What David Brooks gets wrong about conservative Christians, and Christianity itself
CRT 2025 and a defense of praising God who informs our decisions, political or otherwise
On October 22nd at Culture, Religion & Technology, take III (CRT 2025) at Mar-a-Lago, it was the first time I opened up the event with a prayer. It was the first time I ever prayed to Jesus on stage at a CRT event, notwithstanding the word “religion” in the title. It was also the first time I had ever asked the Holy Spirit to fill the audience’s heart at any event I’ve hosted, and I’ve hosted dozens!
The fact that the Holy Spirit can enter all our hearts is a direct consequence of Jesus’ death on the cross and his resurrection: the gospel message. This simple good news was not lost on anyone.
During the event and reception, I was approached by a couple dozen people who thanked me for the prayer, adding that they felt relieved that there was freedom to speak about God’s truth alongside matters of technological innovation, education, national security, politics and culture. In a survey of attendees post-event, 100% of the respondents said they liked opening the event with a prayer. It was indeed freeing and validating for me, having lived in the Bay Area, where any reliance on Jesus was a sign of weakness or ignorance.
I couldn’t help but think, however, that some onlookers may mistake our event to be a gathering of Christian Nationalists with an objective to compel everyone to run America as a theocracy. After all, policy positions espoused on stage, such as being “spiritually ready” in defense, are a direct appeal to our faith. But there is something many critics don’t understand or simply ignore or find incredulous about conservative Christians. We are not forcing anyone to be Christians. That’s not our job. We know it is a narrow door (Matthew 7:13-14) to get into heaven and Jesus only wants those who choose Him to enter.
That said, we have to seek God’s moral clarity to guide us as heads of business, government, media, technology, education, defense and so on. This calling is nothing more than going back to America’s roots. Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in his 1835 book Democracy in America: “there is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America.”
Embracing America’s Judeo-Christian foundation isn’t a Right or Left sentiment.
That is why when I see displays of God-centered worship outside of a church treated with disdain, I want to understand why such odium exists in preparation to defend my faith and actions. This brings me to my commentary of David Brooks’ critique of Charlie Kirk’s memorial service in his NYTimes essay: We Need to Think Straight About God and Politics. I’ve been wanting to write this for a while but I’ve been so busy with the event. So finally here it is.
America’s shared moral values
Let’s first begin with Brooks’ acknowledgment that America had a shared moral ethic and that it was essential to our democracy. He recognizes that democracy “relied on religious institutions to do that moral formation,” quoting John Adam’s famous statement: “Our Constitution was made only for moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Brooks defends religion and politics being integrally connected as long as publicly they’re in proper relation to one another — something, however, he believes was not evident at the memorial. For Brooks, the recognition of martyrdom sparking a Christian revival empowered by a conservative government was a spectacle of ignorance.
Like CRT 2025, the memorial was filled with voices espousing Biblical creeds and political wins in the same breath. So I can imagine, Brooks would have snubbed his nose at CRT 2025 with the same denunciation. As a Christian apologist I must prepare for such snubbing in order to explain to people like Brooks the hope that is in me that he doesn’t see. So let’s dive into the critique because we should expect push-back any time we praise God for the privilege to lead; we will all be called hypocrites or guilty of using God to stay in power. Or worshipping power more than God.
What therefore is our defense? First, let’s acknowledge, like Brooks, that America was founded on deep Judeo-Christian principles.
Not only does Brooks quote Adams, he quotes de Tocqueville’s book, in which he wrote: “For the Americans, the idea of Christianity and liberty are so completely mingled that it is almost impossible to get them to conceive of one without the other.”
Brooks is wistful for those days as he bemoans a faith that is now “privatized” and a “shared morality” that is “shredded.” Reminiscing on a world that once was, Brooks reminds his readers that faith and politics cannot exist independently. He quotes his friend who said that Christianity is a load-bearing wall and when it crumbles, so do institutions. “A crisis within Christianity is a crisis in America,” said Brooks. The question for him isn’t how to separate spirituality from politics because they are so reliant on one another but “how to put them in proper relation to each other.”
Apparently, MAGA Christians don’t know how to do this.
Putting faith and politics in proper relation
Brooks said as much in his assessment: “My problem with the Kirk memorial service and all the conversation about his assassination generally is that many people seem to have no coherent idea about the proper relationship between faith and politics. In their minds, the two spheres seem all mixed together higgledy-piggledy.”
The spheres he is referring to are part of a concept from Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper’s theory of spheres, which says that there are different domains (spheres such as state, family, church) and they have their own sovereignty. But those states should not be mixed. For instance, the church should not govern the state nor should the state govern the church.
Yet at that memorial, where politicians spoke about their faith and their politics as God’s work essentially, Brooks concluded that “it was rarely clear if they were talking about the man who was trying to evangelize for Jesus or the one trying to elect Republicans.” In other words, if this was a Christian memorial service, the football stadium where it was held should have been the house of the Lord with Christ at the center. Not a political event with Pharisees triumphantly saying they were doing the work of God. The display created an “unexamined assumption that being a Christian and being a Republican are basically the same thing,” he decried.
