Tag Archives: Evangelicals

Religious War

A few days ago, I participated in a panel discussion following a showing of “Bad Faith,” a documentary film about Christian Nationalism. Coming so soon after reading “The Kingdom, The Power and The Glory,” it was even more traumatizing.

The film began with videos of the violent January 6th insurrection, and focused in on the multiple signs of “religious” motivation–placards linking Jesus to Donald Trump, crosses, rioters waving bibles and numerous other bits of Christian iconography. The rest of the documentary alternated between films of mega-church pastors preaching fire and brimstone to huge adoring audiences and anguished commentaries from scholars and clerics, including many religious figures who–like Tim Alberta–are devout Evangelicals appalled by the White Christian Nationalism that has replaced authentic Christianity for millions of believers.

The film underscored the dimensions of the religious war these “believers” are waging.

  • The sheer number of “soldiers” who have substituted White Christian Nationalism for Christianity is stunning. The videos showed “sermons” of well-known pastors (many of who have benefitted monetarily from the movement) and panned over huge audiences. According to the scholars interviewed, the movement numbers hundreds of pastors whose names are less familiar than those of the usual subjects, but whose messages are equally strident, intemperate and theocratic.
  • The movement is thoroughly racist and misogynist. Adherents are men and women who are threatened by social change and who express strong disapproval of the emerging “non-biblical” social equality of women and Black people. (Especially Black people.) The audiences for the diatribes about America’s “decline” were virtually all white, and the rhetoric employed left little room for alternative explanations.
  • This phenomenon is not just a fundamentalist tantrum against diversity and feminism; it’s leadership is strategic, well-planned and and coordinated. The role of Paul Weyrich in forming and growing the movement was amply documented, but what really struck me was the longevity of the effort. Weyrich and the others–Falwell, Robertson, Ralph Reed, etc.–began many years ago putting together a political movement intent upon replacing the government with a Christian theocracy. They made common cause with the very rich by promising to protect them from “confiscatory taxation.” They created a number of not-for-profits and think tanks that have worked in tandem for many years. Weyrich’s original manifesto has basically been reproduced in Project 2025.
  • Movement leadership accomplished their planned takeover of the GOP, expelling traditional Republicans and conservatives, and turning the party into a White Christian Nationalist cult.
  • The widespread belief that Evangelical political activity was sparked by Roe v. Wade is a myth. As I’ve previously noted and multiple religious historians have confirmed, initial Evangelical responses to that ruling were positive or neutral. It wasn’t until five years later that movement honchos decided to use “baby killing” as a tool to motivate activism from previously non-political Evangelicals–although their real trigger was withdrawal of tax-exempt status from the segregation academies they had established in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education.
  • The pastors have sold Trump to their Christian Warriors by insisting, variously, that he is a flawed “tool” of the Almighty and/or that he found God and was “born again” during his first term.
  • The movement substitutes country for God and far-Right politics for religion, using bogus history to claim that the United States was established as a “Christian country.” Evangelical clergy who focus on the essence of Jesus’ message–for example, the Sermon on the Mount–lose church members who tell them that such sentiments are “woke” and then decamp for more belligerent congregations.

There was much more, and if you get a chance to see the film, it is definitely worth your time. It will increase your understanding of the threat we face, and will underscore the imperative of reaching the millions of Americans who don’t bother to vote.

What is sobering is the realization that this effort to replace America’s Constitutional democracy with a psuedo-Christian theocracy has been active for over fifty years. Those of us in the larger, “woke” American culture have, for the most part, been blissfully unaware of its well-financed and strategically-sophisticated leadership, or the significant danger it poses to tolerance, individual liberty and the rule of law.

Like Micah Beckwith, these biblical literalists think they–and only they– own God. They are certain that they, and only they, are “on God’s side.” They are convinced that there’s a bright line between (their definition of) Godliness and sin (which is pretty much everything in modern culture), and that God wants them to impose His rules (as they understand them) on the rest of us.

