Focusing on people of color, Wesley asked the professor how to get them out of the right-wing evangelical movement.
“White Christianity has presented itself as normative,” the professor answered, sharing a story of his aunt saying that she liked Jerry Falwell’s commentary better than the one Hendricks wrote. “In her mind, white people are what the Bible was about. Their view was the objective view, and many black people believe that.”
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Hendricks named Franklin Graham and Paula White as white evangelical pastors whom many black people get behind, calling their influence “white supremacist Christianity.”
Calling the former President Donald Trump a “walking embodiment of the seven deadly sins,” the professor explained how right-wing evangelicals used him as their poster boy to push a distorted view of the Bible.
In his book, Hendricks addressed John MacArthur’s 2018 Statement on Social Justice and the Gospel, which over 17,000 pastors have signed, and said that MacArthur was wrong.
“And he’s supposed to be a scholar,” Hendricks said. “It’s just unconscionable.”
“The primary underlying ethic of the Bible is social justice,” Hendricks said after explaining some Hebrew and Greek terms. The professor called MacArthur’s statement one of the most “fundamental misrepresentations that one can offer.”
Hendricks believes that the Bible is unclear whether or not same-sex relationships are sinful and said that the Bible talks more about beastiality than it does homosexuality. “Jesus said to love each other—what that says to me is as long as you love somebody you’re in good shape,” he said.
The professor further claimed that the Bible doesn’t clearly refer to abortion as a sin either, arguing that right-wing evangelicals fight for causes that they say are clear in the Bible but actually aren’t.
“You can’t act like the most important thing in Christianity and the most important thing in the Bible is abortion when you’re going to predicate all kinds of stuff—the politics and everything on abortion when the Bible doesn’t even talk about voluntary abortion by human beings at all,” he said.
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“The basic foundation of right-wing evangelicalism is rotten and anti-biblical,” Hendricks said after arguing that when right-wing evangelicalism was formed in the 1980’s, abortion and homosexuality became “wedge issues” the movement used to garner influence in society.
