Rural Christian White America Doesn't Grasp That it is The Problem

As regular readers know, I have little sympathy for rural, white Christian America.  Indeed, I view its inhabitants as a clear and present danger to America's future and how the nation adjusts to a rapidly changing world.  Moreover, many of the misfortunes that now face this demographic, in my view, stem in large part from their own bad decisions and desperate clinging to ignorance and fundamentalist Christianity which cannot abide knowledge, education and/or science that reveal that their belief system is built on sand and in some aspects is simply untrue.  Much of Southwest Virginia embodies rural, white Christian America at its worst.  The question then becomes how do progressives  - the so-called "coastal elites" deal with these people.  To win elections, Democrat candidates need to find a way to try to attract their votes, yet is being "understanding" the correct course of action?  Trying to reason with those who reject reason and prefer to cling to ignorance is an exercise in futility.  Personally, I am inclined to shame them and call them out - the husband prefers a more conciliatory approach - and not waste my breath on those who have chosen to close their ears and minds. A lengthy piece in Raw Story by a former resident of rural white Christian America seems to support my approach.   Here are highlights:

As the election of Donald Trump is being sorted out, a common theme keeps cropping up from all sides: “Democrats failed to understand white, working-class, fly-over America.”  Trump supporters are saying this. Progressive pundits are saying this. Talking heads across all forms of the media are saying this. Even some Democratic leaders are saying this.

It doesn’t matter how many people say it, it is complete BS.  It is an intellectual/linguistic sleight of hand meant to draw attention away from the real problem. The real problem isn’t East Coast elites who don’t understand or care about rural America. The real problem is that rural Americans don’t understand the causes of their own situations and fears and they have shown no interest in finding out. They don’t want to know why they feel the way they do or why they are struggling because they don’t want to admit it is in large part because of the choices they’ve made and the horrible things they’ve allowed themselves to believe.

I grew up in rural Christian white America. You’d be hard-pressed to find an area of the country with a higher percentage of Christians or whites. I spent most of the first 24 years of my life deeply embedded in this culture. I religiously (pun intended) attended their Christian services. I worked off and on on their rural farms. I dated their calico-skirted daughters. I camped, hunted and fished with their sons. I listened to their political rants at the local diner and truck stop. I winced at their racist/bigoted jokes and epithets that were said more out of ignorance than animosity. I have watched the town I grew up in go from a robust economy with well-kept homes and infrastructure to a struggling economy with shuttered businesses, dilapidated homes and a broken-down infrastructure over the past 30 years. The problem isn’t that I don’t understand these people. The problem is they don’t understand themselves or the reasons for their anger and frustration.

The problem is that rural America doesn’t understand itself and will never listen to anyone outside its bubble. It doesn’t matter how “understanding” you are, how well you listen, what language you use…if you are viewed as an outsider, your views will be automatically discounted. I’ve had hundreds of discussions with rural white Americans and whenever I present them any information that contradicts their entrenched beliefs, no matter how sound, how unquestionable, how obvious, they will not even entertain the possibility that it might be true. Their refusal is a result of the nature of their fundamentalist belief system and the fact that I’m the enemy because I’m an educated liberal.

At some point during the discussion, they will say, “That’s your education talking,” derogatorily, as a general dismissal of everything I said. They truly believe this is a legitimate response, because to them education is not to be trusted. Education is the enemy of fundamentalism because fundamentalism, by its very nature, is not built on facts.

Knowing this about their belief system and their view of outside information that doesn’t support it, telling me that the problem is coastal elites not understanding them completely misses the point.

Another problem with rural Christian white Americans is they are racists. I’m not talking about white hood-wearing, cross-burning, lynching racists (though some are). I’m talking about people who deep down in their heart of hearts truly believe they are superior because they are white. Their white god made them in his image and everyone else is a less-than-perfect version, flawed and cursed.

