THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

I'm not referring to the usual FUD spread like shit in farm field among the 'faithful'. I mean scaring them to the core of their being by actually preaching and witnessing like the Jesus of the Bible does. Even a powerful Pharisee like Jerry Falwell Jr needs to threaten them when they hold a revival in Lynchburg, VA.

The night before Shane Claiborne came to town to preach at a Christian revival, he received a letter from the chief of police at Liberty University warning that if he set foot on the property, he would be arrested for trespassing and face up to 12 months in jail and a $2,500 fine.

At first glance, Mr. Claiborne hardly appeared a threat to Liberty University, a dominant force in Lynchburg, Va., and a powerful engine in evangelical Christianity. Wearing baggy clothes that he sews himself, Mr. Claiborne preaches the gospel, lives among the poor and befriends prisoners on death row, modeling his ministry on the life of Jesus.

But to the leaders of Liberty, he was a menace to their campus. He and his national network of liberal evangelicals, called the Red Letter Christians, were holding a revival meeting to protest in Liberty’s backyard. Their target: Jerry Falwell Jr., Liberty’s president and a man who has played a pivotal role in forging the alliance between white evangelicals and Donald J. Trump, who won 81 percent of their vote.

Mr. Claiborne and his group are the other evangelicals. The Red Letter Christians, a reference to the words of Jesus printed in some Bibles in red type, are not the evangelicals invited for interviews on Fox News or MSNBC. They don’t align neatly with either political party. But they have fierce moral and theological objections to those evangelicals who have latched onto Mr. Trump and the Republican Party.

“Let’s go where the Christians are, go where toxic Christianity lives,” Mr. Claiborne said last year, when proposing the idea for a revival in Lynchburg at an annual retreat for the Red Letter Christians.

The revival last month was the most energetic of several recent attempts by Christians in various camps to confront what they see as Mr. Trump’s “court evangelicals” selling out the faith. The critics have written columns, and a book called “Still Evangelical?” They convened a closed-door summit last month at Wheaton College. A number of bereaved, eminent elders plan a procession to the White House soon to hand over their manifesto, “Reclaiming Jesus: A Confession of Faith in a Time of Crisis.”

Mr. Claiborne and his group were far more audacious, but they also faced disappointment, resistance and fear. They were taking on Lynchburg, a company town where Liberty University is the biggest employer. Their “Red Letter Revival” revealed the state of the evangelical church in 2018: The loudest voices and institutional power and money are with Mr. Trump; the dissenters are fired-up, underfunded and scattered; and the vast majority of pastors are silent for fear of dividing their congregations or risking their jobs.

“There is another gospel in our country right now, and it is the gospel of Trump,” Mr. Claiborne preached at the revival in his Tennessee drawl. “It doesn’t look much like the gospel of Jesus.”

Like Daniel in the lions den, Shane Claiborne went where the heresy is strongest and proved the courage of his faith and bore witness for those who feel left behind by the adoration of the Orange Anti-Christ.