These stories have long been read by Christians as a handbook in civil disobedience. (Martin Luther King Jr. invoked the book of Daniel in “Letter from Birmingham Jail” to defend the virtue of protesting without a permit.) But the story of Daniel also suggests that godly people can negotiate power by influencing leaders whose values differ vastly from their own. At the dawn of the Trump era, the lesson contemporary evangelicals gleaned from the story of Daniel is that God’s people can survive in exile—even under the fist of a despotic ruler—so long as one of their own tribe advocates on their behalf in the corridors of power.
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College Park Church, the congregation that Mike Pence attended during his governorship, sits on a northern stretch of Indianapolis, among golf courses and mid-priced hotel chains. The neighborhood is on the cusp of the suburbs, many of which are named, incidentally, after the landscape of the Old Testament: Lebanon, Carmel, Zionsville. As soon as I entered the foyer, I recognized it as the kind of church I grew up in: large and contemporary, but without the gaudy trappings of a megachurch; doctrinally orthodox, but passionate about social welfare. It’s the kind of church that people like my parents would call “theologically sound,” which is a way of saying that the pastors went to the right schools, that worship avoids the charismatic theater of snakes and spirit slaying, that the sermons never descend into partisan shilling. It is not, in short, the kind of church that is, or ever was, uniformly gung ho about Trump.
Pence took a somewhat circuitous route to evangelicalism. He was raised Irish Catholic and converted in college, when he realized, at a Christian music festival, that “what happened on the cross, in some small measure, actually happened for me.” He avoided explicitly linking his beliefs to his politics during his early public career, but his faith became deeper after he lost his second congressional race, in 1990. Shortly thereafter, he published an article in Indiana Policy Review called “Confessions of a Negative Campaigner,” in which he swore off the smear tactics he had used in the past. The article began with the words of the apostle Paul in I Timothy 1:15: “Christ Jesus came to save sinners, among whom I am foremost of all.”
In the 1990s, Pence began regularly attending an evangelical megachurch with his family and joined the board of the Indiana Family Institute, a far-right group that was antigay and antiabortion. By the time he campaigned again for Congress, in 2000, his faith was at the forefront of his platform, which zeroed in on issues such as abortion, school prayer, and support for Israel. When he arrived in Washington, his congressional aides often saw him reading his Bible. One staffer claimed that Pence would cite specific verses to justify policy decisions. (“These have stood the test of time,” Pence said of the Scriptures. “They have eternal value.”) His faith continued to inspire his political agenda as governor of Indiana. Throughout his tenure, he met with a small group of other Christian men who held themselves accountable as believers.
I was curious about Pence’s spiritual heritage and how the Bible teaching he’d received had influenced his political worldview. But the more immediate reason I’d come to Indianapolis was that College Park was wrapping up an eighteen-month sermon cycle on exile. In the sanctuary, a dimmed auditorium with stadium seating, a churchgoer pointed to the spot a few rows behind me where Pence used to sit on Sunday mornings with his wife, Karen, taking copious notes while dressed in a windbreaker bearing the state seal. The last time this congregant had spotted Pence in church was shortly after he joined Trump on the Republican ticket. He was accompanied by two Secret Service agents and sneaked out before the benediction.
At that time, College Park’s lead pastor, Mark Vroegop, was in the middle of the exile series. From early 2016 until the middle of 2017, he walked his congregation through Lamentations and Daniel, then on to a series called “This Exiled Life,” concerned with the topic of religious liberties. These sermons drew on the Babylon stories to explore the kinds of ethical dilemmas that his congregants might encounter in the corporate world of boardrooms and watercoolers: Your boss hands down a new policy that your faith precludes you from fulfilling. Your co-workers don’t know you’re a Christian. Do you share your views or fly under the radar? “For some of you,” Vroegop told his congregation, “the island of marginal Christianity is shrinking, and you’re going to have to think very carefully, like you’ve never thought before….Where do I draw the line?”
Vroegop is a tall, forty-something man with a commanding voice, the kind of pastor who seems equally suited to heading corporate leadership seminars. I met him one day in his office, a small, sunny room lined with hundreds of theology books, alphabetized by author. He gave me one of them—Timothy Keller’s Making Sense of God—when I mentioned that I’d left the faith in my early twenties. He told me the sermons on exile grew out of conversations he had with his congregants following RFRA and the Obergefell decision. “I would encounter believers who, frankly, just had this sense of panic about them,” he said. Many in his congregation, particularly those who worked in HR and higher education, were confronting new protocols about gender and sexuality at their jobs, and as he walked them through these situations, he realized that the Old Testament might be instructive. “I think in the Babylonian exile, there was this reality of, look, we’re going to be here for a while, we’ve got to figure out how to be Jewish and to honor our God in the midst of a culture that is just godless,” he said. “And there were folks who figured out how to do that. You know, Daniel gets to a very high level of government.”