Set aside the insult that Christians lack self-awareness, does Brooks not realize that many Christians and Republicans do align on values and hence political policies that protect those values?
Christian and Republican values are the same
The first and most obvious is that many Christians believe in the traditional view of gender. This has stayed consistent for at least a decade. In 2017, 84% of white evangelicals and 63% of all Christians believed that sex is binary, according to Pew Research. In 2022, those percentages rose as some 87% of white evangelicals and 70% of black evangelicals believed that sex is binary, according to that Pew survey. By contrast, almost 60% of religiously unaffiliated and 76% of atheists believe sex is on a spectrum.
This almost maps with the breakdown between Republicans and Democrats. Some 90% of Republicans believe in two genders vs only 44% of Democrats. Earlier this year, Donald Trump introduced an Executive Order that protects the rights of those who believe in two genders, which overturned President Biden’s executive orders that expanded rights for those who believe sex is on a spectrum.
So it very much seems if you are Christian and believe in two genders, you’re going to see yourself as a Republican.
As for the makeup of the military, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth is remaking the military to consist of the strongest combat ready force, which would therefore elevate strong men and eliminate many women who cannot meet the same physical standards. This is consistent with a Christian view of traditional gender roles. More than 75% of evangelical Christians believe in traditional gender roles, where the woman is the parent who stays home and is the primary caretaker of children. This aligns with 87% of Republican men who want a return to traditional gender roles and 79% of Republican women. Meanwhile, only 23% of women Democrats support a return to traditional gender roles. Given the proclivity of Republican men and women to embrace traditional gender roles, it’s not surprising that more Republicans are married vs Democrats. Again, if you’re a Christian and believe in traditional gender roles, you’re more likely to be attracted to the Republican party.
The polls bear this out. Christians gravitate to the Republican party. The Democrats went from being made up of 85% Christian in 2006, now down to 62% in 2022. While the percent of Republicans that are Christian went from 94% to 86% in the same period, according to PRRI. And the Democrats have nearly three times as many religiously unaffiliated in their party vs the Republicans. Given most Democrats don’t align with the vast majority of Christians, Brooks has no basis in making his claim.
Brooks reliance on “well-crafted,” “coherent” theories
Brooks then says that since conservatives lack a “coherent theory of how religion should relate to politics,” they can operate in the following ways, including being hypocritical. As an example, he brings up Tucker Carlson, saying it’s nice that Carlson talks about practicing a religion of love and harmony, “but is that actually the way he lives his life?” Never mind that Brooks ignores the plank in his eye, it doesn’t take any theory or lack thereof to be hypocritical. Most, if not all, people are. Romans 7:15 “What I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate I do.”
Then Brooks accuses conservatives of forgetting the power of sin. Brooks writes: “the civil rights movement had a well-crafted theory of the relationship between religion and politics. The movement’s theology taught its members that they were themselves sinful and that they had to put restraints on their political action in order to guard against the sins of hatred, self-righteous and the love of power. Without any such theory, MAGA imposes no restraints, and sin roams free.”
Brooks seems to have forgotten that any Christian worth his or her salt understands the cross. We certainly don’t need “well-crafted” or “coherent” theories, as Brooks requires. The cross does not need theories. It is the essence of Christianity. We are all sinners saved by grace. Romans 3:10 says “None is righteous. No, not one.” And that means we know that any of us can become consumed with hatred, self-righteousness and love of power. Knowing we are sinners means we put restraints on all action, not just political action. We don’t use this knowledge to stay humble in politics, we use God’s knowledge to stay humble in everything we do.
We preach Christ crucified
At the end of the day, Brooks attempt to establish some rational and biblical justification to mock conservative Christians is forced erudition. He is a self-admitted Republican exile and his bias is obvious. He does not support conservative policies and therefore doesn’t see how Christians can ever claim to be doing God’s work. But to criticize them by overly relying on “well-crafted” or “coherent” theories about what it means to be Christian just makes him sound like an annoying modern day Pharisee or gnostic.
The gospel is a pretty simple message. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 1:23, “we preach Christ crucified.” In other words, we don’t need man’s theories.
Especially if it dilutes the gospel. Brooks writes that without his theory of proper alignment, the problem is “that unrestrained faith and unrestrained partisanship are an incredibly combustible mixture.” No. Unrestrained faith and unrestrained allegiance to anything are an incredibly combustible mixture. We need to think straight about God and everything, not just God and politics.
In Matthew 23:3-4, Jesus tells the crowd: “Do not do what they [Pharisees] do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.” In other words, the hearts of the Pharisees are proud and callous, and demanding obedience and introspection of others but not of themselves.
It’s no wonder Brooks is blinded to the very humility he needs when he warns that Republicans are the ones who might become violent.
He writes: “I am one of those who fear that the powerful emotions kicked up by the martyrdom of Kirk will lead many Republicans to conclude that their opponents are irredeemably evil and that anything that causes them suffering is permissible. It’s possible for faithful people to wander a long way from the cross.”
How Brooks ends with this sentiment in an essay about Charlie Kirk - a man assassinated by an opponent who found him irredeemably evil that his death was permissible, is beyond words.
Yes Brooks, faithful people forget the cross, as you seem to have. I hope one day you find your way back to it.