They are the core of Trump’s base. They vote. And he knows he owes them.

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Christian MAGA

A Northwest Indiana newspaper recently reported that Micah Beckwith, Indiana’s incoming Lieutenant Governor, is telling people to refuse to comply with hospital requirements to wear masks when visiting to avoid spreading respiratory illnesses. Beckwith, you will (not) be pleased to know, speaks to God, who evidently doesn’t want us to mask up…

Those of us who find people like Beckwith difficult–okay, impossible–to understand or take seriously, need to read Tim Alberta’s book, “The Kingdom, the Power and the Glory.” It’s eye-opening. And sleep-disturbing.

Alberta himself is a devout Evangelical Christian. His father was a Southern Baptist preacher, and it is very clear from the book that Alberta has not only remained wedded to that tradition, but is in possession of deep biblical knowledge. He is also, however, sane, and inhabits an America with which most of us are familiar.

He appears to be one of the declining number of deeply religious Christians who refuse to cherry-pick biblical passages in order to bolster very unChristian bigotries.

In the wake of his father’s death and the 2016 election, Alberta tried to get his head around a question that has stumped many of us: how could so many ostentatiously devout Christians be in thrall to a figure like Donald Trump? (In 2020, Trump’s share of the White Evangelical vote was a whopping 84 percent.) Alberta took a year and a half to visit numerous Evangelical congregations to try to understand what motivated them.

His book was the product of those visits. I found it terrifying.

As one review noted,

This phenomenon, Alberta says, cannot simply be a matter of evangelicals mobilizing against abortion access and trying to save lives; after all, they have kept remarkably quiet when it comes to showing compassion for refugees or curbing gun violence, which is now, as Alberta notes, the leading cause of death for children in the United States.

What he finds instead is that under the veneer of Christian modesty simmers an explosive rage, propelling Americans who piously declare their fealty to Jesus to act as though their highest calling is to own the libs.

The book demonstrates that the “veneer” has pretty much peeled off. Alberta interviews some of the “usual suspects”– con-artist preachers of the Religious Right–and those interviews amply confirm what we “libs” have already concluded. Far more revealing were his interactions with members of the “flocks,” the congregants, a great many of whom had left churches where the pastors had declined to substitute MAGA politics for biblical sermonizing, and most of whom occupy an alternate, imaginary  and unrecognizable America.

Two things about those reports especially dumbfounded me: the sheer number of people who embrace what Alberta calls “blood-and-soil Christian nationalism;” and the widespread rejection of logic, fact, science and basic humanity among those thousands of “biblical literalists”. As the linked review noted,

“The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory” charts a transformation in evangelicalism, from a midcentury moment when white American Christians were such a dominant force in the country that many could “afford to forget politics” to a time when many more feel, as one prominent pastor puts it, “under siege.” Alberta suggests that this panic has less to do with any existential threat to American Christianity than a rattled presumption of privilege. “Humility doesn’t come easy to the American evangelical,” he writes. “We are an immodest and excessively indulged people.”

A majority of these congregants have turned religion into politics, and substituted (their version of) the “real” America for God. In one sanctuary, Alberta sees “a lot of American flags” but not a single cross.” He found belligerent culture warriors who never spoke about helping immigrants or the poor, and noted that “bashing the left tends to stimulate conservative passions more reliably than trying to teach Jesus’ example of good deeds and turning the other cheek.”

A booth at the Faith and Freedom Coalition was selling T-shirts with “Let’s Go Brandon,” the conservative chant that stands  for an expletive directed at Joe Biden. In case the expletive was unclear, the T-shirts included a hashtag #FJB. When Alberta questioned the propriety of such merchandise at a Christian event, the proprietor responded that he was protesting the “fact” that “we’ve taken God out of America.”