Once you have this view, it is easy to lower the outside group’s standing and acceptable level of treatment. Again, there are varying levels of racism at play in rural Christian white America. I know people who are ardent racists. I know a lot more whose racism is much more subtle but nonetheless racist. It wouldn’t take sodium pentothal to get most of these people to admit they believe they are fundamentally better and superior to minorities. They are white supremacists who dress up in white dress shirts, ties and gingham dresses.

Because rural Christian white Americans will not listen to educated arguments, supported by facts that go against their fundamentalist belief systems from “outsiders,” any change must come from within. Internal change in these systems does happen, but it happens infrequently and always lags far behind reality. This is why they fear change so much. They aren’t used to it. Of course, it really doesn’t matter whether they like it or not, it, like evolution and climate change even though they don’t believe it, it is going to happen whether they believe in it or not.

Rural Christian white Americans have let anti-intellectual, anti-science, bigoted racists like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, the Stepford wives of Fox, and every evangelical preacher on television into their systems because these people tell them what they want to hear and because they sell themselves as being like them. The truth is none of these people give a rat’s ass about rural Christian white Americans except how they can exploit them for attention and money.

Gays being allowed to marry are a threat. Blacks protesting the killing of their unarmed friends and family are a threat. Hispanics doing the cheap labor on their farms are somehow viewed a threat. The black president is a threat. Muslims are a threat. The Chinese are a threat. Women wanting to be autonomous are a threat. The college educated are a threat. Godless scientists are a threat. Everyone who isn’t just like them has been sold to them as a threat and they’ve bought it hook, line and grifting sinker.

Since facts and reality don’t matter, nothing you say to them will alter their beliefs. . . . . The problem isn’t understanding their fears. The problem is how to assuage fears based on lies in closed-off fundamentalist belief systems that don’t have the necessary tools for properly evaluating the fears.

I think the idea that “Democrats have to understand and find common ground with rural America,” is misguided and a complete waste of time. When a 2,700-year-old book that was written by uneducated, pre-scientific people, subject to translation innumerable times, and edited with political and economic pressures from popes and kings, is given higher intellectual authority than facts arrived at from a rigorous, self-critical, constantly re-evaluating system that can and does correct mistakes, no amount of understanding, respect or evidence is going to change their minds and assuage their fears.

“Rural white America needs to be better understood,” is not one of the dots. “Rural white America needs to be better understood,” is a dodge, meant to avoid the real problems because talking about the real problems is viewed as too upsetting, too mean, too arrogant, too elite, too snobbish.

I do think rational arguments are needed, even if they go mostly ignored and ridiculed. I believe in treating people with the respect they’ve earned, but the key point here is “earned.” . . . . Just because the media, pundits on all sides and some Democratic leaders don’t want to call the actions of many rural white Christian Americans racist and bigoted doesn’t make them not so.

What I understand is that rural Christian white Americans are entrenched in fundamentalist belief systems; don’t trust people outside their tribe; have been force-fed a diet of misinformation and lies for decades; are unwilling to understand their own situations; and truly believe whites are superior to all races. No amount of understanding is going to change these things or what they believe. No amount of niceties will get them to be introspective. No economic policy put forth by someone outside their tribe is going to be listened to no matter how beneficial it would be for them. I understand rural Christian white America all too well. I understand their fears are based on myths and lies.

They are the problem with progress and always will be, because their belief systems are constructed against it.  The problem isn’t a lack of understanding by coastal elites. The problem is a lack of understanding of why rural Christian white America believes, votes, behaves the ways it does by rural Christian white America.

Brexit and Britain’s - and America's - Delusions of Empire

The parallel's between those in Britain who voted for Breixt and white Americans who voted for Donald Trump, a/k/a Der Trumpenführer, are remarkable.  In both instances, the two groups long for a perceived glorious past and a seek to reject modern economic reality and the fact that globalization and emerging economies make the days of "good old days" of yesteryear impossible to a bring back.  For the British, it's a longing of Imperial Britain on the eve of World War I when things may have been good for many whites in Britain proper, but not so wonderful for many of the subject peoples.  For Trump voters, it's the days immediately post World War II when America dominated the world, segregation at home maintained white privilege and minorities "knew their place" and gays, for their part remained largely invisible.  One irony is that America, with its crumbling infrastructure and disproportionate military spending is making the same mistake made by Britain post WWI when it failed to modernize its infrastructure and industries to remain competitive.  With China, India and other economies rising, going back to the late 1940's and 1950's simply isn't going to happen no matter what false promises Trump made to the gullible and .those motivated by bigotry.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at British delusions and indirectly makes the case for a wake up call by Trump supporters in the USA.  Here are excerpts:

