How Pastors, Not Politicians, Turned the Republican Party Racist

I grew up Republican and was a member of the City Committee of the Republican Party of Virginia Beach for eight years.  During that period, I viewed Republicans for the most part as "the good guys."  But something changed over the years and I have always credited the GOP's decline into a party of extremism and racism to directly correlate with the rise of the Christofascists in the party.  As the Christofascists infiltrated the party, moderates and I would argue sane people not motivated by simple greed (the true motivation for the worship of tax cuts) and racism and/or religious extremism fled the party.  A friend and former classmate recently linked to a lengthy piece in Forbes written by a former Republican that focuses mostly on the South but lays out how pastors, especially Southern Baptist pastors, were key to the transformation of the GOP and accomplished the "Southern Strategy" that Richard Nixon and his strategist, Lee Atwater envisioned.  Here in Virginia, The Family Foundation in alliance with Jerry Fallwell and now his son and Pat Robertson and his minions have played a major behind the scenes role in turning the Virginia GOP into a neo-Confederate party where racism is no longer disguised and is synonymous with calls for "religious liberty.  Take the time to read the entire piece.  Here are article highlights: 

“White Democrats will desert their party in droves the minute it becomes a black party.” Kevin Phillips, The Emerging Republican Majority, 1969.

Thirty years ago, archconservative Rick Perry was a Democrat and liberal icon Elizabeth Warren was a Republican. Back then there were a few Republican Congressmen and Senators from Southern states, but state and local politics in the South was still dominated by Democrats. By 2014 that had changed entirely as the last of the Deep South states completed their transition from single-party Democratic rule to single party rule under Republicans. The flight of the Dixiecrats was complete.

Reasons for the switch are not so hard to understand. . . . . Southern anger over the Democratic Party’s embrace of civil rights reforms was no secret and no surprise.

While the “why” behind the flight of the Dixiecrats is obvious, the “how” is more difficult to establish, shrouded in myths and half-truths. Analysts often explain the great exodus of Southern conservatives from the Democratic Party by referencing the Southern Strategy, a cynical campaign ploy supposedly executed by Richard Nixon in his ’68 and ’72 Presidential campaigns, but that explanation falls flat.

Crediting the Nixon campaign with the flight of Southern conservatives from the Democratic Party dismisses the role Southerners themselves played in that transformation. In fact, Republicans had very little organizational infrastructure on the ground in the South before 1980, . . . The flight of the Dixiecrats was ultimately conceived, planned, and executed by Southerners themselves, largely independent of, and sometimes at odds with, existing Republican leadership. It was a move that had less to do with politicos than with pastors. Southern churches, warped by generations of theological evolution necessary to accommodate slavery and segregation, were all too willing to offer their political assistance to a white nationalist program. Southern religious institutions would lead a wave of political activism that helped keep white nationalism alive inside an increasingly unfriendly national climate. Forget about Goldwater, Nixon or Reagan. No one played as much of a role in turning the South red as the leaders of the Southern Baptist Church. There is still today a Southern Baptist Church. More than a century and a half after the Civil War, and decades after the Methodists and Presbyterians reunited with their Yankee neighbors, America’s largest denomination remains defined, right down to the name over the door, by an 1845 split over slavery.

Spirituality may be personal, but organized religion, like race, is a cultural construct. When you’ve lost the ability to mobilize supporters based on race, religion will serve as a capable proxy. What was lost under the banner of “segregation forever” has been tenuously preserved through a continuing “culture war.” A fight for white nationalism and white cultural supremacy has in some ways been more successful after its transformation into an expressly religious, rather than merely racist crusade.

So long as pastors or priests (or in this case, televangelists) are willing to apply their theological creativity to serve political demands, religious institutions can be bent to advance any policy goal. With remarkably little prodding, Christian churches in Germany fanned the flames for Hitler. The Southern Baptist Church was organized specifically to protect slavery and white supremacy from the influence of their brethren in the North, a role that has never ceased to distort its identity, beliefs and practices.

At that time [1956], there may have been no more influential figure in the Southern Baptist Convention than W.A. Criswell, the pastor of the enormous First Baptist Church in Dallas.

At a convention in South Carolina, Criswell turned his popular fire and brimstone style on the “blasphemous and unbiblical” agitators who threatened the Southern way of life. Beyond all the boilerplate racist invective, Criswell outlined an eerily prescient rhetorical stance, a framework capable of outlasting Jim Crow. In a passage that managed to avoid explicit racism, he described what would become the primary political weapon of the culture wars:

Don’t force me by law, by statute, by Supreme Court decision…to cross over in those intimate things where I don’t want to go. Let me build my life. Let me have my church. Let me have my school. Let me have my friends. Let me have my home. Let me have my family. And what you give to me, give to every man in America and keep it like our glorious forefathers made – a land of the free and the home of the brave.