During the summer of 2016, Vroegop preached on the book of Daniel, describing Nebuchadnezzar as “an angry, irrational king” and likening Daniel’s position to “the vice presidency, if you will, of the country.” The sermons focused on the delicate balancing act that Daniel performs. While he strives to stay on the king’s good side, he also tells him difficult truths and urges him to keep his promises to the exiles. He “dared to speak to kings who were filled with pride and idolatry,” Vroegop said in one sermon. “Somehow, Daniel had figured out how to be faithful to God while serving the Babylonian empire faithfully as well.” I pointed out to Vroegop what seemed obvious to me—that the sermons were an allegory about Pence and Trump. Vroegop listened patiently while I drew these parallels but insisted that Pence had not been on his mind when he preached. Pence, he said, wasn’t even being considered at the time for the ticket. (Vroegop preached the final Daniel sermon on June 26; Pence was announced as running mate on July 15.)
Vroegop has a long-standing policy against speaking about Pence to the press, but others have floated the idea of Pence as a Daniel-like figure, including some Indianapolis Christians who know the vice president personally. Gary Varvel, a columnist and political cartoonist who has been friends with Pence since the nineties, published an op-ed last August in the Indy Star that compared Pence to Daniel, as well as to Joseph and Esther, Israelites who similarly “rose to the number two positions to ungodly kings in their day.” When I talked to Varvel, he told me he’d thought of Daniel as soon as Pence was announced as Trump’s running mate. He shared the theory with some Christian friends, who confessed that they had been thinking the same thing. Varvel hasn’t spoken to him since he joined the campaign, but he suspects that Pence may have had these biblical stories in mind when he chose to partner with Trump. “I would be surprised if he didn’t consider this as a divine appointment, so to speak,” Varvel told me. Former Indiana secretary of state Ed Simcox, who once led Bible studies in the state legislature, echoed this sentiment in an interview with World magazine. When asked about Pence’s decision to partner with Trump, Simcox replied, “Mike would be thinking about the role he can play for his country. How can I contribute? Mike could wind up as the foremost counselor to the king, like in the Bible.”
It’s clear that Pence sees himself as the defender of an imperiled religious minority, a mantle he assumed during the RFRA fallout. It’s telling that throughout those a
ppearances, Pence did not appeal to the country’s supposed religious foundations; nor did he defer to Christian values as a normative national ethic. Instead, he declared that the law would “empower” religious people whose liberties were being “infringed upon,” drawing on the grammar of identity politics. Pence is a politician who has tapped into the language of exile, and by the time he joined Trump’s campaign, he had become fluent, promising James Dobson that a Trump-Pence administration “will be dedicated to preserving the liberties of our people, including the freedom of religion that’s enshrined in our Bill of Rights.” For Christians who were immersed in these ancient myths, Pence made for a familiar figure, a member of the tribe who would represent them in the court of a pagan empire, a man who could encourage an unpredictable king to keep his promises. A former advisor quoted in GQ claims that Pence joined the ticket after he was reminded that “proximity to people who are off the path allows you to help them get on the path.”
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If the stories of exile helped evangelicals come around to the idea of a Trump presidency, they have served a different purpose since Trump and Pence took office: they have been marshaled to incite loyalty to Trump—particularly within the administration itself. Ralph Drollinger, a former NBA player and founder of Capitol Ministries, leads Bible studies on Capitol Hill wherein “the Word of God is regularly explicated and applied in specific to the life of a Public Servant.” The gatherings, which are known to insiders as the Members Bible Study, take place weekly in both the House and Senate. During the Obama administration, Pence was one of the Bible study’s sponsors, along with Michelle Bachmann, Tom Price, and Mike Pompeo.
A few weeks after the 2016 election, on November 28, Drollinger held a reception where he distributed Bible-study notes on the stories of Daniel, Joseph, and Mordecai. He declined my request for an interview, but Capitol Ministries sent me the notes to this study, “Maintaining Biblical Attitudes with New Political Leadership,” which was clearly designed to quell internal fractiousness over the incoming president. (Drollinger was an outspoken Trump supporter throughout the campaign.)
Drollinger’s Bible study began by acknowledging that many people in office had been vocal about their displeasure at Trump’s election. The point of the study was to demonstrate the “exemplary behavior” of Old Testament figures like Daniel, “who stood their ground for God, and yet maintained respect for those in authority with whom they did not agree.” What distinguished Daniel, in Drollinger’s estimation, was his “loyal service” to and “manifest respect” for the king. Despite the fact that he served a pagan ruler who did not recognize his religion, Daniel made himself useful and encouraged Nebuchadnezzar to follow scriptural commands. “We may not be able to interpret a king’s dreams today,” Drollinger wrote, “but we can put into words the ageless truths of God’s Holy Writ!” According to the study, Daniel and biblical figures like him assiduously followed the commands of the kings they served and exhibited an attitude of general compliance (“Nor did they call their boss names in the media” read a tongue-in-cheek aside). He then explicitly likened Pence to Daniel. “For years, Governor Pence has embodied these aforesaid biblical characteristics, and God has elevated him to the number-two position in our government.”