[I]t’s Brexit supporters who may be in line for a real shock. Even beyond the coming “traumatic” loss of access to the E.U.’s market — as the Economist put it — the promise of a politically resurgent Britain is likely to fall flat.

Much of the rhetoric of the pro-Brexit crowd centers around the reclamation of British “sovereignty” from technocrats in Brussels. But Brexit proponents have also projected a nostalgic vision of Britain once more asserting itself as a dominant player on the world stage. May trumpeted the dawn of a new “Global Britain” earlier this year: a nation shorn of its continental commitments and capable of finding a new accommodation with other parts of the world — especially those it once colonized.

Brits are hardly alone in harboring delusions of empire — consider, for example, the colonial nostalgia of France’s far-right nationalists or the Ottomania of Turkey’s ruling party. But the fantasy of Britain’s past collides almost farcically against Britain’s present.

Never mind that Britain’s empire was a precursor to the forces of globalization and migration that the Brexiteers so profoundly resent.

Never mind that Brexit will “be a considerable blow to Commonwealth nations that export to Britain,” as the Financial Times reported: “Thirty-two Commonwealth countries, mainly in Africa and the Caribbean, are covered by free-trade agreements with the E.U. These states therefore enjoy duty-free and quota-free access to the E.U. for nearly all their goods. . . . Once the UK is out of the E.U., these countries will end up paying $800m a year in additional duties to access the UK market, according to an analysis by the Commonwealth Secretariat.”

The reality is that many Commonwealth nations simply don’t need Britain. Australian exports to its former colonial ruler amounted to just 1.4 percent of its total outgoing trade. Canada, which shares a huge land border with the United States, will always look south, not east. India, once the jewel in Britain’s imperial crown, has an economy already roughly the same size as Britain’s; Indian moguls now own some of Britain’s most iconic companies.

“In anglophone Africa, the game is already up,” British historian David Olusoga noted in the Guardian. “The motorbikes on the freeways of Accra and Lagos are Chinese, assembled by local mechanics from kits shipped direct from Shandong. 

“Brexit is rooted in imperial nostalgia and myths of British exceptionalism, coming up as they have — especially since 2008 — against the reality that Britain is no longer a major world power,” British academic Tom Whyman wrote in a withering column. “Those most under the spell of imperial nostalgia have now become the sorcerers themselves, having somehow managed to conjure up a mandate to transform Britain in their image.”

The myth of British exceptionalism.  Sound familiar?  America suffers from a similar delusion and myth making.  Clinging to myths and what allows one to avoid thinking  is not the answer to achieving prosperity and a just society. Brexit supporters and Trump supporters are both in for a rude shock and the economic pain will be self-inflicted. 

A Long Overdue Eulogy for White Christian America?

Despite Donald Trump's election thanks in no small part to evangelical Christians who demonstrated that hate, bigotry and white supremacy were far more important to them than the Gospel message of Christ, things are not looking auspicious for white, heterosexual Christian America over the longer term.  As author Robert P. Jones notes in  “The End of White Christian America,” white Protestants lost their majority status in 1993, and the U.S. Census Bureau projects that the America will no longer be majority white by 2042 and that the number of whites will decline by 2060.  For Trump voting evangelicals who see no common humanity in anyone who doesn't share the same skin color and religious beliefs, this is a calamity of incalculable proportions.  