Long after the battle over whites’ only bathrooms had been lost, evangelical communities in Houston or Charlotte can continue the war over a “bathroom bill” using a rhetorical structure Criswell and others built. He had constructed a strangely circular, quasi-libertarian argument in which a right to oppress others becomes a fundamental right born of a religious imperative, protected by the First Amendment.

Criswell’s bizarre formula, as it metastasized and took hold elsewhere, could allow white nationalists to continue their campaign as a “culture war” long after the battle to protect segregated institutions had been lost.

Southern Baptists remained at the vanguard of the fight to preserve Jim Crow until the fight was lost.

Evangelical resistance to the civil rights movement was not uniform, but dissent was rare and muted. Southern Baptist superstar Billy Graham was cautiously sympathetic to King. . . . . However, in public Graham was careful to keep a safe distance and avoided the kind of open displays of sympathy for civil rights that might have complicated his career.

In 1968, the Southern Baptist Convention formally endorsed desegregation. That same year, in a remarkably passive-aggressive counter to their apparent concession on civil rights, they elected W.A. Criswell to lead the denomination.

Defeated and demoralized, segregationists in the 1970’s faced a frustrating problem – how to rebuild a white nationalist political program without using the discredited rhetoric of race. Religion would provide them their answer. Armed with the superficially race-neutral rhetorical formula Criswell had described, prominent Southern Baptist ministers like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson would emerge to take up the fight. All they needed was a spark to light a new wave of political activism.

In 1967, Mississippi began offering tuition grants to white students allowing them to attend private segregated schools. A federal court struck down the move two years later, . . . . It was the status of these schools, a growing source of church recruitment and revenue, that finally stirred the grassroots to action. Televangelist Jerry Falwell would unite with a broader group of politically connected conservatives to form the Moral Majority in 1979. His partner in the effort, Paul Weyrich, made clear that it was the schools issue that launched the organization, an emphasis reflected in chain events across the 1980 Presidential campaign.

The rise of the religious right is usually credited to abortion activism, but few evangelicals cared about the subject in the 70’s.

In August of 1980, Criswell and other Southern Baptist leaders hosted Republican Presidential candidate Ronald Reagan for a rally in Dallas. Reagan in his speech never used the word “abortion,” but he enthusiastically and explicitly supported the ministers’ position on protecting private religious schools. That was what they needed to hear.

Evangelical ministers, previously reluctant to lend their pulpits to political activists, launched a massive wave of activism in Southern pews in support of the Reagan campaign. The new President would not forget their support. Less than a year into his Administration, Reagan officials pressed the IRS to drop its campaign to desegregate private schools.

For decades, men like [Lee] Atwater had been searching for the perfect “abstract” phrasing, a magic political dog whistle that could communicate that “N…r, n…r” message behind a veneer of respectable language.

It was religious leaders in the South who solved the puzzle on Republicans’ behalf, converting white angst over lost cultural supremacy into a fresh language of piety and “religious liberty.” Southern conservatives discovered that they could preserve white nationalism through a proxy fight for Christian Nationalism. They came to recognize that a weak, largely empty Republican grassroots structure in the South was ripe for takeover and colonization. . . . Religious nationalists began to purge traditional Republicans from the region’s few GOP institutions.

Russell Moore became the President of the Southern Baptist Convention’s social outreach arm in 2013. In that capacity, he began to challenge many of the darker elements of the church’s history. From a post in the church traditionally dedicated to hand-wringing over gay rights and dirty movies, Moore criticized those who stirred up hatred against refugees and ignored matters of racial justice. He drew sharp criticism when he denounced the Confederate Flag, explaining, “The cross and the Confederate flag cannot co-exist without one setting the other on fire.”

The real fury came when Moore applied to Donald Trump the same standard of conduct Baptists had demanded of Bill Clinton.

As religious leaders lined up solidly behind Trump last fall, Moore commented, "The religious right turns out to be the people the religious right warned us about."

Today, W.A. Criswell’s Dallas megachurch is pastored by Robert Jeffress, who has remained faithful to the most bigoted strains of the olde tyme religion.

Billy Graham’s son, Franklin, retooled the ministry he inherited, turning it into something a civil rights era segregationist could love without reservation. Graham, who earns more than $800,000 a year as the head of his inherited charity, has made anti-Muslim rhetoric a centerpiece of his public profile and ministry.

