For decades I have complained that the mainstream media has failed to hold evangelicals accountable for their bigotry and contempt for others. In the area of gay rights, time and time again otherwise reputable news outlets would provided platforms devoid of hard questioning to leaders of what pretend to be "family values" organization even though in fact their organizations are certified hate groups. Tony Perkins, the white supremacist affiliated leader of Family Research Council is but one such example. Now, in the Trump era, evangelicals are belatedly being exposed for their hypocrisy and racism. Indeed, the majority of white evangelical Christians show themselves on a daily basis to be the antithesis of Christ's gospel message. Rather than allow the veil to be drawn back letting the general public see the toxicity of these Trump supporting Christians in name only, some groups are mounting a PR blitz that would have the public discount the racism that so strongly motivates so many white evangelicals. A piece in Rewire looks at both the problem of the media not be tough enough on evangelicals as well as the effort to white wash evangelical racism and betrayal of true Christian values. Here are excerpts:
Over the last few decades, they’ve become experts at marketing, PR, and image management, using vehicles like the National Prayer Breakfast and The Gathering to slickly handle relationships with political elites and the press.
The problem is that efforts to better understand evangelicals all too often manifest as a reluctance to be critical and a failure to include the perspectives of both exvangelicals and policy researchers, both of whom are knowledgeable and have legitimate concerns about widespread evangelical tendencies toward the rejection of pluralism and attempts to impose theocracy. In 2014, according to a Christian Post report, an evangelical Times editor, Michael Luo, “told an audience at The King’s College… that whenever his colleagues at the New York Times do happen to botch a report that casts Evangelical Christians in an unfair light, that it is mostly due to ignorance.”
As a result, in order to avoid kerfuffles, major media outlets often have reporters who are current or former evangelicals, or who are extremely friendly to evangelicals, do the lions’ share of the coverage of evangelicalism. In the Washington Post, evangelicals largely cover themselves. Both Michael Gerson and Sarah Pulliam Bailey are graduates of Wheaton College, arguably the epicenter of “respectable” evangelicalism. And a handful of evangelicals who have become experts at presenting a moderate face to the media are far and away the most frequently quoted sources. Their answers to softball questions are left unchallenged, and there is little or no probing into those areas in which exvangelicals and policy researchers would easily see answers as incomplete or outright disingenuous.
[T]he U.S. media has contributed mightily to the normalization of white evangelicals, an overwhelmingly anti-pluralist, anti-democratic demographic that researchers have identified as “uniquely conservative.” However, thanks to white evangelicals’ unwavering Trump support—81 percent voted for him and 71 percent still view Donald Trump’s presidency favorably—we’ve recently seen an unusual amount of critical coverage in typically friendly outlets over white evangelicals’ prevailing attitudes toward asylum seekers and refugees.
Evangelicals—and those who are strongly invested in a “respectable” image for evangelicalism—now seem to be making a concerted effort to push back ahead of the midterm elections, in which evangelicals’ reputation will be tied to what many will see as a referendum on a historically unpopular authoritarian president for whom they remain the single most supportive demographic.
The first salvo in this new PR blitz was launched in September, when the Democracy Fund’s Voter Study Group published a report, written by the director of polling at the libertarian Cato Institute, that purports to show that “Trump voters who attend church regularly are significantly more likely than nonreligious Trump voters to have favorable attitudes toward black people, Hispanics, Asians, Jews, Muslims, and immigrants, even while holding other demographic factors, such as education, constant.” In a New York Times op-ed, the report’s author Emily Ekins framed the report explicitly as a response to “people on the left” who “think the religious right has compromised its Christian values in order to attain political power for Republicans.”
The problem with Ekins’ claim that “church teachings can curb tribalistic impulses by regularly reminding worshipers that we are all God’s children,” is that her own data, which she is employing either sloppily or disingenuously, shows nothing of the sort.
In a thorough analysis for RD, Timothy Gloege points to findings in the Voter Study Group data that make the uncritical acceptance of Ekins’ claims impossible for any intellectually honest observer. For example, the study found that 82 percent of frequent church-attending Trump voters agree with the statement that “if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites,”. . . . What we have here are “respectable” racists, the kind who are image-conscious enough not to want to be seen as racist, deflecting such charges with declarations that, “I can’t be racist, I have black friends.” What we certainly do not have is evidence that churchgoing Trump voters are in actual fact less racist than secular Trump voters.
In the Washington Post, Paul A. Djupe and Ryan P. Burge make much the same point, drawing attention to the fact that frequent church attendance correlates with higher rates of Trump support. In addition, the data shows that for Trump voters who never attend church, self-reported positive feelings toward minorities correlate with less support for the president, but among churchgoing Trump voters the opposite holds true.
But the Cato Institute isn’t doing all the heavy lifting when it comes to “saving” evangelicals’ reputation. Evangelical leaders and institutions have also been working to distance themselves from Trump in the public’s perception. Just as conservative evangelicals cherry-pick their favored Bible verses in order to focus on punitive readings obsessed with policing sexuality, they also have a knack for cherry-picking data that paints them in a positive light. . . . Their analysis focuses on evangelicals’ self-described motives for voting for Trump, as if people don’t lie about their motivations in surveys such as this, and ignoring the possibility that voting for and continuing to support a president who separates the children of asylum seekers from their parents at the border and who stands accused of sexual misconduct by 22 women is somehow morally justifiable if one claims to do so for economic reasons, or to have simply voted “against Hillary Clinton.”
One can argue that this has also been the thrust of decades of efforts that white evangelical leaders like Russell Moore have poured into so-called “racial reconciliation,” a project that has arguably failed, as we are seeing Black people and other people of color leave predominantly white evangelical churches when their concerns about the racism and Trump support of their fellow church members are not taken seriously.
[T]o support [Trump] this president despite his continuous assaults on the free press, his overtures to white nationalists, his human rights violations at the border, and his anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ policies, is morally despicable regardless of motive.
Facing complicity in such enormous cruelty represents a serious ego threat, but if evangelicals want to be taken seriously by the U.S. mainstream going forward, they are going to need to prove themselves capable of serious self-reflection and repentance. . . . . White evangelicals own the disastrous Trump presidency. Until they admit this, admit it is a problem, and change, we must recognize them as a toxic illiberal force in American society and politics, one that needs to be politically sidelined if we are going to preserve American democracy.