For the rest of society which has been abused and discriminated against by white conservative Christians, I would argue that this is a positive thing.  Covenant Magazine looks at the decline facing this most hate and bigotry -filled element of American society. Note that yet again we see the mistreatment of LGBT citizens as being a major catalyst for younger generations leaving Christianity. I predict that the anti-LGBT jihad about to be unleashed by Trump and his gay-hating cabinet nominees will accelerate the exodus.  Here are article excerpts:

The rapid disintegration of the Crystal Cathedral[in Orange County, California] represents the “canary in the coal mine” for what Jones calls White Christian America (or WCA), a term he uses to identify white Protestant America, both mainline and evangelical. Protestant Christianity in America is facing a demographic and cultural tsunami, he argues, that is amply illustrated by the statistics collected and analyzed in the book. The mainline church experienced its heady times of cultural influence and political power during the first half of the twentieth century. Its fall was nearly as spectacular as its rise, with both influence and numbers waning through the 1960s and ’70s. The evangelical movement had an equally heady rise in the ’80s, only to see slippage in the first and especially the second decade of the twenty-first century. White Protestants lost their majority status in 1993. The U.S. Census Bureau predicts that the country will no longer be majority white by 2042 and that the number of whites will decline by 2060. This is bad news for the church of WCA, chiefly because it has shown itself singularly incapable of “desegregating.” Jones argues that because white Americans have so few people of color in their social networks they suffer from a “racial perception gap.” They have great difficulty understanding or seeing the world from the standpoint of an African American citizen of one of our largest cities or a recent Hispanic immigrant, documented or otherwise. Thus white Americans are frequently perplexed and angered when black Americans protest the latest police shooting or express frustration with the slow rate of change in matters of social justice.

Jones points out that while the mainline denominations were involved early on in support of the civil rights movement, their local churches have done no better at becoming multi-ethnic and multi-cultural than evangelical churches.

In a powerful section of the book entitled “Why Is Desegregating Church So Difficult?” Jones points to the work of Jennifer Hardy, who argues that, paradoxically, one of the reasons efforts have failed in both communities is “the powerful hold that ‘reconciliation’ has on white Christian imagination.” . . . For many it seems that once they have said “I’m sorry” to a person of color, that is enough. As my friend Michael Murphy puts it, it is like a husband who has beaten his wife for years saying, “Let’s put that all behind us.” White Christians, in other words, frequently go in for “cheap reconciliation” when the true path of reconciliation is arduous and painful.
 WCA is protected by its suburban isolation and, in many cases, living with denial. But WCA is not only facing a demographic cliff, it is experiencing a generational disaster. Whereas in 2014, 67 percent of people over the age of sixty-five were “white Christians,” only 29 percent of those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine were. And 34 percent of the latter population were “unaffiliated.”

Both the mainline and evangelical church were losing their young adults—and the evangelical losses were even greater than the mainline. Whereas 27 percent of Americans sixty-five and over were “white evangelical Protestant” and 20 percent “white mainline Protestants” only 10 percent of those eighteen to twenty-nine were—for both groups. Evangelical young adults reported that their reasons for leaving the church were the over-identification of the movement with conservative politics and its cruelty toward gay persons. Couple this with a declining birth rate and you have a disaster in the making.
 Wishful thinking and flashy new programs will not help if the mission of the church does not address the world that is rather than the world that was.  It is abundantly clear that WCA must become something else entirely. It must lose the “white” tag and learn from the growing African American, Asian, and Hispanic churches both in the United States and throughout the world. It must address its privilege and the cheapness of its reconciliation. It must recover the gospel of “costly reconciliation”—a gospel that addresses all persons and the whole planet. Hunkering down with the old hymns and worship songs and looking back to the glory days is a pathway to irrelevance and death. Evangelicals who believe God’s Spirit is alive and active in the world must ask, where is that Spirit moving? How can we catch that wind? It will not happen if WCA stays safely anchored in the harbor of the past.

Again, the fact that 81% of evangelicals voted for Trump and his overt calls to white supremacist demonstrates that WCA is not letting go of its "white tag" anytime soon.  We can only hope that the road to irrelevance and death is even more rapid than so predict. 