Jerry Falwell's son also inherited the family business, serving now as president of his father's university. His support for Trump is less surprising than Graham's, and far less of a departure from his father's work. Falwell spoke in support of Trump at the Republican National Convention.

Public perception that a “Southern strategy” conceived and initiated by clever Republicans turned the South red is worse than false. By deflecting responsibility onto some shadowy “other” it blocks us from reckoning with the past or changing our future. History is a powerful tide, especially when it runs unseen and concealed. A refusal to honestly confront our past leaves us to repeat our mistakes over and over again.

No one needs to say “N..r, n..r” anymore. With help from evangelical pastors, this new generation of politicians has found a new political party and a fresh language with which to stir old grievances and feed their power. By merely refining their rhetoric and activating evangelical congregations, a new generation of Southern conservatives grow ever closer to winning a fight their forebears once thought was lost.

Not surprisingly, a recent survey found that a majority of evangelicals admit to being racists.  "Religious liberty" today equates with a right to discriminate against gays but also ultimately to discriminate against blacks, one of the bedrocks of the Southern Baptist Church and its allied evangelical churches. As has been the case through so much of history, organized religion is a pervasive evil.  Hopefully, with the flight of younger generations from religion  over time its toxic power will die in America.

When Does “Morality and Decency Kick In” for Trump Voters?

This post follows up on the theme of my post yesterday entitled The Trump Voter Paradox. If one listens to the bloviating of many, if not the majority, on the political right, the talk ad nausea about "Christian values" and "family values" as they support a Republican Party war long formulated by the likes of Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell against families, the sick, the poor, and sexual and racial minorities.  Now, Der Trumpenführer is taking the bigotry and hatred to new heights both through his manufactured hysteria about minority NFL players exercising their constitutional right to freedom of speech and expression to his, in my view, deliberate delay in expediting life saving aid to Puerto Rico. And despite all of this, his supporters - like true modern Day Pharisees - cheer him on. People are literally dying, yet Trump supporters are still whining about standing for the national anthem.  For the record, I support the players' refusal to stand.  Anyone not afford the Constitution's promise of equal protection under the law (which includes the LGBT community) has every reason to protest.  A piece in Salon looks at what I believe to be the moral bankruptcy and blatant racism of Trump supporters.  Here are excerpts:

On Monday, head coach of the San Antonio Spurs Gregg Popovich articulated his support of the ongoing national-anthem protests taking place across the sports world. In declaring his support of any players who should decide to participate, he — as he has before — drew a sharp line under the racial issues surrounding the remarks by Trump and the way people of color are treated in this country.

“Obviously, race is the elephant in the room, and we all understand that. Unless it is talked about constantly, it's not going to get better. . . . 'Oh, that again. They pulled the race card again. Why do we have to talk about that?' Well, because it's uncomfortable,” he said "They have our full support and no matter what they might want to do or not do is important to them, respected by us," Popovich said in support of protesters. "And there’s no recrimination no matter what might take place, unless it’s ridiculous egregious."

Popovich also commented on the response by the president more specifically and asked when Trump supporters would wake up. “I wonder what the people think about who voted for him, where their line is, how much they can take, where does the morality and decency kick in?”

Popovich is not the only one to take aim at Trump's remarks; in fact, the floodgates have opened for pro sports teams to take a stand (or knee) against him. Tony Dungy, former NFL player and coach, commented on the protests on "The Today Show" Sunday, specifically about the backlash and the shift in the tides.

“Up until yesterday, the players would want people to know, this was not about the flag, this was not about patriotism. In their opinion, it was about social change,” Dungy said. “But yesterday this was a group of our family got attacked and called names and said they were unpatriotic and should be fired for, what we feel, is demonstrating our first amendment right. We’re gonna [ . . . ] band together as a family and they reacted."

Sportscaster Dale Hansen used his position as a Vietnam Veteran to defend the protests, in opposition to those against the protests who claim that the action is disrespectful to veterans.“The young, black athletes are not disrespecting America or the military by taking a knee during the anthem,” Hanson said. “They are respecting the best thing about America. It’s a dog whistle to the racists among us to say otherwise." He condemned those who don’t believe in white privilege as well. “They, and all of us, should protest how black Americans are treated in this country. And if you don’t think white privilege is a fact, you don’t understand America.”

Perhaps the most scathing rebuke was from former tight end Shannon Sharpe on Undisputed, where he commented on the solidarity of the NFL and the hypocrisy of the people in power in the league. “This wasn’t a protest. This was unity. So, what are we showing solidarity against?” He continued. “We’re showing solidarity because President Trump challenged the very men. Wealthy, wealthy men, billionaires, and he told them, what you should do if someone protests, you should fire them. They don’t like being told what to do.”

