University didn’t originally admit Black students. To be fair, not all evangelicals hold such beliefs, but we should try to understand where the beliefs of so many might come from.
A review of Anthea Butler’s “White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America,” by Bianca Mabute-Louie, identifies evangelicalism as a nationalist political movement to support white, Christian hegemony. Racism is a feature, not a bug, of the movement.
Butler, according to Mabute-Louie, said, “interpretation of Scriptures, theology, and belief informed evangelicals’ social and political actions, and justified the oppression of African Americans during and post-enslavement.”
Many Americans have been puzzled by evangelicals’ devotion to President Donald Trump despite his lurid personal picadilloes, his seeming lack of religiosity and the cruelty of his recent attempt to deny millions, including children, of food benefits.
Christians and non-Christians alike have asked earnestly how any believer — left, right or otherwise — could support such policies and such a person.
Johnson suggested these beliefs reach deep into 1500-era teachings of John Calvin and “predestination.”
Most students learned about Calvinism from a historical, not religious, perspective. The Pilgrims, for example, were Calvinists. That’s also where the “Protestant work ethic” originated, as well as interpretations of the Bible as “without error.”
Calvin believed that “even before creation,” God had chosen some people for salvation, a belief associated with predestination, according to Christianity.com. Calvin fumed at how Catholicism reduced religion to “salvation by works.”
His refrain? People shouldn’t try to manipulate God nor place Him in their debt. Saved people are saved only Him, not by good works.
“This is the perfect theology for what we see in the evangelical movement,” Johnson said. “This is why they may not consider themselves bigoted or racist. They have found a denominational justification for our racial caste system. It’s why they don’t like social activism. To them, there is no social Gospel, only individual salvation.”
Johnson pointed to the acronym TULIP for understanding.
TULIP stands for total depravity (there’s no good in us), unconditional election (God has already chosen those who prosper), limited atonement (Jesus died specifically for the elect), and perseverance of the saints (the elect will be saved).
John Wesley, a founder of modern Methodism, provided an alternative to this theology for many, including for Johnson.
Wesley, Johnson said, looked at slavery and like Calvin, saw the total depravity. But Wesley also saw God in the tortured enslaved people and heard an ecclesiastical call to rescue them.
“From his deathbed, John Wesley pleaded with people gathered around him to promise to end the scourge of slavery,” Johnson said. “I follow United Methodism in that spirit.”
A photo of a crying toddler caught up in a nighttime border raid remains an enduring image from the first Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy.
The prolonged family separation stemmed from the federal government’s failure to maintain a central database. A 2018 court order halted the practice, and a 2023 settlement requires continued reunification efforts and support through 2031.
But a lifetime of damage already has been done, especially to the children. Pope Leo has called out the “extremely disrespectful” treatment of migrants in the U.S., according to an NPR report.
The question then becomes not if God exists in the crying toddler or her parents, but where is God in a faith tradition that embraces such wanton and intentional cruelty?