Shutdowns during the pandemic particularly incensed many of these culture warriors, and Alberta recounts multiple conversations with people who sound a lot like Indiana’s Micah Beckwith. COVID, they insist, was a liberal assault on Christianity and the church. (One woman insisted that Dr. Fauci had “invented” it.) Masks and vaccines are a liberal plot.

These are the people who elected Donald Trump.

The book is chilling. Read it.

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An Accurate Description

I have previously cited observations and analyses from David French, a genuine conservative with whom I often agree. (Tomorrow, I will post about a significant disagreement with him, so it isn’t all sweetness and light.) French recently published a very perceptive essay in the New York Times, considering the worst possibilities of a second Trump term in office.

French began by recognizing that a second term wouldn’t be characterized by the internal divisions of the first, which saw an effort by responsible aides and appointees to contain Trump’s worst impulses. He recognized that, in a second term, there would be sufficient numbers of “pure Trump sycophants” to completely staff the White House–and “his MAGA base would replace the Federalist Society as the screener of his judicial appointments.” But he has an even more ominous fear.

I dread the division and conflict of a second Trump term, and I don’t minimize the possibility of Trump doing permanent political damage to the Republic. But the problem I’m most concerned about isn’t the political melee; it’s the ongoing cultural transformation of red America, a transformation that a second Trump term could well render unstoppable.

To put the matter as simply as possible: Eight years of bitter experience have taught us that supporting Trump degrades the character of his core supporters. There are still millions of reluctant Trump voters, people who’ve retained their kindness, integrity and good sense even as they cast a ballot for the past and almost certainly future G.O.P. nominee. I have friends and family members who vote for Trump, and I love them dearly. But the most enduring legacy of a second Trump term could well be the conviction on the part of millions of Americans that Trumpism isn’t just a temporary political expediency, but the model for Republican political success and — still worse — the way that God wants Christian believers to practice politics.

I will inject here my assumption that French’s own (genuine) Christianity is what has allowed him to continue dearly loving those in his family who support Donald Trump. Not being a Christian of any sort–and being blessed with a family utterly devoid of Trumpers–I will admit that I can conceive of no way I could continue to respect a family member who failed to see Donald Trump for the ignorant, self-absorbed and increasingly mentally-ill specimen he is. And in the absence of respect, love comes hard…

As French writes, he has never before seen extremism penetrate a vast American community so deeply, so completely and so comprehensively.

As the Iowa caucuses approached, Trump escalated his language, going so far as to call his political opponents “vermin” and declaring that immigrants entering America illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country.” The statement was so indefensible and repugnant that many expected it to hurt Trump. Yet a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll found that a 42 percent plurality of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers said the statement would make them more likely to support Trump — a substantially greater percentage than the 28 percent who said it would make them less likely to support him.

French notes with alarm that  numerous “Christian” Republicans believe Donald Trump is God’s chosen man to save America. Trump himself shared a video modeled on Paul Harvey’s famous video “So God Made a Farmer,” that proclaims “God Made Trump.” The result–as French quite accurately notes–is “a religious movement steeped in fanaticism but stripped of virtue.”

Absent public virtue, a republic can fall. And a Trump win in 2024 would absolutely convince countless Americans that virtue is for suckers, and vice is the key to victory. If Trump loses a second time, there is a chance he’ll end up a painful aberration in American politics, a depressing footnote in our national story. But if he wins again, the equation will change and history may record that he was not the culmination of a short-lived reactionary moment, but rather the harbinger of a greater darkness to come.

I’ve quoted liberally from French’s essay, because I think he is absolutely correct–he has identified the (terrifying) stakes of this year’s election, and the consequences of victories for Trump and the MAGA Republicans who idolize and emulate him. (Here in Indiana, that most definitely includes mini-Trumpers Braun and Banks.)

Sociologists, psychologists and political scientists have a variety of theories about why people embrace fascism. We’re still exploring the reasons so many “good Germans” refused to see the writing on those walls.

Whatever the reason, the rest of us absolutely cannot allow America to enter that “greater darkness.” Polls may show a majority of Republicans have lost their way, but a majority of Americans have not. That majority needs to vote.