 These self-styled "godly Christians" care more about a piece of cloth than travesties done to living, breathing  - at least until they are gunned down by police - individuals.  Indeed, these people are the antithesis of Christ's message.

Trump Voters: In Some Cases, Thoughtful, Smart, and Terrifying

My blogger/activist friend Lane Hudson who I first met at the LGBT Blogger Summit in Washington, DC, in December, 2008, shared a piece at Mother Jones that lays out the challenge progressives - and I would argue, true Christians to the extent the concept has not been completely destroyed by the Christofascists - face in confronting many Trump/GOP supporters.  The young man, Peter, that is the focus of the article is not a knee jerk racist.  Yet he seems incapable of questioning his own distorted view of objective reality and, like many areas that strongly supported Trump, the area that he comes from has things far better than many parts of America.  And it is noteworthy that when faced with a changing world and society, rather than adapt, Peter and his cohorts blindly close their minds and cling to their "identity" - i.e., white, heterosexual conservative Christian.  Here in Virginia, rural areas like the one that Peter is from are in a downward spiral but they refuse to see that it is their own closed mindedness and reactionary beliefs that make them so unpalatable to new progressive businesses. Meanwhile, the youth with ambition leave the area for progressive cities. I am at a loss as to how to get through to such people.  Here are some article highlights:

This past October, I taught a week long seminar on the history of conservatism to honors students from around the state of Oklahoma. In five long days, my nine very engaged students and I got to know each other fairly well. Six were African American women. Then there was a middle-aged white single mother, a white kid who looked like any other corn-fed Oklahoma boy and identified himself as "queer," and the one straight white male. I'll call him Peter.

Peter is 21 and comes from a town of about 3,000 souls. It's 85 percent white, according to the 2010 census, and 1.2 percent African American—which would make for about 34 black folks. "Most people live around the poverty line," Peter told the class, and hunting is as much a sport as a way to put food on the table. Peter was one of the brightest students in the class, and certainly the sweetest.

Still, Peter's thinking might help us frame a central debate on the left about what to make of Trump's victor.y Is it, in the main, a recrudescence of bigotry on American soil—a reactionary scream against a nation less white by the year? Or is it more properly understood as an economically grounded response to the privations that neoliberalism has wracked upon the heartland?

Peter knows where he stands. He remembers multiple factories and small businesses "shutting down or laying off. Next thing you know, half of downtown" in the bigger city eight miles away "became vacant storefronts." Given that experience, he has concluded, "for those people who have no political voice and come from states that do not matter, the best thing they can do is try to send in a wrecking ball to disrupt the system."

According to the 2010 census, the median household income in Peter's county is a little more than $45,000. By comparison, Detroit's is about $27,000 and Chicago's (with a higher cost of living) is just under $49,000. The poverty rate is 17.5 percent in the county and 7.6 percent in Peter's little town, compared with Chicago's 22.7 percent. The unemployment rate has hovered around 4 percent.

The town isn't rich, to be sure. But it's also not on the "bottom." Oklahoma on the whole has been rather dynamic economically: Real GDP growth was 2.8 percent in 2014—down from 4.3 percent in 2013, but well above the 2.2 percent nationally. The same was true of other Trump bastions like Texas (5.2 percent growth) and West Virginia (5.1 percent).

Peter, though, perceives the region's economic history as a simple tale of desolation and disappointment. . . . . He was just calling it like he saw it. But it's striking how much a bright, inquisitive, public-spirited guy can take for granted that just is not so.

But while Peter's analysis is at odds with much of the data, his overall story does fit a national pattern. Trump voters report experiencing greater-than-average levels of economic anxiety, even though they tend have better-than-average incomes. And they are inclined to blame economic instability on the federal government—even, sometimes, when it flows from private corporations.

Feelings can't be fact-checked, and in the end, feelings were what Peter's eloquent essay came down to­—what it feels like to belong, and what it feels like to be culturally dispossessed. "After continually losing on the economic side," he wrote, "one of the few things that you can retain is your identity. What it means, to you, to be an American, your somewhat self-sufficient and isolated way of life, and your Christian faith and values. Your identity and heritage is the very last thing you can cling to...Abortion laws and gay marriage are the two most recent upsets.

I did notice a line in his essay that I had glided over during my first two readings, maybe because I liked him too much to want to be scared by him. "One need only look to the Civil War and the lasting legacies of Reconstruction through to today's current racism and race issues to see what happens when the federal government forces its morals on dissenting parts of the country."

