Where fear is trumping perfect love

I'm haunted by an article from Peter Wehner, long time Bush Republican and now Never Trumper, titled The Evangelical Church Is Breaking Apart in The Atlantic.

Wehner is clearly in pain over the evolution of his co-religionists -- so he did the right journalistic thing and interviewed scores of them. Academics and discouraged pastors agree: political hatreds are trumping Jesus in U.S. evangelical-land. Congregations dissolve into warring parties over culture war issues; people who didn't come for the battles are driven out.

He concludes:

... it isn’t simply the case that much of what is distinctive about American evangelicalism is not essential to Christianity; it is that now, in important respects, much of what is distinctive about American evangelicalism has become antithetical to authentic Christianity. What we’re dealing with—not in all cases, of course, but in far too many— is political identity and cultural anxieties, anti-intellectualism and ethnic nationalism, resentments and grievances, all dressed up as Christianity.

Jesus now has to be reclaimed from his Church, from those who pretend to speak most authoritatively in his name. ...

He's gentle about it; these were/are his tribe. And that makes his dissection of their hateful behavior all the more poignant. Absolutely worth reading for anyone who seeks not to denounce, but to understand.

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Somehow I suspect that this wonderfully named little storefront church in San Francisco is not riven by the particular conflicts about which Wehner writes. These good folks look to be poor and, given the location, likely from some community of color. I did actually search Wehner's article for the adjective "white," but found no declaration that he's really talking about a white evangelical religiosity. But quite evidently, he is.