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Don’t Know Much About History…

Before my stint as Executive Director of Indiana’s ACLU, I had never heard of David Barton. When that job required me to engage in discussions with people who refused to believe in the separation of Church and State, however, he was frequently quoted.

Barton–a total fraud–was frequently touted in these debates, cited as a “respected Christian historian,” and it was unsurprising that  the folks making those assertions  dismissed the debunking protestations of a female ACLU lawyer (Jewish, to boot!). 

That background may explain why I immediately clicked through to read a Politico article titled “The Bogus Historians Who Teach Evangelicals They Live in a Theocracy.” Here’s what the author–himself a devout Evangelical–had to say about Barton:

The people packed into FloodGate Church in Brighton, Mich., weren’t here for Bill Bolin, the right-wing zealot pastor who’d grown his congregation tenfold by preaching conspiracy-fueled sermons since the onset of Covid-19, turning Sunday morning worship services into amateur Fox News segments. No, they had come out by the hundreds, decked out in patriotic attire this October evening in 2021, to hear from a man who was introduced to them as “America’s greatest living historian.” They had come for David Barton. And so had I.

It would be of little use to tell the folks around me — the people of my conservative hometown — that Barton wasn’t a real historian. They wouldn’t care that his lone academic credential was a bachelor’s degree in religious education from Oral Roberts University. It wouldn’t matter that Barton’s 2012 book on Thomas Jefferson was recalled by Thomas Nelson, the world’s largest Christian publisher, for its countless inaccuracies, or that a panel of 10 conservative Christian academics who reviewed Barton’s body of work in the aftermath ripped the entirety of his scholarship to shreds. It would not bother the congregants of FloodGate Church to learn that they were listening to a man whose work was found by one of America’s foremost conservative theologians to include “embarrassing factual errors, suspiciously selective quotes, and highly misleading claims.”
 
All this would be irrelevant to the people around me because David Barton was one of them. He believed the separation of church and state was a myth. He believed the time had come for evangelicals to reclaim their rightful place atop the nation’s governmental and cultural institutions. Hence the hero’s welcome Barton received when he rolled into FloodGate with his “American Restoration Tour.”

Throughout his decades of public life — working for the Republican Party, becoming a darling of Fox News, advising politicians such as new House Speaker Mike Johnson, launching a small propaganda empire, carving out a niche as the American right’s chosen peddler of nostalgic alternative facts — Barton had never been shy about his ultimate aims. He is an avowed Christian nationalist who favors theocratic rule; moreover, he is a so-called Dominionist, someone who believes Christians should control not only the government but also the media, the education system, and other cultural institutions. Barton and his ilk are invested less in advancing individual policies than they are in reconceiving our system of self-government in its totality, claiming a historical mandate to rule society with biblical dogma just as the founders supposedly intended.

The author went on to describe the speech Barton delivered, which he described as “exalting a curious version of the Christian ideal.” Evidently gun restrictions are un-Christian. So too are progressive income taxes, government health care and public education. During his denunciation of critical race theory, he shared a slide showing logos for The New York Times’s 1619 Project and Black Lives Matter framed around a Soviet hammer and sickle.

There was much more…

What the deeply religious author described is part and parcel of a phenomenon that has become increasingly obvious over the past several years: the transformation of Evangelical Christianity from a religion into a political ideology. In this essay and in his new book,”The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism,” he documents what he calls the “deterioration of American Christianity.”

The Politico article is quite lengthy. And terrifying. I strongly encourage you to click through and read it in its entirety. It illustrates the politicization of the churches the author witnessed firsthand in his research for the book–research that took him to “half-empty sanctuaries and standing-room-only auditoriums” and included shadowing big-city televangelists and small-town preachers. He says he reported from inside hundreds of churches, Christian colleges, religious advocacy organizations, denominational nonprofits, and assorted independent ministries.