He first objected (politely!) to what he saw as the damning implication behind my observation. Slavery and Reconstruction? "I was using it as an example of government intrusion and how violent and negative the results can be when the government tries to tell people how to think. I take it you saw it in terms of race in politics. The way we look at the same thing shows how big the difference is between our two groups."

To him, focusing on race was "an attention-grabbing tool that politicians use to their advantage," one that "really just annoys and angers conservatives more than anything, because it is usually a straw man attack."  I wanted to meet him halfway, until he started talking about history.

"The reason I used the Civil War and Reconstruction is because it isn't a secret that Reconstruction failed," Peter wrote. "It failed and left the South in an extreme poverty that it still hasn't recovered from." And besides, "slavery was expensive and the Industrial Revolution was about to happen. Maybe if there had been no war, slavery would have faded peacefully."

As a historian, I found this remarkable, since it was precisely what all American schoolchildren learned about slavery and Reconstruction for much of the 20th century. Or rather, they did until the civil rights era, when serious scholarship dismantled this narrative, piece by piece. But not, apparently, in Peter's world.

This was where he left me plumb at a loss. Liberals must listen to and understand Trump supporters. But what you end up understanding from even the sweetest among them still might chill you to the bone.

As noted at the outset, how does one deal with those who cannot or will not look at objective facts and objective reality?   I often tell my clients that they need to choose between logic and reason on the one hand and emotion and feeling on the other.  Far to many Trump voters followed their emotions and sense of growing isolation (largely as a result of their own closed mindedness).  How do you reason with those who care little for real facts and objective data?  I do not know the answer. 

PRRI Study: White Christian America is Dying

Robert P. Jones, the founding CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), has a new book out entitled “The End of White Christian America.” For Christofascists, the findings will likely fuel their rebellion against sanity and modernity.  For others, the findings on white Christianity will be welcomed.  As regular readers know full well, I am no fan of religion in general and conservative Christianity in particular.  Sadly, religion has  brought more death and misery to the world over the centuries than nearly anything else save wars, disease and natural disasters - and many wars were ultimately based on religion  One need look no farther than ISIS and the horrors it has unleashed because of religious dogma.  Closer to home, the ugliness that has engulfed the Republican Party is in many ways based on the hate, racism and general misogyny that are, in my view, synonymous with conservative Christianity.  One delicious irony is that it is the conservative Christians' anti-gay attitudes that are most fueling defections from Christianity as a whole.  Here are some highlights from a Washington Post e-mail interview with Robert P. Jones:

Today, young adults ages 18 to 29 are less than half as likely to be white Christians as seniors age 65 and older. Nearly 7 in 10 American seniors (67 percent) are white Christians, compared to fewer than 3 in 10 (29 percent) young adults.

Although the declining proportion of white Christians is due in part to large-scale demographic shifts — including immigration patterns and differential birth rates — this chart also highlights the other major cause: young adults’ rejection of organized religion. Young adults are three times as likely as seniors to claim no religious affiliation (34 percent versus 11 percent, respectively).

The American religious landscape is being remade, most notably by the decline of the white Protestant majority and the rise of the religiously unaffiliated. These religious transformations have been swift and dramatic, occurring largely within the last four decades. Many white Americans have sensed these changes, and there has been some media coverage of the demographic piece of the puzzle. But while the country’s shifting racial dynamics are certainly a source of apprehension for many white Americans, it is the disappearance of White Christian America that is driving their strong, sometimes apocalyptic reactions. Falling numbers and the marginalization of a once-dominant racial and religious identity — one that has been central not just to white Christians themselves but to the national mythos — threatens white Christians’ understanding of America itself.

[O]ver the last decade, we have seen marked decline among white evangelical Protestants, the more conservative part of the white Protestant family. White evangelical Protestants comprised 22 percent of the population in 1988 and still commanded 21 percent of the population in 2008, but their share of the religious market had slipped to 18 percent at the time the book went to press, and our latest 2015 numbers show an additional one-percentage-point slip to 17 percent.

These indicators of white evangelical decline at the national level are corroborated, for example, by internal membership reports during the same period from the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest evangelical Protestant denomination in the country. It has now posted nine straight years of declining growth rates.

As a result, both white mainline Protestants and white evangelical Protestants are graying. In 1972, white Protestants’ median age was 46 years old, only slightly higher than the median age of the American population (44 years old). Today, white Protestants’ median age is 53, compared to 46 among Americans as a whole. Notably, by 2014, there was no difference between the median ages of white evangelical and mainline Protestants.

Catholics simply do not fit neatly into the story of White Christian America. In the book, I use White Christian America as a metaphor for the dominant cultural and institutional world built primarily by white Protestants, which until recently set the terms and tone for national debates and served as a kind of “civil glue” for the country, to borrow a term from E.J. Dionne.

