I have presented polling data recently to argue that racism -- or perhaps better stated as attitudes and understanding about the nation's racist past and present -- are the basic polarizing element in U.S. politics. Very large majorities of voters support Democratic policy priorities, including abortion rights; gun safety regulations; preserving and strengthening Medicare and Social Security; and both the recently passed so-called Bipartisan Infrastructure bill and the Build Back Better act currently under consideration. But many of those same people vote for Republicans who oppose all of this.
I happened to be in the car this morning and I heard a segment of the NPR program On Point. Host Meghna Chakrabarti spoke with Robert P. Jones, author of White Too Long; and Anthea Butler, author of White Evangelical Racism: The politics of morality in America. Both have similar arguments. I'll introduce this with the blurb to Butler's book:
The American political scene today is poisonously divided, and the vast majority of white evangelicals play a strikingly unified, powerful role in the disunion. These evangelicals raise a starkly consequential question for electoral politics: Why do they claim morality while supporting politicians who act immorally by most Christian measures? In this clear-eyed, hard-hitting chronicle of American religion and politics, Anthea Butler answers that racism is at the core of conservative evangelical activism and power.
Butler reveals how evangelical racism, propelled by the benefits of whiteness, has since the nation’s founding played a provocative role in severely fracturing the electorate. During the buildup to the Civil War, white evangelicals used scripture to defend slavery and nurture the Confederacy. During Reconstruction, they used it to deny the vote to newly emancipated blacks. In the twentieth century, they sided with segregationists in avidly opposing movements for racial equality and civil rights. Most recently, evangelicals supported the Tea Party, a Muslim ban, and border policies allowing family separation. White evangelicals today, cloaked in a vision of Christian patriarchy and nationhood, form a staunch voting bloc in support of white leadership. Evangelicalism’s racial history festers, splits America, and needs a reckoning now.
What is important to understand is that the white evangelical movement has become essentially synonymous with the Republican party; and that it rests on three bedrock principles: Christianity (or their interpretation of it) over all other religions; men over women; and white people over all others. This is the ideology that underlies the Trump personality cult and the Republican party. That's it.
8 comments:
So what am I to make up my partner’s cousin, a 67-year-old Caucasian woman, identifies as evangelical, as decent person as you can ever find, and is married to a tall African-American man? Nice couple, terrific people. I say that as an aware non-racist. What this tells me is that there are Caucasian evangelicals around who are not racist at all.
I find this all puzzling. I have lived and worked in the South, where things are generally very different in all aspects of life. I’ve lived in seven different states across the country. Here I am in Michigan, and here is this really terrific lady who doesn’t have a racist bone in her body and is truly a fine person, married to an African-American, and she’s evangelical. Are we saying that she’s an outlier?
Butler says that many people are leaving the church once they realize what is going on. And indeed the number of people telling pollsters they are evangelicals has declined substantially in recent years. But of course it depends on the specific congregation and preacher. Also this obviously does not apply to the Black evangelical church. But it is the main current in white evangelicalism.
There’s also the issue of labels and self-identification. Perhaps the woman I mentioned previously is not aware of the larger trend in evangelical churches in the U.S. In addition, I know the church she attends, and its denomination is Lutheran.
Aha. There is a denomination called the Evangelical Lutheran Church but it isn't part of the conservative Evangelical movement. In fact it is a "full communion partner" with the United Church of Christ, the Episcopal Church, the United Methodist Church, the Reformed Church in America, and the Presbyterian Church. In other words, it is a liberal protestant denomination, it just happens to use the word "evangelical" in its name.
Mystery solved!
Evangelical merely means that one is called upon to share the good news of christ, etc... There are catholic evangelical lay orders, but no one talks about that. What we generally call "white evangelical" in america is a very specific outgrowth of baptist christianity which originated in the Third Awakening but was quickly subsumed in the tent evangelist movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
While it began with great social causes such as abolition, and spawned the Salvation Army, it has morphed into something Moody and the Booths would find appalling: herrenvolk bolld and soil paganism. This is what happens when we despise institutions and allow unsupervised bible study leaders to preach.
Makes sense that such horrendous teachings and practices — unsupervised — could come out of such a horrendous book.
Ugh... That was "blood and soil."
Anyway, that's why I'm such a fan of institutional churches like the roman catholic and find this movement toward unchurched bible study groups frightening. You may disagree with part of what they do but large organizations tend toward moderation and PR damage control. They are by no means perfect but we need something occupying that part of our social psyche.
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