Pence has certainly fulfilled this prescription of loyalty. During the first full Cabinet meeting, the vice president declared that working for Trump was “the greatest privilege of my life,” provoking a chain of obsequious echoes from the other attendees. His unwavering devotion to his leader has earned him the endearment “sycophant in chief.” He has declined to publicly disagree with the president, even in the crucible of his worst political traumas. When Trump refused to condemn white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, for example, Pence not only defended him but did so in the soothing tones of a spiritual advisor. “I know this president,” he told Matt Lauer. “I know his heart.”
And yet, it would be difficult to overstate how far Drollinger’s exegesis—which imagines Daniel as a deferential subject—strays from Christian orthodoxy, which traditionally celebrates him as a righteous dissenter. (It’s also worth mentioning that Daniel was a slave, so whatever loyalty he exhibited was, in fact, compulsory.) Pence’s shows of deference, by contrast, reek of political strategy. His tenure so far reflects the more cynical implication of Drollinger’s lesson: that the most expedient way to accomplish a religious agenda is to perform loyalty to the king while working diligently behind the scenes on behalf of your own people. Pence was instrumental in the choice of Neil Gorsuch for the Supreme Court and is believed to have influenced many Cabinet appointments, including those of Betsy DeVos, Tom Price, and Mike Pompeo—a cohort that, in the words of the writer Jeff Sharlet, may be “the most fundamentalist Cabinet in history.” “Evangelicals have had an unbelievably open door with this administration,” said Johnnie Moore, a public relations executive and member of the Trump campaign’s evangelical advisory board, a group of Christian leaders who continue to counsel the president on spiritual matters. While Moore told me that Trump himself has strong ties to evangelicals, he emphasized Pence’s deep relationships with leaders in the Christian community, and said that the vice president has opened the White House to his longtime friends. Christian lobbyists, along with Pence, played an important role in persuading Trump last December to declare that the United States would recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. In his address to the Knesset the next month, Pence explicitly tied American history to the Jewish exile narratives. “In the story of the Jews,” he said, “we’ve always seen the story of America.” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rounded out the metaphor when he visited the United States in March and joined the chorus of evangelical leaders who see Trump as a twenty-first-century incarnation of the heroic Persian king. “I want to tell you that the Jewish people have a long memory,” he said to Trump in the Oval Office. “We remember the proclamation of the great King Cyrus the Great…twenty-five hundred years ago, he proclaimed the Jewish exiles in Babylon can come back and rebuild our temple in Jerusalem.”
Although Pence has denied that he has higher ambitions, political commentators haven’t ruled out the prospect of a Pence presidency. Last year, he launched the Great America Committee, the first PAC started by a sitting vice president. This development, coupled with reports that he was hosting dinners for wealthy Republican donors at his official residence, and his choice of a presidential campaign operative as his first chief of staff, led to rumors that he might be running a shadow campaign. Regardless of whether he ends up running in 2020—or whether some fateful event promotes him to commander in chief—it appears he is planning a political future independent of Trump, a prospect that causes no shortage of anxiety on the left. It is now something of a cliché to point out that Trump’s erraticism and lack of moral center might actually be preferable to Pence’s ideological determination. Sarah Jones remarked in The New Republic that if Pence had his way, America would become like Gilead, the dystopian state of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, where women are considered property and “gender traitors” are publicly executed.
But one needn’t look to dystopian fiction to conjure the kind of theocracy that Pence might prefer. It’s right there in the Bible. After the Israelites were freed from exile, they returned to Jerusalem, rebuilt the Temple, and constructed a wall around the city. Under the leadership of a high priest, Judah became a theological state operating according to the Law of Moses, which outlined an inflexible code of hygiene and diet and forbade divorce and homosexuality. Some Old Testament sources dramatize this era as a revival of religious and ethnic purity, a period in which Jerusalem was systematically purged of foreign influences; in the Book of Ezra, non-Jews were persecuted, and men were forced to give up their foreign wives and children.
Pence himself has alluded to this return narrative in his speeches and public appearances. The verse he chose for his swearing-in a
s vice president—II Chronicles 7:14—reiterates the conditions of God’s covenant with Israel and the promise of a restored theocratic homeland. American evangelicals see themselves as the inheritors of these covenants, which is something commentators miss when they predict, again and again, the decline of the Religious Right. Such assumptions rest on the modern, liberal notion that history is an endless arc of progress and that religion, like all medieval holdovers, will slowly vanish from the public sphere. But evangelicals themselves regard history as the Old Testament authors do, as a cycle of captivity, deliverance, and restoration, a process that is sometimes propelled by unlikely forces—pagan strongmen, despotic kings. This narrative lies deep in the DNA of American evangelicalism and is one of the reasons it has remained such a nimble and adaptive component of the Republican Party.
One of Pence’s favorite Bible verses is Jeremiah 29:11: “For I know the plans I have for you…plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” The verse, which currently hangs above the mantel of the vice president’s residence in Washington, contains God’s promise to free the Jews after their captivity in Babylon. In a later verse, God vows, “I will gather you from all the nations and places where I have banished you…and I will bring you back to the place from which I carried you into exile.”
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