While anti-Catholic sentiment has generally cooled today, it remained strong up through the 1960s, as President John F. Kennedy’s campaign demonstrated. In the 19th and early 20th century, many Catholics were seen as neither “white” nor “Christian.”

The rise of religiously unaffiliated Americans over the last few decades is one of the most important and dramatic shifts in American religious history. As recently as the 1990s, less than 1 in 10 Americans claimed no religious affiliation. By 2014, the religiously unaffiliated rivaled Catholics’ share of the religious marketplace, with each group making up 22 percent of the American population.

Looking ahead, there’s no sign that this pattern will fade anytime soon. By 2051, if current trends continue, religiously unaffiliated Americans could comprise as large a percentage of the population as all Protestants combined — a thought that would have been unimaginable just a few decades ago.

The reasons for the growth of religiously unaffiliated Americans are complex. First, it should be noted that the growth of this group has come almost entirely at the expense of white Christian denominations, . . . .

When PRRI surveys have asked religiously unaffiliated Americans who were raised religious why they left their childhood religion, respondents have given a variety of reasons — stopped believing in teachings, conflicts with science, lack of time, etc. — but one issue stands out, particularly for younger Americans. About 70 percent of millennials (ages 18-33) believe that religious groups are alienating young adults by being too judgmental about gay and lesbian issues. And 31 percent of millennials who were raised religious but now claim no religious affiliation report that negative teaching about or treatment of gay and lesbian people by religious organizations was a somewhat or very important factor in their leaving.

I’m certainly critical of the way that white evangelical Protestants have historically intertwined racial segregation and Christianity. That’s a normative perspective, but I don’t take it to be a controversial one.

White evangelicals have themselves started disentangling Christianity and racism, albeit slowly and recently. For example, the Southern Baptist Convention did not get around to apologizing for the role slavery played in the denomination’s founding and for its consistent failure to support civil rights until 1995. And only this year, 2016, did the SBC vote to officially disavow the display of the Confederate battle flag.

The issue of LGBT equality is more complicated and more divisive. But even here, attitudes are shifting. . . . . For example, 45 percent of young evangelicals (ages 18-29) and 43 percent of young Mormons favor same-sex marriage, compared to only 19 percent of white evangelical seniors and 18 percent of Mormon seniors. Most notably, the data show that young Republicans have passed the tipping point: 53 percent of young Republicans now support same-sex marriage. . . . I think younger evangelicals and younger Republicans are increasingly challenging the assumption that equality before the law is a progressive value.

Trump’s appeal to evangelicals was not that he was one of them but that he would “restore power to the Christian churches” if he were elected president. This explicit promise, along with his anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim rhetoric, signaled to white evangelical voters that when he crowed about “Making America Great Again,” he meant turning back the clock to a time when conservative white Christians held more influence in the culture. Trump has essentially converted these self-described “values voters” into “nostalgia voters.”

[T]he patterns in the electorate are clear. Every four years, there is a shrinking pool of white Christian voters; if current trends continue, 2024 will be the first year white Christians will not make up a majority of voters nationwide.

I begin the book with an obituary for White Christian America, and I conclude the book with a eulogy. This construction is consistent with the book’s stark title. My argument in the book is that we have already experienced the passing of White Christian America. While this claim is grounded in demographic changes, it is also supported by the fading power of major institutions, such as the National Council of Churches or the Christian Coalition of America. There are no indicators that the country will see the likes of White Christian America as a dominant cultural force again.

Personally, I view the decline - and hoped fro demise - white conservative Christianity as a positive good.  So much of the hate and racism that plagues the nation today ultimate traces back to lily white "Christian" family values organizations which, upon inspection, do little other than fan the flames of hatred and disseminate lies about anyone and everyone who isn't a white conservative Christian.   The work to be done is to continue to expose the truth about these people while dispelling the lies they disseminate - often to gain power or self-enrichment. 

Race - The Real Reason the Republican Party is Imploding

I have said it before and I will say it again: the descent of the Republican Party began when white, racist, Christofascists were cynically welcomed in to the party by the so-called GOP establishment which put short term electoral victories over the long term future and viability of the party.  These angry white conservative Christians - many of whom, particularly in the South view the Jim Crow era a golden period in America - have become a cancer in the GOP that has proved to be just as hard to eradicate as the AIDS virus.   A piece in Salon looks at the role racism has played in the coming implosion of the GOP.  Here are highlights:

Republicans in the House are reportedly no closer to finding John Boehner’s successor. As a matter of fact, things have gotten so bad that the conservative establishment is begging Rep. Paul Ryan to take the job. He says he’d rather not.

