Idols and Ideology by Douglas C. MacLeod Jr.

Evangelical Idolatry:
How Pastors Like Me
Have Failed the People of God
By Jeff Mikels
Eerdmans, 2025
$28.99   256 pp.

Jeff Mikels is confessing his sins to the world.

In his new book, Evangelical Idolatry: How Pastors Like Me Failed the People of God, Mikels speaks of how, after building a small church in Lafayette, Indiana, where many community members are conservative evangelical Christians, he began to detect a feeling of anger from his congregation. This was most pronounced during and after the pandemic.

Mikels’s sin was wanting to conduct services virtually because he believed in “the work of the scientific community.” Because of these restrictions, church membership declined. Mikels was disappointed to find “the way Christians and Christian churches were responding to the events in the world around them.” More and more, he noticed, they were “adopting the same language and perspectives as secular conservatism.” No longer were Christians following Christ and the gospel; instead, they were beginning to follow the disingenuous “teachings” of President Donald Trump, his sycophants, and media outlets designed to keep right-wing Republicans in office. Idols and ideology came together to spread fear, anxiety, racism, xenophobia, and misogyny to ensure power was maintained, while faith in Christ and the gospel continued to wane to a possible point of no return.

This decomposition process continues during the second Trump Administration, perpetuated by many of the same people, but more vigorously than before. It started with Trump not placing his hand on the Bible while being sworn into the presidency this past January. Next, it was his tirade against the Right Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde, the bishop of the Washington National Cathedral, who prayed he would have mercy on LGBTQ+ individuals. Recently, he made the decision to dismantle USAID and to eradicate birthright citizenship, both sparking conversations about constitutional crises. Federal workers are losing their jobs. The January 6th rioters were pardoned, and the president wants to make a resort out of the Gaza Strip.

Where is Jesus Christ and the gospel in all of this? Mikels is not overly confident that our nation’s politicians will make the necessary changes, so his mission is to help those who are following false idols on a day-to-day basis—“disillusioned Christians” who need to get back to the basics and embrace the foundational properties, principles, and people of the faith.

Such an effort must begin with extensive self-reflection and prayer, and Mikels is very open about his journey to Christian enlightenment. After experiencing the Trump impeachments, the hostile reactions toward Covid-19 safety protocols, and the injustices of the events surrounding George Floyd’s murder, his ideological viewpoints changed drastically. “It opened my eyes,” he says, “It woke me up.” Evangelical Idolatry is thus an autobiographical account, an opening of one’s soul to a community that claims piousness while spewing unreasonable, illogical hatred.

Mikels is a preacher by trade, and he certainly administers the Word here, chapter by chapter. He selects verses from Scripture to illustrate the need for dialogue as opposed to selective morality; Young Earth creationism and the validity of science, which includes climate change; the dangers associated with racism masked as policy and anti-abortion rhetoric; the importance of economic equality and religious tolerance; and the necessary dismantling of the temples that house our current, and less godly, idols.

Evangelical Idolatry is a passionate and organized call to action to save Jesus Christ and the gospel from annihilation. If Christians listen to Mikels’s confession and sermon and strategize properly, they may eventually relearn the true nature of the Christian faith as an adherence to both the Great Commandment and the Great Commission: Love your neighbor as yourself, and baptize more disciples while teaching them to obey God’s commandments.

Mikels realizes this endeavor will take time as well as a complete paradigm shift within the halls of our churches and political and cultural institutions. Ultimately, the only way Christianity can survive is if professed Christians stop feeding into their own biases and the dangerously petty rhetoric of materialistic demagogues and return to the foundations of the Way: love thyself, love thy neighbor, love the gospel, and, most important, love and follow Jesus. Mikels does a brilliant job in urging skeptics to hear his pleas. One hopes they will listen and take them to heart. ♦

Dr. Douglas C. MacLeod Jr. is an associate professor of composition and communication at SUNY Cobleskill. He has written multiple book chapters, peer-reviewed journal articles, and book reviews throughout his almost 20-year career as an academic and teacher. Recently, he has had essays published in Childhood and Innocence in American Culture: Heartaches and Nightmares (Lexington Books); Holocaust vs. Popular Culture: Interrogating Incompatibility and Universalization (Routledge); and Film as an Expression of Spirituality: The Arts and Faith Top 100 Films (Cambridge Scholars Publishing). He lives in Upstate New York with his wife, Patty.

Image: Protest against the shelter-in-place order during Covid-19 pandemic, May 2020. Hu Nhu / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 4.0