Among the other things his chilling descriptions illuminated was the importance of  teaching accurate history–and the motives of the Christian Nationalists who are attacking the public schools that teach that history.

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Culture Overwhelms Politics…Eventually

American politics is no longer about politics. Genuinely political disputes revolve around the role of government, around contending policies. That today’s GOP is consumed by very different issues should have become clear when the Party simply dispensed with the production of a platform.

Jennifer Rubin recently reported on a study of Evangelicals conducted by PRRI, the Public Religion Research Institute. The study confirmed what has become obvious to political observers: people who identify as Evangelical are claiming a political label, not a theological one. These are the voters who form the base–and constitute the majority–of today’s GOP.

A striking 71 percent of these voters think the country has gone downhill since the 1950s (when women were excluded from most professions, Black Americans faced barriers to voting, 50 million Americans still used outhouses and only about 5 percent of Americans were college-educated). Because White Protestant evangelicals make up such a large share of the GOP, that means 66 percent of Republicans want to go back to the time of “Leave It to Beaver.

Other results from the research fill in the blanks. Six in ten white evangelical Protestants (61%) believe that there is discrimination against white Americans and that such discrimination is “as big a problem as discrimination against racial minorities.”
Some 58 percent of all Americans realize that white supremacy is still a major problem, but only 33 percent of White Evangelical Protestants agree– the lowest percentage among all religious groups.

Fifty-one percent are convinced that public teachers and librarians are indoctrinating students with “inappropriate” curricula and books.

Fifty-four percent of Evangelicals believe in the “big lie” of a stolen election.

And on immigration, only 30 percent of Americans buy into the “great replacement theory.” But 51 percent of White evangelical Protestants agree that “immigrants are invading our country and replacing our cultural and ethnic background.”

I’m personally appalled by that “only” thirty percent figure…But I digress. As Rubin sums up the findings,

In a nutshell, this group’s beliefs clash with the essence of the American experiment and conflict with objective facts, demography and economics. White evangelical Protestants’ outlook is warped by right-wing media and refracted through a prism of visceral anger and resentment.

That “visceral anger and resentment” are in response to–and in conflict with– the current state of American culture.

Today’s Republicans are rejecting reality. As Rubin quite correctly notes, they want something that is unattainable. America is steadily becoming less White, less male-dominated and less religious, and no election, no politician can change that. Women are not going docilely back to the kitchen; Black and Brown folks aren’t going to regain a shuffle and “know their place.” White guys who want to be dominant are going to have to prove their bona fides–they will no longer wield control merely by virtue of their gender and skin color.

Moreover, White evangelicals are fundamentally out of step with the majority American opinion on everything from abortion to immigration to the legitimacy of the 2020 election. That, too, won’t change, no matter how angry they become.

The anger and frustration uncovered by the PRRI study (and confirmed by several others) does explain the willingness of the  GOP base to support incredibly flawed candidates.  People who feels besieged don’t cast their votes on the basis of candidate merit; as Rubin says, they “don’t much care about a candidate’s smarts, ethics or decency. Faced with a perceived existential threat, these Americans are inclined to support anyone who gives voice to their frustrations.”

That is the answer to the persistent question–why?— from those of us who have been at a loss to understand why any sane American would vote for Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Donald Trump or the other numerous, despicable culture warriors who currently populate the once-Grand Old Party.

Even the most casual student of history realizes that cultural change eventually dictates political policies and movements. But zealots hostile to the culture can do enormous damage in the meantime.

If it takes control of the House or Senate next Tuesday, the current iteration of the GOP can and probably will reverse years of social and economic progress. At a bare minimum, it will continue its assault on immigration, do further harm to the environment, and withdraw support for Ukraine– upending the global balance of power. It will weaponize its ongoing assaults on women, people of color and non-Christians, and do enormous damage to America’s constitutional liberties and to the rule of law.

What it can’t do–what it has absolutely no interest in doing–is govern.

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