But over the weekend, it started to look like Ryan may not have to resign himself to the miserable fate of being one of the most powerful people on the planet — at least not yet. Because according to reports which first emanated from Breitbart.com and other tribunes of the far right, but which have since been corroborated by the New York Times and others, even Ryan may not be conservative enough to please the 30-40 extremists who felled Boehner, thwarted McCarthy, and call themselves members of the House Freedom Caucus.

 

ADVERTISING

Yes, that’s right: The Republican Party is now beholden to a faction so zealously reactionary that Paul “Ayn Rand is the reason I got involved in public service” Ryan is, in its reckoning, much too far to the left.

[R]ecognizing the problem is the easy part. The harder part is acknowledging where it comes from. Brooks chalks the GOP’s militancy up to 30 years of “rhetorical excesses, mental corruptions and philosophical betrayals” and suggests that Republicans are “addicted to a crisis mentality.”  . . . . 

No, as is so often true in American politics, the problem is race.

Some hardliners pay lip service to his supporting the 2008 bailouts when explaining their opposition to Ryan. But if you follow the far-right press, or listen to rank-and-file activists, it’s blindingly obvious that conservatives’ real problem with Paul Ryan is that he not only supports comprehensive immigration reform, but supports higher levels of overall immigration, too. “There’s nobody in the Republican Party who could be worse than Paul Ryan,” said Roy Beck, a leading “immigration control” activist, to Breitbart. “Open Borders is in his ideological DNA. That’s the terrifying thing.”

Where they break from the rest of the political establishment is in their analysis; that apocalyptic stuff about the end of the republic, the New Black Panther Party, and immigration being akin to “invasion.”

But that’s not craziness; that’s racism. They’re different. So if Brooks and others really want to know how this dysfunction got started, they’ll have to look back further. Before the Tea Party, and before Paul Ryan was even born. They’ll have to examine the roots of today’s Republican Party. I’d recommend they start with Richard Nixon and the presidential campaign of 1968.

As noted before, the GOP has become so extreme on race that I often wonder why they do not hand out KKK robes at the beginning of GOP city and county committee meetings.  The GOP was not always like this - certainly not in the more distant years past when I was on the Virginia Beach City Committee for the GOP.

KKK Rally in SC to Defend Rebel Flag and Promote "White Christian Nation"

Try as they might to distance themselves from racists and white supremacists, the Christofascists are finding the effort difficult.  Now, the Klu Klux Klan is making the effort even more difficult as it announces that it will rally at the South Carolina capitol to defend the Confederate flag and to promote "White Christian Nation."  I have often maintained that if you scratch beneath the surface of most supposed Christian "family values" organizations you will find a bunch of would be segregationist and white supremacists.  That holds true for Family Research Council or The Family Foundation here in Virginia.  Patheos.com looks at situation in South Carolina.  Here are highlights:

The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan will rally on the Statehouse Grounds in South Carolina next month to promote a “White Christian nation” and defend the honor of the Confederate flag.
On Monday, state officials confirmed that the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan’s Pelham, North Carolina, chapter have reserved the Statehouse Grounds in South Carolina for a rally in front of the South Carolina Statehouse scheduled for July 18.
The Post and Courier reports the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, which calls itself the “largest Klan in America,” filed a permit saying they expected between 100 and 200 people to attend the event on the north side of the building, where the Confederate battle flag is currently being flown.
In a statement, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley said the KKK was not welcome: This is our state, and they are not welcome.

However, despite Governor Haley’s protests, Brian Gaines, spokesman for the South Carolina Budget and Control Board, confirmed the rally, noting the state provides rally space at the Statehouse site when space is available or previously not reserved.

The KKK rally promoting a “White Christian nation” and defending the Confederate flag will take place a month after Dylann Roof entered a historic church in Charleston and shot to death nine African-Americans during a Bible study meeting last month.

On their website, the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan claims Southern whites are facing “cultural genocide” while insisting they are not a “hate group.” The group insists that the KKK is all about obeying “God’s law,” and restoring “America to a White Christian nation founded on God’s word.”  The following is an excerpt:

We hate drugs, homosexuality, abortion, and race-mixing because these things go against God’s law and they are destroying all white nations. But rather than focus on hate, we try to focus on the love of our race. Love for our God and Country. Our goal is to help restore America to a White Christian nation founded on God’s word. 

It sounds almost the same as the agenda on the websites of FRC and TFF.  Conservative Christianity is truly something ugly. 