I was raised conservative Catholic, was an altar boy for 10 years and ultimately rose to the 4th Degree in the Knights of Columbus.  For 7 years I usually attended daily mass.  Now, neither I nor any of my siblings, my nieces and nephews or my children and their families attend church.  Why? Just look ate the Catholic Church's continued protection of predator priests and mistreatment of women and gays.  Then look at the racism and homophobia rampant in conservative protestant denominations.  Why would anyone moral and possessing ethical decency and empathy for others want to be a part of such hatred and misogyny? 

I Can't Be "Friends" With A Trump Supporter - Part 2

Two weeks ago I posted about my blogger friend Michelangelo Signorile's open letter at Huffington Post to a long-time, long-distance friend after he learned that she had voted for Donald Trump. Michelangelo's letter well summarized my feelings towards "friends" who had voted for Trump (and in my view, racism, bigotry, homophobia and neo-fascism) when he said that he had realized that he had never really known the woman addressed in his letter.  Like the woman Michelangelo addressed, many of my Trump supporting "friends" can not seek to excuse themselves by citing that they live in the Rust Belt and/or had experienced “economic anxiety” during the Obama years (most are actually quite well off financially).  Now, Michelangelo has a new post that looks at the reactions his open letter has evoked.   Like Michelangelo's experience, many of my "friends" seek to either depict me as "intolerant" or claim that this is only disagreement about "politics" and conveniently ignore the extremists and vitriolic homophobes Trump is placing in positions of power.  The reality is that I will likely never trust or feel comfortable with these "friends" some of whom I continue to see for the sake of neighborhood and social harmony.  Here are highlights from Michelangelo's latest piece:

There was a lot of response on social media and elsewhere, most of it positive, much of it from people in far more difficult situations ― people who opposed Trump and were struggling with relationships they’ve had with parents, siblings, children or closer friends who voted for Trump. Many expressed how the letter articulated thoughts similar to their own, no matter how differently (or similarly) they may navigate this in their own lives.

Then there were the Trump supporters who criticized the piece. They almost universally claimed they couldn’t believe anyone was breaking off a friendship over “politics.” This, to me, was both ludicrous and disingenuous ― if very telling ― particularly since I’d addressed it right there in the open letter.

Many of these Trump supporters ― a lot of them traditional Republicans who went “home,” as political pundits nauseatingly put it ― are defensive about the fact that they voted for the unstable racist, misogynist and self-proclaimed sexual assaulter, and they’re fearful of admitting to themselves and certainly others that they tolerated hate and bigotry. They can’t face that they’re in bed with what appears to be a large swath of other Trump supporters who actually revel in their own racism, pushing white supremacist hate and feeling emboldened by what they view as Trump’s embrace: making Steve Bannon his chief White House strategist. So, they conjure up all kinds of rationalizations or whirl around in a sort of denial.

These are the Trump supporters that went bonkers over my open letter to my friend. . . . On several websites and on social media they portrayed me as the “intolerant” liberal. Of course, I’m proudly intolerant of bigotry -– but that’s not what they meant.

I’ve pointed out how Mike Pence is running the transition and is already getting the anti-LGBTQ agenda set regarding domestic policy, and that Trump’s cabinet picks who will run the government departments are a who’s who of homophobia. 

But even if that weren’t true, why would you give a chance (as this critic put it) to someone who pandered to those who hate you? Trump courted evangelicals and promised to appoint judges to overturn the historic Obergefell ruling on marriage equality (and he has publicly opposed marriage equality since 2000). Even if you believe he wouldn’t do that, why would you give even conditional support to a man who has given hope to the people who detest you and wish you harm?

The rationalizers can’t face the fact that there will be no peace because Trump is a bigot who ran a hate-filled campaign and has shown no remorse for doing so, nor is he making any attempt to heal any wounds.

Debating them about my personal choice regarding a friendship ― or even referring to them here by name ― would only be giving them an opportunity to attempt to legitimize the terrible choice they made in the election. And they surely don’t deserve that.