Nonreligious 'Nones' Are Driving LGBT Equality in America

I have often said that conservative Christians will be the ones who ultimately kill Christianity in America.  Their brand of hate and fear based dogma is growing increasingly repellant to more and more Americans, especially those under age 30 a third of whom have walked away from organized religion entirely.  As a story in The Advocate notes, one of the consequences of this growing disdain for religion is that the so-called "Nones" are helping to drive LGBT equality.   The take away?  That it is important to continue to spotlight the ugliness of the Christofascists not to mention their never ending hypocrisy and all too typically ties to racist organizations.  Scratch a "family values" organization and underneath you find former advocates of segregation.  Here are highlights from The Advocate:

This past week it emerged that Josh Duggar, the eldest son of the 19 Kids and Counting family, had molested at least five underage girls as a teenager, allegedly including two of his sisters. The revelation forced Duggar to leave his job with the Family Research Council, officially an antigay "hate group," where he vocally opposed laws protecting LGBT people.

The entire Duggar family has also been deeply enmeshed in antigay, right-wing politics. Notably, they have vocally supported religious conservatives like Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, while matriarch Michelle Duggar last year recorded a robocall that accused transgender people of being child molesters.

The Duggars have held themselves up as a model of Christianity in America: wearing their religion on their sleeves, the family is politically active, deeply conservative, anti-LGBT, patriarchal, and anti-science.

"Real Christians" like the Duggars would like to think they're doing God's work. But if they're judged by the fruits of their tree, as the Bible teaches, they've actually driven Americans away from churches. And new research indicates that their entrenched, anti-LGBT positions are part of why Americans are abandoning the faith in record numbers — and not coming back.

When Pew Research Center released its latest religion in America survey results, it highlighted a trend that has been ongoing for years: people are leaving organized religion in droves. . . . . The number of people who identify with any religious denomination keeps shrinking.

There are now approximately 56 million religiously unaffiliated adults (those identifying as agnostic, atheist, or “nothing in particular”) in the U.S., according to Pew. In light of this group’s “none of the above” attitude toward existing organized religion, the group is sometimes referred to as the “Nones.”    The Nones are more numerous than either Catholics or mainline Protestants . . . .

[T]he Nones also tend to be one of the most solidly Democratic and pro-LGBT demographics as well. This isn’t coincidental; prior studies from the Public Religion Research Institute have shown that up to a third of Millennial Nones left traditional faith communities because of religious intolerance toward LGBT people.

Certainly, there are other factors at play. Generational replacement is failing to happen — for every person who has joined a religion after having been raised unaffiliated, there are more than four people who have become religious “Nones” after having been raised in some religion, revealed Pew.

Dr. Brittney Cooper, an Assistant Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University, summarizes the problem posed by conservative Christianity to Millennials like herself in a powerful essay alleging that right-wing religious fanatics have concocted a bigoted “white supremacist Jesus."

“I cannot stand in a church and worship on Sunday alongside those who on the very next Monday co-sign every kind of legislation that devalues the lives of Black people, women, and gay people,” writes Cooper. “I am a firm believer that our theology implicates our politics. If your politics are rooted in the contemporary anti-Black, misogynist, homophobic conservatism, then we are not serving the same God. Period.”

The Pew survey shows the American Catholic Church’s numbers are in almost as steep a decline as mainline Protestants. Reactions to the trends detailed in the survey vary greatly across church leaders and devout members.

Others point to a groundbreaking 2010 study by Putnam and Campbell, which argues there is a strong link between Millennial disenchantment with Christianity and the rise of evangelical conservatism in the 1980s and ‘90s. That study hypothesizes that Millennials have come of age in an environment where being Christian means being conservative (and Republican). More socially progressive Millennials — which is most of them — view the choice before them as an ultimatum of sorts: identifying with one’s political identity, or their religious identity. When it comes down to brass tacks, Millennials are apt to change the latter, given how little effort it takes to drop out of organized religion. In short, when there is a conflict between religious and political identity, the path of least resistance involves giving up the religious one.

The solution, from Putnam and Cambell’s perspective, would be to sever the link between religion and politics. But recent polling indicates that 57 percent of Republicans want to see Christianity as the official religion of the United States.

Relatedly, research shows that increased Internet access — especially when used to access progressive media sources like Right Wing Watch and ThinkProgress — helps tighten the spiral of religious de-identification by consistently pointing out the link between conservative religions and politics. 

Whether the rise of the Nones — and the concurrent decline of moderate religions — ultimately speeds up or slows down efforts to secure legal protections for LGBT people as a whole remains to be seen. What we do know is that is that the rise of the Nones and the increasing acceptance of LGBT people are strongly linked.